Learning To Walk

A lot has changed since my last Labanotation post.

For one thing, I've been focusing on the chapter on directional stepping. My approach is first to cover the direction symbols alone, and how they can be used to express different steps. Then in subsequent chapters, I plan to introduce new symbols that modify the direction symbols, in order to express a greater and greater variety of different steps. Eventually I'd cover the whole topic.

Unfortunately this has turned out to be a controversial decision. Direction symbols alone are able to express just a small handful of basic dance steps; and my tutor, Ilene, is concerned that dancers will be misled into thinking that Labanotation can't express any other types of steps. She insists that the only way to go, is to teach all the ways of notating steps at once.

I understand where she's coming from; but the obvious solution seems to be to just alert the reader to the fact that the direction symbols only explain a few different steps, and that additional steps will be explained in subsequent chapters. I'm not sure what else I'd need to do beyond that, to make sure people didn't get confused.

But she feels it's very important, so we argue about it.

Meanwhile, I've decided to use the Blender open source 3D animation software tool to create diagrams for my whole Labanotation text. The only problem being, Blender is hugely, insanely complicated! So I've essentially spent the past couple of weeks learning how to use Blender to place realistic human characters into still poses and animations.

Just today, I finally started to get something resembling a person taking a single step. This is the culmination of weeks of labor: a 2-second video of someone standing on a bare platform, and taking a single step forward.

What a sense of elation! As I edited the animation over several hours, I felt more and more like I really had a hold on the situation, and was really able to control exactly what this person was doing, to get her to step the way I wanted.

I've tried to learn Blender before; but it's always been so complicated, I just had no idea where to begin, or what to do, or how to approach the topic. But this time around, it's all been so obvious. Of course I would need to read such-and-such a chapter in so-and-so's book. Naturally I would need to do that, because of this-and-that type of problem I confronted, in producing a diagram for my Labanotation text!

Writing a text about Labanotation is really the ideal circumstance in which to learn Blender. Everyone should do it that way. In order to make the diagrams I need for my chapter, I'm constantly running into problems, and having to learn all sorts of Blender material in order to solve them. It's quite an immersion course. Meanwhile, since I'm writing a text about dance, or at least about something else that's about dance, I'm dealing with subtleties of human movement that I wouldn't encounter if I were just trying to make a funny animated movie. All the little details of a given movement suddenly take on an added significance, because they illustrate several paragraphs of text, in which I try to make complex notational ideas clear to a lay reader.

It's so nice also, to be totally captivated by a topic of exploration again. At the beginning of this year, I'd decided to cut out all my pursuits, and leave absolutely nothing between myself and my perceptive senses. I felt that I'd been hiding behind my enthusiasms; and I didn't want to let myself off the hook anymore. So I cut them out. It turned out to be a horrifying exploration of depression and emotional free-fall. But you know what I say - when life hands you depression and emotional free-fall, make lemonade!

Those were rough months. I really felt like I came right up against the bare metal of my existence; or nearer to it than I had in years and years. And when it was over, it took awhile for any topic of study to captivate my attention the way it had before. Of course there was still Labanotation itself; but that was less a labor of love than it was a labor of love/hate. I did it, but it was always just rough and painful, because of the controversies I created among the people I spoke to in the community, and because of my own struggle to understand the material I needed to write about.

But Blender now, has no such ambivalence attached. Not only is it incredibly fun to learn and play with, but it's going to absolutely revolutionize everything I'm doing with Labanotation. Instead of stale line drawings, poorly and laboriously done, I will now be able to illustrate all the diverse Labanotation concepts with highly accurate, rendered 3D images of people in the poses I've arranged, depicting the notation I've diagrammed. Animated videos will accompany textual explanations in ways that no other Labanotation text has ever approached. Readers coming to Labanotation for the first time will discover that the biggest problem they face will be deciding which wonderful creative choreographic idea they want to write down first.

It's quite something. I'm very much enjoying this whole process.