Golden Era of Baroque Dance

"The reign of Louis XIV marks an important milestone in the development of dance and art. Convinced that visual arts and music would significantly contribute to a monarch’s authority, image, and glory, the “Sun King” coordinated artistic activities through establishing a significant number of royal academies. Through the Académie Royale de Danse the art of dancing was given a proper language and notation system for the first time in history. On the other hand, the Académie Royale de Musique was tied to the birth of a national operatic style. Opera was the perfect tool for an idealistic and majestic projection of a nation’s monarch. Keywords: baroque dance, Louis XIV, dance notation systems, ballet de cour, royal academies, Jean-Baptiste Lully, music, opera. "

Issues of Dance Notation: Domenico da Piacenza's Dance Writing in Fifteenth-Century Italy

<p>Dance is an art form that is traditionally taught through physical demonstration. Choreography is forgotten if it is not practised repetitively, as dancers must rely on physical memory without the help of a written score to remind them of the steps. So many great works have been lost over time as choreographers have neglected to preserve their routines in written form. To prevent this, multiple notation systems have been created but none of them have ever become as popular or standardised as music notation. Many of these systems involve symbols that can only be understood by those who have studied the system in depth and are therefore inaccessible to the everyday dancer or choreographer. The origins of dance notation in Western culture come from fifteenth-century Italy. Dance masters who served at the many courts of the country recognised the need for dance to be intellectually understood as well as performed. The popularity of manuals as a way to discuss art, music, philosophy and many other subjects that formed the education of the elite during the Renaissance led to the writing of dance manuals. Domenico da Piacenza (c.1400-1476) was the first to do this, and his treatise De arte saltandi et choreas ducendi (c.1455) is an eloquently written model text for all dance manuals that followed. Domenico does not notate his dances with symbols, but rather uses word descriptions to explain his choreography. His manual includes sixteen chapters which discuss the qualities one should aspire to achieve when dancing, the nature of the different misure (speeds) of the music, and how one should dance to each of these. This is followed by descriptions of eighteen of Domenico’s balli accompanied with his self-composed music, and five bassadanze. By examining closely three of Domenico’s balli, and attempting to reconstruct them, this thesis engages with issues regarding the preservation of dance and how effective the use of the written word is for doing so. Although there are several flaws in Domenico’s system, the idea of using the written word to notate dance still seems the most practical to date. The method created by Domenico in fifteenth-century Italy for his court dances is still the most common way for modern dance forms such as ballet and ballroom to be notated, transmitted to others and learned by dancers today.</p>

Issues of Dance Notation: Domenico da Piacenza's Dance Writing in Fifteenth-Century Italy

<p>Dance is an art form that is traditionally taught through physical demonstration. Choreography is forgotten if it is not practised repetitively, as dancers must rely on physical memory without the help of a written score to remind them of the steps. So many great works have been lost over time as choreographers have neglected to preserve their routines in written form. To prevent this, multiple notation systems have been created but none of them have ever become as popular or standardised as music notation. Many of these systems involve symbols that can only be understood by those who have studied the system in depth and are therefore inaccessible to the everyday dancer or choreographer. The origins of dance notation in Western culture come from fifteenth-century Italy. Dance masters who served at the many courts of the country recognised the need for dance to be intellectually understood as well as performed. The popularity of manuals as a way to discuss art, music, philosophy and many other subjects that formed the education of the elite during the Renaissance led to the writing of dance manuals. Domenico da Piacenza (c.1400-1476) was the first to do this, and his treatise De arte saltandi et choreas ducendi (c.1455) is an eloquently written model text for all dance manuals that followed. Domenico does not notate his dances with symbols, but rather uses word descriptions to explain his choreography. His manual includes sixteen chapters which discuss the qualities one should aspire to achieve when dancing, the nature of the different misure (speeds) of the music, and how one should dance to each of these. This is followed by descriptions of eighteen of Domenico’s balli accompanied with his self-composed music, and five bassadanze. By examining closely three of Domenico’s balli, and attempting to reconstruct them, this thesis engages with issues regarding the preservation of dance and how effective the use of the written word is for doing so. Although there are several flaws in Domenico’s system, the idea of using the written word to notate dance still seems the most practical to date. The method created by Domenico in fifteenth-century Italy for his court dances is still the most common way for modern dance forms such as ballet and ballroom to be notated, transmitted to others and learned by dancers today.</p>

Approaches to Dance (3): Naïveté and Curiosity

Part autobiography, memoir, and autoethnography, this essay sketches a pathway that zig-zags and follows switchbacks as it moves from childhood ballet lessons to a profession in academic teaching and research. The path embraces dance notation, Korean dance, movement analysis, history, iconography, aesthetics, language, and communication as it continues beyond university employment into retirement, revealing the evolution of thought processes and the intertwining of the personal and professional.

The Use of Digital Pedagogical Assessment in the Teaching of Dance Notation

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between digital technology and folk dance, highlighting the teaching methodology of the subject of Dance Notation. We first provide a brief insight into the history of teaching dance notation, followed by presenting its current educational practice. Related to this, we discuss the relationship between digital tools and dance education in a separate chapter. Pedagogical assessment plays a key role in our study, as we want to show how regular digital formative assessment makes the teaching of dance notation more effective and motivating. We outline further directions at the end of the article that could be introduced or at least researched as a pilot project in dance education.

Proposal for a Dance Performance

Proposal for a Dance Performance is an artwork for music ensemble and PowerPoint. This work aims to transform -through the use of self-referential narration- dance notation, emails, program notes and technical rides, into performing instances. The paper puts the above artwork in a dialogue with works by Hanns Eisler, Alfred Johannes and Johannes Kreidler, which use music notation as a conceptual visual tool. Furthermore, this paper discusses the role of music as a character in a play, a technique found in Samuel Becket’s work. This combination of narration and notation is being proposed as a transdisciplinary methodology for breaking fixed notions of artistic practice.

Danses Fantastiques

Much of Tchaikovsky's music for the ballets Sleeping Beauty and Nutcracker exhibits what Harald Krebs calls metrical dissonance: the juxtaposition or superimposition of noncoincident pulses and rhythmic patterns. This article shows how the dances of the composer's collaborators, Enrico Cecchetti, Antonietta Dell'Era, Lev Ivanov, and Marius Petipa, respond to and participate in these metrical dissonances. The first part of the article defines metrical dissonance, the processes that transform it, and the related but distinct phenomenon of metric type. The second part presents four choreomusical analyses that draw on archival dance notation and videos of present-day performances.

From Spectacles to Dance

This chapter first explores a large-scale dance spectacle in which 50,000 twenty-something citizens celebrated Kim Il Sung’s birthday in 2000. It then looks at how mass performance spectacles have developed in North Korea, exploring their distinguishing characteristics. Next, a historical and contextual discussion is given (which expands from a brief consideration in the previous chapter), linking to dance, and explaining how the content of mass spectacles are notated and disseminated. This leads to an exploration and explanation of the chamo p’yogibŏp alphabet-based dance notation, developed in Pyongyang and first used in notation scores in the late 1980s. Then, inherited forms of dance (folkloric, indigenous, international), what they became, and the leading dancer Ch’oe Sŭnghŭi (1911–1968) are explored to set up an overview of the characteristics of dance in North Korea. The account foregrounds Ch’oe Sŭnghŭi’s adaptations of modern dance.

On a Curious Chance Resemblance: Rudolf von Laban’s Kinetography and the Geometric Abstractions of Sophie Taeuber-Arp

This paper investigates a case of historical co-emergence between a modern system of dance notation and the rise of geometric abstraction in the applied arts during the first decades of the 20th century. It does so by bringing together the artistic careers of the choreographer Rudolf von Laban and the visual artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Comparing their pedagogical agendas and visual aesthetics, this paper argues that the resemblances between Laban’s Kinetography and Taeuber-Arp’s early geometric compositions cannot be a matter of pure coincidence. The paper therefore presents and supports the hypothesis of a co-constitutive relationship between visual abstraction and the dancing body in the European avant-garde.