A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)
zacksdancelab.com
A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)
1–10 of 49 posts
Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)
#2I've often considered the same things (Salsa), and it's interesting to see where he's going with it!
Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)
#3Just me, or is this ornithology for birds?
Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)
#4I've often considered the same things (Salsa), and it's interesting to see where he's going with it!
https://furius.ca/salsa-book/ is a previous attempt!
Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)
#5I've often considered the same things (Salsa), and it's interesting to see where he's going with it!
Hah same - especially in the beginning - all the moves looked like programming functions - inputs and outputs, state mutations etc.
Thing is, the more I learned the more I started to use internally consistent vocabulary, so I no longer needed analogs, but would construct new moves from older simpler ones.
I don’t think though that this article captures the complexity of of social dance, maybe that’s why its so universally fun? Its not just arms, legs and body positions - there is weight transfer, musicality, disparity between partner’s skill levels, let alone all other dancers around you that you need to track so as not to have an accident. And thats before you start adding shines, styling and body movement.
There _is_ an underlying system of course - every move has a finite possible exits, if you dance “by the rules” but dance evolution is all about breaking those rules. And if you’re at that level, you can start mixing other dances into your move set … Its all incredibly hard to reason about.
Maybe thats why the gold standard is just to record your lessons and get back to them when you want to.
Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)
#6This 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, kinesiologically.
Then further to the subset of those that could be danced with reasonable comfort.
And finally the subset of those that are easy enough to be taught to students and would work on a crowded social dancefloor.
None of this was done with the help of computers.
The most systemic documentation of this is possibly Mauricio Castro's book "Tango -- the structure of the dance".
But lately a lot of new books were published on tango technique; I may be out of the loop.
A friend of mine who's also a tango professional is currently looking into the feasibility of doing a PhD thesis on this topic.
He wants to use ML to spit spit out the full motion tree of tango.
Both to be able to document it automatically, i.e. using generated 3D animations, as well as to discover new combinations the manual approach used by Naveira, Frumboli and Salas, over a quarter century ago, will have missed.
Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)
#7This reminds me a bit of Siteswap notation for Juggling.
Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)
#8Just 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 attempts at notation of dance. I would be very surprised if there weren't any. Modeling cultural practices is also somewhat of a hot topic in the so called "Digital humanities" for what that is worth. A quick search for example brought up this article which talks about Dance Studies and attempts at digitization:
https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/digital-research-in-dan...
Anyways "ornithology for birds" is pretty fitting as this seems to just be anthropology for humans.
Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)
#9the 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 and through the hold to grasp their partner's left side, inside of their left arm. the statement needs a big caveat so it is clear that it does not accurately describe all real dance holds.
Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)
#10This 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 capture of extremities along with some easing of paths and compression of point-clouds (think bezier curves) might be more worthwhile than a notation.