2006-10-10

The IS Framework for Preservation Dance Heritage

The history of dance has always been a history of loss. Most of dance produced is lost to us for good -- the result of the lack of funding for preservation, the ephemeral characteristic of dance performance, and the lack of a widely-applied documentation system. Documentation systems do exist, and the prominent one is called Labanotation. Labanotation scores, which are the most precise means of documenting a dance, function for dance the same way music scores function for music. But Labanotation has not yet widely applied, because, unlike music scores, it is not essential for dance creation/performance, and there is a general lack of education about it.

As a result, more informal and less accurate systems of preserving dance are in large evidence, including the passing down of dances from one dancer to another, choreographers' scripting of descriptive notes, and audiovisual archiving. Motion capture techniques also record movement; but they are mainly used for animation. Putting aside the pros and cons of different means of preserving dance and their combinational usage/collective contributions, the first and biggest problem is how to finance dance preservation with the ever-shrinking budgets in the already-brutal economies of dance. Borrowing from the practices of film restoration, the dance community should recognize the importance of commercialization as a self-sufficient support for sustainable, properly-scaled, and advanced dance preservation, and, hence, R&D in its information systems should embed a commerce infrastructure. Cost-efficient DVD and high definition camera technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for the dance community to profit from newly-produced audiovisual recordings as well as restored archives. Other dance resources, like Labanotation scores and motion capture data sets, should also be treated as digital products transacted online. Movement-related industries like film, gaming, sports and rehabilitation, are all potential customers and collaboration partners of dance. Knowledge gained from dance preservation has proven useful in advanced technological applications; the Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) framework has already helped the design of expressive and stylistic animated movement. On the other hand, technologies, such as creating virtual dancers co-staged with live ones, or creating choreography via algorithms like chaos theory, challenge the future development of dance preservation. The dance community needs to redesign its industrial structures and strategies to best utilize its resources in the intricate trio of dance, technology and commerce, while simultaneously serving the purpose of dance preservation.

To read the complete research:
http://gbspapers.library.emory.edu/archive/00000147/01/GBS-DIA-2005-005.pdf

The author, Dr. Wenli Wang, is Visiting Assistant Professor at Department of Management Information Systems in University of Nevada, College of Business.

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