Exhibition: IT Contents

Hachimura Lab, Ritsumeikan University

The Use of Labanotation for Choreographing a Noh-play

Hachimura Lab, Ritsumeikan University

Labanotation is a graphical notation scheme for describing human body movement that has been widely accepted for the purpose of recording human movements in the fields of choreography and dance education, mainly in Western countries. It is said that, by using the full set of Labanotation, almost all of our body movements can be described. Since the resulting score staff will become extremely complicated, only the fundamental description has usually been used. On the other hand, there are styles of motion particular to traditional dances, and if we restrict ourselves to handling these dances, the basic notation scheme is insufficient to describe these motions.

Based on the above, we investigated a method of describing and reproducing CG animation of highly-stylized traditional dance using fundamental description of Labanotation while maintaining the quality of CG character animation, and developed a system called LabanEditor. LabanEditor is an interactive system for inputting/editing Labanotation scores and displaying 3D CG character animation associated with the scores. Recently, we developed and implemented a unique feature for handling highly stylized traditional Japanese performances, Noh, and realized it as LabanEditor3 (LabanEditor version 3).

Noh is the most popular and characteristic Japanese traditional performing arts in the stylized form of a musical dance-drama and its movement is highly stylized and unique. Shimai is a short but principal performance extracted from the whole Noh play and usually played alone in a simple costume. Since Shimai is basically made of a successive combination of Kata, by using a combination of several fragments of Labanotation score representing each Kata, we can describe and reproduce a CG animation of the Shimai.

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