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A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

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Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

#41

Post by knuckleheads »

vlz wrote: post #8
chrisjj wrote: post #3

Just me, or is this ornithology for birds?

I see this as an almost scientific/scholarly exercise in modeling. While the author seems not to start with any intent to "do science" he or she tries to capture a concrete phenomenon abstractly in order to study it more closely, which is arguably at the heart of science or at least some of the sciences. The post is "almost" scholarly because it does not try to look into what others did before or currently, eg. prior…

Yeah, at some point I will try to write out something about all the various dance notations that I've been able to find. My favorite one is from SalsaIsGood.com. Totally incomprehensible to me for the most part, https://web.archive.org/web/20231001115608/https://www.salsa..., however, I really like the diagrams that they made https://web.archive.org/web/20231001115608/https://www.salsa... .

As to whether this all will be useful for learning how to dance, it remains to be seen. I didn't learn how to dance from diagrams and notation, but I also don't think there's that many good diagrams and notations to learn from, so it's hard to say whether it would have been effective or not. My answer at this point is to try and produce stuff that helps people and see whether it's possible or not.

Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

#42

Post by knuckleheads »

gradschool wrote: post #34

Choreology is an established discipline. There's no reason to re-invent it without improving on it. Some people might do it professionally. A big budget musical production typically will employ a choreologist to make notes during the rehearsals. Members of the company can ask for reminders about their parts, which the choreologist not only will have written down but will be a good enough dancer to demonstrate. https:…

I've studied Labanotation and Benesh movement notation, among others, some on my own and tried my hand at annotating social dancing with it and didn't find it to be particularly useful for social danced partnerwork in particular. For Choreographed dances, I am sure having a choreologist on staff would be a god send. However, for improvised social dances, I don't feel like the dance notations that I have seen capture the cues and signals the lead sends to the follower in a way that is adequate to be learned from later on. If you have any resources about this though I would love to read them!

Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

#43

Post by knuckleheads »

geewee wrote: post #17
damhsa wrote: post #9

the supposed 15 hand holds is a little misleading as it doesn't account for holds where a hand is placed on the body, which is important to many dancing traditions, such as the mirror image polka hold, with the man's left arm stretched to his left holding his girl's right hand, and his right on her body, or the rotationally symmetric ceilidh hold, where both partners hold left hands, and pass their right hand over an…

Nor does it capture that you might be holding your hands in different ways, such as which side is rotated up.

Yes all of that was purposefully left out. It's just about which hand is touching which other hand, not about how the hands are actually in contact. I was purposefully skipping those details to try and find something simple to build on.

Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

#44

Post by knuckleheads »

viraptor wrote: post #22
geewee wrote: post #16

Having danced for around a decade, I would say the hand positioning example is a bit reductive. The most obvious example is that there's only one variant of "both hands crossed over" - while it's true that the hands might only fit together one way, the things you can do with the hands depending on what arm is on top varies significantly. Having said that I'm pretty excited about the topic and what the author can do w…

It is, but also it's a helpful simplification, I believe. It's kind of like a cup and a ring being topologically equivalent. Helps you talk about some generic thing without overloading with details. Then there are many more layers on top: palms facing up/down/side, cupped or pressed against, which part of the hand/arm/body are you holding, which one's on top, compression or stretch, at what height, etc.

To me, it's explicitly about being topologically equivalent. I brushed up on my topology and knot theory when working on this to make sure I had it right. The post is considering two social dancers as connected components of two topological objects and the 15 different ways are all the different ways specific points of the surface (hands reduced to points that is) are able to connect.

There's more topology as well when you start bringing in other characteristics of a position, like relative distance and orientation of the dances, you can find more equivalence classes for the other types of equivalences that fall out of that.

Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

#45

Post by knuckleheads »

lostemptations5 wrote: post #11

I don't know. This is ok if it's helpful, but reminds me of why I quit playing chess: the mystery was lost. As I got more into chess and with the advancement of chess computers and championships, I felt there was little creativity left to have fun with the game. So for dancing, it's literally meant to be "danced". Of course you can figure out all the combinations and so on, but being overly analytical about it remove…

I also play and enjoy chess as well as dancing, and I do enjoy reading about and using chess engines and how championships are impacted by them. Different strokes for different folks though, obviously nobody needs notation or printed materials or anything to learn how to dance. My supposition is that more abstracted dance resources would help some people though who are being underserved by the current dance education market presently, but we will see.

Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

#46

Post by knuckleheads »

abernard1 wrote: post #12

I enjoy the attempt to analyze the dancing (really choreography). But I'm surprised that in this new world of LLM hype not one word in there was dedicated to what dance really is: a language. Dance is a physical, kinesthetic language. And to riff on some of the posters, it's this expression and communication between the dancers that makes dancing worth dancing. There's also the social communication between the group,…

I didn't include it in this version of the post, but I do view dancing as a language and I think it's useful to do so. Every dance is a conversation between two people, with cues and signals following back and forth the whole time. I explicitly don't think about this choreographed dancing, I am primarily interested in analyzing improvised social dancing between two people. I've found a lot of stuff that I'll try to write about soon via way of metaphor by just applying the tools of linguistics and semiotics to social dancing. For example, the idea of a phonetic inventory composed of the ways that people move during the various social dances and styles makes a lot of sense. The small ways that people move their bodies in Cuban Salsa are different are different from LA Salsa, but they are more similar to each other than the way that people move when dancing Zouk or Tango. The tilted head in Zouk and the torsion in Tango feel like the rolled R of some Spanish dialects. Once I have something more concrete I'll try and post about it.

Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

#47

Post by knuckleheads »

fzeindl wrote: post #10
virtualritz wrote: post #6

This partly happened in tango in the 90's, when Gustavo Naveira, Chicho Frumboli and Fabian Salas came together to create a structural and kinesiologica base for something that previously existed more as "an intuition". For each basic configuration of leader and follower and their bodies they looked at all permutations. Then they constrained it first to the subset of those that are possible to do at all, kinesiologic…

I have had the same idea about martial arts. Not sure it is possible. In dancing you have at least some symmetric patterns and rhythm, in martial arts you have even more stances, rotation around more axes and arrhythmic moves. good dancing like good fighting isn‘t mechanical either, it is good because it relies on little imperfections. Just like MIDI files cannot replace a concert pianist. In the end I think motion c…

Somebody sort of did something like this, not exactly the same, but I think'll get a kick out of it. I don't do martial arts but as part of the research I looked into how people represent martial arts in written or abstracted form. During this time, late one night, I found this website: http://eel.is/GrappleMap/index.html It turns out one guy made a website that let you simulate a ton of BJJ moves and sequences, designing an abstract BJJ representation as well as making a 3d animator/viewer for those animations http://eel.is/GrappleMap/composer/index.html?484,517,518,125... It's all up on github https://github.com/Eelis/GrappleMap/ and some sample videos can be seen here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC7zTBMPj1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAeBgGZ1GdM http://eel.is/GrappleMap/index.html I spent hours messing around with this, he got it working in VR too. More or less one guy just writing a ton of C++ on his own to make something incredible. https://github.com/Eelis/GrappleMap/graphs/contributors

Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

#48

Post by knuckleheads »

virtualritz wrote: post #6

This partly happened in tango in the 90's, when Gustavo Naveira, Chicho Frumboli and Fabian Salas came together to create a structural and kinesiologica base for something that previously existed more as "an intuition". For each basic configuration of leader and follower and their bodies they looked at all permutations. Then they constrained it first to the subset of those that are possible to do at all, kinesiologic…

That's super helpful thank you for writing it all out! I bought Castro's book, looking forward to reading it more. If you have any other resources/recommendations like this I would love to see them. I had tried TANGOBOOK: Dance Notation of The Classic Tango by Hsieh, Felipe and found it to not be all that helpful to me as a beginner Tango dancer. I feel like the footwork diagrams left out a lot of where I was supposed to be pointing to with my chest, but I'm not very good at Tango, so it's hard for me to say that that actually matters.

Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

#49

Post by lostemptations5 »

bsder wrote: post #25
lostemptations5 wrote: post #11

I don't know. This is ok if it's helpful, but reminds me of why I quit playing chess: the mystery was lost. As I got more into chess and with the advancement of chess computers and championships, I felt there was little creativity left to have fun with the game. So for dancing, it's literally meant to be "danced". Of course you can figure out all the combinations and so on, but being overly analytical about it remove…

> why I quit playing chess: the mystery was lost. Well, the problem is that with all the online resources, you quickly learn that chess is more about blunder avoidance than any brilliant, dynamic scheme. That takes a lot of the fun out of chess.

Haha :))
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