From dance notation to human animation: The LabanDancer project

Abstract Symbolic systems such as Labanotation for notating dance and choreography provide a critical tool for the preservation of cultural heritage in what once was considered an ‘illiterate’ art form. While the goals of such notation systems are laudable, the unfortunate reality is that most dancers and choreographers cannot read or write the notation; that is, they are loath to take the considerable effort to learn a rich, but complex methodology. To make Labanotation scores more accessible the LabanDancer system has been developed to translate Labanotation scores recorded in the LabanWriter editor into 3‐d human figure animations. A major challenge in the development of this translator has been to find approaches that are general enough to create reasonable animations for a wide variety of different movements. Any translator must also take account of the context of a movement since this can affect the interpretation of the Labanotation scores. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.