Dance notes

Since starting to teach classes, opportunities to come up with new ideas and techniques to teach in class are something I have been trying to keep on top of.  Well, actually, it's not really an option; I simply have to find those opportunities, because otherwise the classes will get boring and dull (and I don't want that).

First up, the notes:

(You can click on each of the notes to see a full-size version of it)

The first thing worth talking about is the way I've laid out the notes.  Each note is numbered at the bottom, so that I can keep track of the sequence with which I thought up these notes.  This might seem like a waste of time to put together, but doing it when it's fresh in my mind will save me time.  It'll definitely longer to try and figure out which page comes first after the fact.

Important ideas that I want to make a point of going over again later get a box drawn around them.  When I've finished writing about a specific idea, I draw a line across the page to make sure I have a clean break - visually and mentally.

So far, none of this stuff is groundbreaking, but that's okay, this is my chance to talk about my process, not an opportunity for me to split the metaphorical atom of taking notes.

One interesting thing to note is that peppered throughout these notes are the words "Use Case"

As I went through the process of writing out these notes, two main thoughts crossed my mind.

1. Surely someone has done this before me and thought up notation to support this
   
2. Why isn't there software to do this?

Coming up with my own notation will work, but if someone has already spent time doing it and has created a system that works, I would like to hop on board that and start evolving from that jumping off point, rather than rebuilding the wheel.

More importantly though, why hasn't any software been created to support this need?  There are plenty of dance choreographers out there, and it just seems like having software that supported them is a no-brainer.

When going through and taking notes, this was something that stuck in the back of my mind.  A use case is something that we capture when gathering requirements for a piece of software.  More specifically, it indicates a specific way in which a piece of software would be used.  Typically use cases are as simple as writing out:

As a user, I would like to be able to login to the system.

My notes are less formalized than even that, but you can see the places in which I've noticed a particular use case that a piece of software like this would need to support.  On the first page, one of the use cases I thought of is that to effectively capture choreography, you need to capture not just the main body position, but also to add notation and indicate which way various body parts are oriented (fingertips pointing up, for example).

Naming Stances

As I took notes, I noticed immediately that there was value in naming each new tutting stance that I came up with.  The stance may already be named by someone else, but having a name that I can use to quickly refer to a stance I'd written down previously saves me a lot of time.  Throughout the notes you can see that I've peppered names for various stances (and left one of them unnamed because I couldn't think of an intuitive name for it).

More Use Cases

Some more use cases that struck me as being potentially relevant:

1. Give users the ability to indicate the transitions to and from a given stance (eg, you can transition from this the box stance into the wall stance)
2. Give users the ability to indicate the lines that the dancer's body creates (and extend those outwards).  Better yet, automatically determine what the lines are, and possibly display the mid-line that exists between those.

Lines and body-geometry are an important part of good aesthetics when dancing, and providing a choreographer with an immediate representation of what lines are being created would be a nice touch.

Some other ideas

Some other ideas that I would like to see integrated into a choreography software would be allowing the user to quickly put together their own set of "body positions", and then slide those positions in and out of a sequence of moves.  Eg, I create one position to show my left arm being in the air, and one position to show my right arm in the air.  I can then create a sequence of moves that goes from the one position to the other, simply by dragging and dropping those positions into place.

As you can tell, this is far from an exact science, and mainly an idea in progress.  Still, it would be really nice to see something like this put together, if only because then I wouldn't need to resort to scrawling notes on paper and making a mess of things.

Still, in the meantime, my workflow continues along the following lines:

1. Write out dance notes whenever practicing
2. Get home, scan dance notes in
3. Add dance notes to Evernote, so that I can access them from anywhere

As I continue to use this method, I'll continue to evolve my notation so that I can improve its efficiency.