hn_throwaway_99
6 days ago
These choreography notation systems are very interesting from a historical perspective, but their raison d'être went away with the advent of video.
Dance (or at least ballet) is still largely passed down by oral tradition; dancers are coached by older generations who danced these pieces when they were younger (obviously not for new works). In fact, unlike in the music world, it's exceedingly rare to find anyone in the dance world who can read or understand any of these notation systems. They tend to be the purview of dance historians or those specifically tasked with coaching copyrighted works from dead choreographers. That is, even before video, they weren't really in widespread use like music notation was.
daniel_reetz
6 days ago
Choreographers have almost no means to copyright their creative work and the Choreographer's Guild presently seeks to protect said work and get choreographers credited and paid.
It may be that notation has a renewed utility by virtue of creating a copyrightable artifact.
hn_throwaway_99
6 days ago
> Choreographers have almost no means to copyright their creative work
That's simply not true. In the US choreographic works have been explicitly copyrightable since 1976, and things like the Balanchine Trust have existed for over 40 years. Written notation is not necessary - a video is sufficient.
What organizations like the Choreographer's Guild do is more change the cultural expectations around dance copyright than the legal possibilities. That is, in the dance/entertainment world, often times a choreographer is hired for peanuts and is simply unaware of their legal rights around copyright. But when it comes to what is legally possible/necessary, there is no difference really between what, say, a photographer who is hired to do a photoshoot can do vs. a choreographer hired to produce a work of dance.
UweSchmidt
6 days ago
You appear to be in favour of said Guild trying to change the cultural expectation for more copyrights, now extending to human movement. Needless to say this evokes the image of corporations like Disney ending up with those copyrights and going after people doing the zoomer dance long after the Mickey Mouse copyright will have expired. Are those worries warranted?
hn_throwaway_99
6 days ago
Not really, but then again anyone can basically argue the interpretation of anything in law. I would say that in many other professions creators have been paid for their works long after they've been created, but choreographers have basically been shafted for a long time, usually only being paid a daily or weekly rate for the original creation.
I found this interesting article about a very well-known choreographer and his quest to copyright his works, including his famous "Single Ladies" choreography for Beyonce: https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/jaquel-knight-bey.... The thing I find weird/ironic about this is that the Single Ladies choreography famously copies a lot from Bob Fosse's "Mexican Breakfast" (the article I linked talks about this in detail). While I personally agree with the quote from the article, "You see the three ladies, you see the inspiration — but the funk, the stylized movement, they’re extremely different. I mean, how I got here as an artist is being inspired by those who came before me", in terms of copyright law, I think there is much more similarity between Mexican Breakfast and Single Ladies than there is between, say, the song Blurred Lines and Marvin Gaye's Got to Give it Up, which Blurred Lines was found guilty of infringing.
I also found it annoying that the article I linked stated "For a Black creator in an industry that has long appropriated Black culture..." but then goes on to argue that the amount of copying done from Mexican Breakfast is just "the creative process". To be clear, I think it is part of the creative process, but it's annoying the author can see none of the hypocrisy about taking about "cultural appropriation" while then devoting paragraphs to how the copying of Mexican Breakfast is somehow totally different.
zie
6 days ago
It's amazing what happens when one is incentivized to not see hypocrisy.
Animats
6 days ago
True. Labanotation is sometimes taught to dancers. A published report card for Madonna shows she got a D in that class. But choreographers do not compose in dance notation.
Here's a decent explanation of Labanotation.[1] I once looked at it as a possible input language for an animation program. Bad idea.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220501031730/https://www.dance...
femto
6 days ago
> I once looked at it as a possible input language for an animation program.
You might be interested in some of the work by Don Herbison-Evans. He lectured me in Computer Science, was a bit of a dance nut and into animation for choreography.
He was working on a project called MUSE, which was essentially CAD for choreography [1]. There was also an animation system, called NUDES [2]. At one point he was building a program to animate from Labanotation. I'm not sure if that was MUSE, NUDES or yet another program.
jrm4
6 days ago
Interesting. I'm on my university's IT Governance council, and we were discussing who was using the most data storage. I presumed the film school, but, as you can guess, it's Dance, at about 70% compared to the entire rest of the university, for their video.