Making Meaning with Machines

Amy LaViers works at the intersection of robotics and dance. Her work has been presented in arts, engineering, and science venues, including Nature, Merce Cunningham’s studios, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, the Performance Arcade, Berkeley, Princeton, and Georgia Tech. She runs the Robotics, Automation, and Dance Lab, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit for art-making, commercialization, education, outreach, and research.

Catherine (Cat) Maguire is a movement educator and dance artist. She has been teaching in the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System for over 40 years and works as a faculty member of WholeMovement, a coterie of movement analysts working together to promote movement studies globally. She also teaches ongoing movement classes designed to foster self-expression and body connectivity at McGuffey Art Center in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Electronic Resources xix
Prelude: Opening with Embodied Perspectives 1
Introduction: Inviting Engineers into Movement Studies 3
I Making Meaning through Movement
1 Noticing Movement: Meaning, Measurement, and Experience 27
2 Studying Movement: Somatics, Choreography, and Notation 47
3 Constructing Movement: Somatic Strategies, Choreographic Technologies, and Notational Abstractions through a Laban/Bartenieff Lens 63
II Describing Movement with an Embodied Taxonomy: The BESST System
4 What Is Moving? The Interconnection of Body Parts and Action (Body) 85
5 Where Is the Movement? Spatial Fiducials for Movement (Space) 113
6 When Is the Movement Happening? The Temporal Perception of Movement (Time) 139
7 For Whom Is the Movement? The Relationship between Mover and Environment (Shape) 165
8 How Is the Movement Executed? Movement Quality Enables Shading of Motion (Effort) 185
III Translating Movement to Machines
9 Deconstructing Movement: Case Studies in Expression (Answering “Why?”) 209
10 Notating Movement: Advanced Analysis through Symbolic Representation 243
Conclusion: Understanding Movement 283
Outro: Returning to Embodied Perspectives 293
Appendix A: Symbols in the BESST System 297
Appendix B: Movement Scales 311
Appendix C: Effort Configurations 323
Appendix D: Rationale for the Time Component 327
Appendix E: Pedagogy and Group Work 329
Glossary 339
Notes 359
References 367
Index 383