Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR: Many movements are spontaneous. They occur naturally without conscious thought. Other actions are more controlled. They don't just happen. There's a deliberate intention behind them. Some sequences of movement are improvised, made up by their performers as they go along.
SPEAKER 1: OK. Come on.
NARRATOR: But many sequences of movement are designed, worked out in advance by their creator who intends them to be recreated in exactly the same way on different occasions and by different people.
These choreographed sequences can only be recreated accurately over and over again, whatever the time interval between performances, if the movements are analysed and recorded, if there is a language for movement. But would the ability to analyse our movements be of any use to most of us.
WARREN LAMB: If we grow up really unaware of how our body moves, how we can use our body, how we can adapt the body to many different activities, then maybe we can achieve all that's necessary intuitively or just by an innate sense. But I claim there's a value in studying and being disciplined about an understanding of what all the possibilities of movement are.
NARRATOR: Warren Lamb worked closely with Rudolf Laban, a major advocate of movement analysis. Together, during the 1940s and early 1950s, they observed and recorded the actions of factory workers using Laban's own notation.
This is a record from a tile factory. But the way individual operators carried out each stage in making a tile varied.
WARREN LAMB: There were operators who were doing this all day long. But they all did it a little bit differently. One person might approach the sand with a rather slow movement, and then do it quickly. Another might approach it more from above. Another one might go much more roundabout to do it.
And the traditional time and motion study at that time always wanted to reduce the actions to the absolute minimum. Laban said no. You must, so long as the operator does the essential things, then the operator must find his or her own rhythm. And by that means will avoid stress, and it will benefit the company because production will increase.
NARRATOR: Always very interested in mathematical ideas, Rudolf Laban devoted a large part of his life to the description of movement, both symbolically and geometrically. Both his symbolic language and his use of geometric forms arose out of his lifelong involvement with dance.
WARREN LAMB: In a sense, we are all dancers and we are all moving in a particular form or pattern. So it's not dance, of course, in the sense of theatre presentation. But it is dance in the sense that we all employ rhythmic movement. And we all use different rhythms.
NARRATOR: If this dance, or any dance, is to be recreated to be performed over and over again in exactly the same way, then every movement of the dancers must somehow be remembered. As with recording mathematical thinking, one way of recording decisions about how the dancers move is to write it down, using a designed and structured language, to use a symbolic notation.
And all written notations record by encoding. However, if a record is to be of any use, to be the basis for recreating a dance, the coded symbols need to be decoded to be understood by others. So it's not the symbols themselves that are important but whether they can be deciphered.
The ballet Afternoon of a Faun is the story of the love of the faun, a mythical creature, half man, half goat, for a nymph. Both choreographed and danced by Nijinsky, its first performance in Paris in 1912 caused scandal and outrage.
RUDOLF NUREYEV: If you think that when it had been performed the first time in London, the English public thought that they were barbaric. Then when I performed it with the Royal Ballet and Grigorovich, and [INAUDIBLE] and Ashton insisted that steps should be exactly as they used to be. And the production collapsed, because it was too tame.
NARRATOR: But has the ballet really become tame? Well, perhaps. Although Nijinsky did write down the movements of the dances, he used his own notation. And unfortunately, no one could interpret it, because nobody had a key to the meanings of his symbols.
So the dance movements were passed on from memory by word of mouth. Inevitably, movements danced in contemporary productions can no longer be true to the original. No longer those danced by Nijinsky, the ballet has indeed lost much of its original impact.
Afternoon of a Faun is a complex ballet of movements involving every part of each dancer's body, and so any record needs to be very detailed. But that's not always as important.
This gavotte was first danced in ballrooms in the 18th century. We can be fairly confident that this 20th century re-creation is similar to the original, because when he created it in 1720 Kellom Tomlinson wrote down the basic steps using an established language called Feuillet notation, a notation that we can still understand today.
When using any dance notation, the challenge is to represent dynamic movement by what is essentially a static and symbolic form and to decide what to include and what to ignore. This record is largely a floor plan. It shows both where and how the dancer's feet are to move. These dancers are able to go from the symbols to the movements, because they know what each symbol means and how they're combined.
However, the notation didn't record everything. For example, head and arm movements were ignored. They were left to the performers to provide. There are over 100 dance notations though, each using different symbols and each focusing in different ways on the movements they describe. And here are the movements of this gavotte written down in three of the most used 20th century languages of movement.
In Benesh notation, which is read like music across the page. In Eshkol-Wachman notation, also written across the page. And in Labanotation, which is written up the page as the dance proceeds. All three notations have things in common.
Like music notation, each is divided up into bars. And when they're written down, what is produced is always a kind of graph, one of movement against time. Yet there are also differences.
By using different symbols and clusters of symbols for the same movements, each notation places emphasis on slightly different things. In practise, the choice of notation is often based not on who can write it, but on who can read, understand, and above all, interpret what is written. Like any language, the major influence on choice is that of communication.
Like many dance companies, the Royal Ballet have standardised on Benesh notation, which Joan Benesh, a dancer with the Sadler's Wells Ballet company, and her mathematician husband Rudolf published in 1956.
Here, one of the Royal Ballet's choreographers, David Bintley is working on his latest ballet with notator Grant Coyle. Notators, also called choreologists, have been on the staff of the Royal Ballet since 1960, both looking after existing works and, as here, helping to create new ones.
DAVID BINTLEY: I remember my own pieces, of course. And I remember them when I'm creating them, because I'm thinking about them the whole time. And also, it doesn't take me long once my memory's been jogged to get back into a piece so that I remember why I did that and why I did that.
If someone introduces an error into it, I can see it very, very easily. But it is a fact that after I've done a piece I really kind of mentally erase it, and I'm onto the next. When I set a piece, sometimes what is written in the score is never done.
GRANT COYLE: Recently, when I went to America with David and we set a ballet, we did work with a company who had never used choreologists. Their reaction was one of amazement. And mainly because they just, first of all, they couldn't understand how a movement could be written down. And then secondly, how well the system worked in the studio. How efficient it was.
If I have a 30-minute ballet to do, and I have to get the bulk of it together in three weeks, you tend to kind of throw it down. And where my memory is short, and where the memory of everybody except the notator is short is when you come back three weeks later. And it's a small thing.
It could be in the middle of a complex lift that X dancer actually had his hand here instead of here. And that kind of thing is what I wouldn't see, because my intention is to get the overall effect of the lift so I know what it's supposed to look like. The notator will be looking at all these things, and he'll be able to tell a dancer exactly where that hand should be. And that, I think, is almost as important as having the thing for the record is that day to day kind of help and just reminding you what you did two days ago.
NARRATOR: Nowadays, whatever the dance form, choreographers are rarely alone when they create new dances. Every movement is recorded by a notator, who works alongside the choreographer during the rehearsals for the first performance of the new work.
Like the Royal Ballet, here at Kokuma there's a close working relationship between the choreographer and the notator. And though here the notator is using the Labanotation, the process of recording movements is the same. So when does their collaboration begin?
JEAN JOHNSON JONES: In terms of the notation process itself, it's better to begin when the person that's doing the creating is actually beginning their work. During that period, they're usually working much more slowly. They're going through thought processes. They are using vocabulary as well as their bodies. So that you're much more able to get what the choreographer in this case wants, the choreographic intent.
Now, we know that part of that has to do with being one step removed from the choreography. But during that kind of process, you're more likely to get what the choreographer wants rather than what the dancer does.
NARRATOR: While the choreographer works out the movements of the new dance, the notator watches, recording the key aspects of how each dancer moves.
CHOREOGRAPHER: One, two up.
NARRATOR: As his ideas evolve, this choreographer will often refer back to the notator's record maybe to remind himself about what he's just decided or to refresh his memory about decisions he made some time ago. And whatever the origins of any dance form any of them can be recorded and so recreated with the use of notation.
JEAN JOHNSON JONES: I'm using it primarily with African people's dance. I see it as a way in of understanding that dance first and foremost. Many African people's dance, choreographers will say the notation doesn't take on board everything that they want to do.
For example, if they're doing a movement in which the spirit enters the body, they will say but you can't notate that. And I will say, no, but you can't notate it either. I mean you can't notate something you can't see. But what you can see is how the spirit has acted upon the body, and that's where the efforts become very, very important.
Movement such as we saw today, where you have the vibratory movements, movements that shake, these are movements that come from the inside out rather than from the outside in. So you might have a spatial orientation, but that spatial orientation becomes much more meaningful if we're talking about something that involves what we might call flow fluctuations in the body.
NARRATOR: There are strong similarities between the ways that many symbolic dance languages work. So to give you an insight we'll examine Labanotation, the notation Jean Johnson Jones uses in more detail.
Written in Waltz time, this dance sequence can be described like this. But what does each symbol mean, and how are they strung together in a sequence? What exactly is Labanotation?
TINA CURRAN: Labanotation is a way of reading, writing, and communicating movement. Unlike music, Labanotation is read vertically from the bottom of a three-line staff up. The centre line of the staff represents the centre line of the body. And it's written from the performer's point of view, so everything to the right of the centre line represents the right line of the body, the right side. And likewise, the left side.
The direction of movement is judged by, is based on the rectangle. How that's modified will show you which direction you're travelling in space. A symbol with a chimney on top would represent going forward. Reversed, going backwards. A triangle pointing to the right would represent right, and reverse to the left.
The diagonal directions have a point indicating which direction they're going toward. The shading of the symbol represents which level or height that a movement is made in. If the symbol is completely blacked out, it would be a low level. If it was a support that would represent a plie or bent knees.
A symbol with a dot in the middle represents a middle level or normal. Legs would be straight if you were supporting. A symbol with diagonal lines running through it would represent a high level. So supporting it you would be in releve or up on your toes.
The length of the symbol represents the timing. So a shorter indication represents a smaller amount of time. A longer indication represents a longer amount of time. And depending upon where the symbol is placed on the staff will give the performer the information of what part of the body is moving.
NARRATOR: And here's the Labanotation for the rest of this movement sequence. But the important test of any notation is whether it can be decoded, whether the original dance can be recreated from the symbolic record time and time again.
During the 1980s, some 70 years after its first performance, a key was discovered to Nijinsky's notation of his Afternoon of a Faun, and a faithful re-creation of the original ballet translated into Labanotation.
ANN HUTCHINSON GUEST: His score that he had written himself of his first ballet Afternoon of a Faun was in the British Library. But nobody could read it. A German colleague named Claudia Jeschke had also got involved with this project. So we met, decided to work together, and by pooling our information and resources, gradually we were able to find out-- because there were a few other related materials which we found-- to break the code and translate into Labanotation every detail in Nijinsky's score.
And what we were able to revive was his ballet as he wrote it down. And it's a beautiful work, much more delicate and sensitive than the memory-based version, which one so often sees.
NARRATOR: Rudolf Laban was not only interested in symbolic systems but also in mathematical structure. In addition to designing the symbolic language that bears his name, he relied heavily on geometry as a way of describing movements of the human body in space.
He was a talented artist. And his drawings reflect his joint interest in both mathematics and dance. And Laban made use of his spatial ideas to create these dance movements.
JEAN JOHNSON JONES: His spatial ideas had to do with using various geometric forms. And he identified a number of forms such as the icosahedron, the cube. He identified the diagonal planes that we use in regard to movement in various ways.
In relationship to those various forms, he also developed scales. And these scales were combinations of space, combinations of effort, and combinations of time used in a particular kind of a way.
NARRATOR: His so-called scales were a series of dance exercises written to be performed within the five geometric shapes known as the platonic or regular solids. Each regular solid has every edge the same length and every corner and face identical to every other one.
The faces of the triangular pyramid, the tetrahedron, the octahedron, and the icosahedron are all equilateral triangles. There's just one regular solid with square faces, the cube. And finally, one made from regular pentagons, the 12-faced dodecahedron. And in this particular scale, Laban has identified three perpendicular planes within the cube.
However, the ideal space for a dancer to move within would be a sphere. And the regular solid that's closest to a sphere is this one. It's the 20-faced icosahedron.
The variety of ways in which the human body is able to move can be described by using one of the languages for movement, a language with mathematical features. Perhaps drawing on geometry as a way of describing how people move or using symbols to represent those movements.
However, ultimately it's not the choice of language that really matters. Above all, as with all mathematical thinking, it is whether the recorded message conveyed by the symbols can be understood and acted upon by others.