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SESSIONS Non-Technical Presentations, Panels & Workshops Trained Eye, Informed Body / Abstract Ilene Fox We often talk about how studying Labanotation helps train the eye, providing a framework for looking at movement. This better understanding of what we are seeing informs performance, allowing a dancer to better reproduce the movement that is wanted. In the way we have been teaching Labanotation, this has been a by-product rather than the main goal of the course. This presentation will discuss a course specifically designed to train dancers to better analyze and understand movement, using the Labanotation concepts as a framework. The course begins with a movement experience that has the students look at a movement and try to describe it to someone who cannot see the phrase, coaching them only verbally, no demonstration, trying to get them to reproduce the movement exactly. Through this exercise the students begin to see what kind of information is needed. A list is made that becomes the basis of the class presentations. The class sessions present the Labanotation movement concepts such as, directions and levels, rhythms, part of the body moving, the difference between contracting and folding, the various kinds of turning movements, etc. The concepts are presented through analyzing movement patterns. This course does not focus on symbols, but on the ideas. It focuses on understanding and analyzing movement with the detail used in Labanotation rather than in the more general way of motif. The skills a notator uses in analyzing movement are also presented. The session could be either a 30 minute paper presentation, or a longer workshop with a presentation of the course followed by an experiential session. Ilene Fox is the Executive Director of Dance Notation Bureau, New York. Among the choreographers whose works she has notated are Balanchine, Holm, Joffrey, Limón, Louis, Shawn and Sokolow. She notated the Chinese Classical Dance Syllabus for the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. She has taught notation internationally, including in England, Israel, China, and Thailand. She is currently working on a project to translate Labanotated scores into computer animation.
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