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SESSIONS Non-Technical Presentations, Panels & Workshops Dance Preservation Beyond the Written Score / Abstract Greg Halloran Leaders in the area of Labanotation, the written language of movement, agree it is the best system to record and preserve dance. No system of dance preservation is one hundred percent accurate. Each year many dance classics are restaged via Labanotation, and in many instances a coach, or expert on the dance and/or style comes out to refine a restaging. Rarely are these coaching sessions documented. This paper serves to call to a need for better documentation of these invaluable coaching sessions and to offer one example of how this documentation might be recorded. I have been involved in restaging dances via Labanotation since 1990. Although I am comfortable reading the score and directing dances, I have enjoyed the luxury of having an expert on the dance included in the process. Invaluable subtitles, such as stylistic details and movement motivations, are brought to the dance from such coaches. Sometimes the choreographer, if available, is brought in to see their works reborn in a new light. The few coaching sessions that have been documented in the past are preserved in often long, drawn out video recording, which have a limited shelf life and are not accessible to those in other countries who do not use the VHS system. Computer technology offers a new more-efficient means of documentation. Computer programs usually have worldwide accessibility and are often low in cost. I have found that danceCODES, a pre-programmed shell developed by Robbie Shaw perfectly suited for the documentation that I am discussing. The program is easy to use for archiving materials into an interactive, non-linear, multi-media documentation. It can record video, still pictures, audio, text and notation into a cohesive, interesting and accessible package. I plan to use danceCODES in my restaging of Doris Humphrey’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor. Lucy Venable, who studied with Humprey and notated the dance, spent three days coaching the dancers on the finest details of Humphrey’s style in the fall of 2002 at the University of Idaho. I found Venable’s work extremely helpful to both my dancers and myself. I recorded hours of video footage, interviews, photos and pages of notes. I will then attempt to compact the main, most important elements of her coaching into a CD-ROM using danceCODES. My presentation will show how the CD-ROM works and how the information is stored and presented. Greg Halloran is currently Director of the Center for Dance at the University of Idaho. He holds his M. A. and M. F. A. in Dance from the Score from The Ohio State University. He has taught at the Youth Performing Arts School in Louisville, Kentucky, Northern Illinois University and Kenyon College.
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