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Module 4 - Warmup Exercise

Performance notation

tl;dr: Create a beautiful diagramatic score for a performance. Choose a performance from this week’s pool of case studies and examine in detail. Analyze and develop a notation to describe and communicate it’s structure (or some part of it) as a diagram in just 2 hours.

Due Date: Thursday, Nov 10, 9am (see full timeline)

Submit to Gallery Pool: ….

• Brief and goals
• Learning Objectives
• Process
• Deliverables
• Considerations and Constraints
• Approaches, Inspiration and Context
• Documentation

Brief and Goals

This module asks you to think about performance, and specifically the relationships between stage, performer, audience and media. To help unpack some of the interactions between these elements, we’re going to deconstruct a performance to look for the underlying structure. And then you’re going to create a diagram that helps explain it. This is designed to help you become a little more familiar with the dynamic interplays that unfold during a performance.

Brief: Create a beautiful diagramatic score for a performance Choose a performance from this week’s pool of case studies and examine in detail. Analyze and develop a notation to describe and communicate it’s structure (or some part of it) as a diagram in just 2 hours

As part of this exercise you’re going to need to do a few things. First, you’ll need to pick a good performance to work with. Once you’ve got it, you’ll need to decompose it. It might be helpful to zero in on just a section of the performance. Watch it a couple of times and make notes. Think about the qualities you see: is it highly structured or scripted? what are the major things that happen and how do they relate to one another? what media do you see and hear and when does it change and why? Look for any signs of structure, composition, patterns, repetitions, etc and record them. Then, using your notes, create your own score for the performance. Think about what notations and formats you might use (e.g. color, form, visualisation, etc.) so that someone else might understand what’s happening. Make sure the features of the performance are recognizable and that you can discern patterns. Finally, spend some time reflecting on the outcome. Better yet show it to someone you know. Do they understand what it might be communicating without seeing the performance?

Learning Objectives

As part of this exercise you will be asked to:

• Develop your skills in analysing and decoding media (recognizing and coding patterns and structures within media);
• Develop an awareness of the relationships between stage, performer, media and audience and how these might be used successfully within media performances
• Build an applied understanding of emergence and how it relates to media-driven performance; and
• Develop your skills in media representation.

Process

As mentioned above:

• Selection: Choose a performance to work with. If the performance is long then choose just a section of the performance to examine in detail. I’d strongly recommend you choose a performance from the lookingout. But you don’t have to stick with your own selections i.e. you’re free to choose someone else’s example to work with.

• Analysis: Review the performance a few times. Keep notes as you watch. Record timestamps of significant moments. Look for indications of structure e.g. changes in visual content, changes in audio volume/tone/content, changes in the number of people on stage, their arrangement, position, or quality of movement. Keep a note of things that are repeated or might indicate common structures or patterns.

• Notation: Start to transform your notes into a formal schema. Think about how you can show connections, as well as changes in a diagramatic format. How can you use color, shape, form, arrangement and other compositional elements to indicate these things.

• Diagram: In not more than two hours, create a beautiful diagramatic score. Channel your Kandinsky or your favorite examples of information visualization!

• Reflect: on the process of recreating this composition and the relationships in the composition. As a suggested strategy show it to someone you know or maybe someone from the class and see if they can decipher it?

Deliverables

You are asked to deliver three things for this warm up exercise:

1. Notation: The final notation/diagram.
2. Narrative: A description of the manner in which you approached the project, the process you followed and the strategies you used to translate the work.
3. Reflection: A reflection on outcome and comparision to the original work.

Considerations and Constraints

Constraints:

• The outcome must be created in under 2 hour (not including research).
• The outcome must be a diagramatic composition.
• You must work with a performance

Considerations:

• You are free to choose an performance you wish to notate. This could be a concert orchestra, a choreographed dance, a play, etc.
• You’re also free to work digitally or physically (e.g. on paper)
• You’re welcome to use technologies and tools to assist you in your analysis.
• You don’t have to deal with the entire performance. You can focus on a section of the performance.
• Remember: you have creative license! And these considerations are just a guide.

Finally, there’s a bunch of potential notions you can borrow from below!

Approaches, Inspiration and Context

There are many examples of performance notation that you can draw on in this project.

• Orchestra: Perhaps the most obvious connection is the musical score used to coordinate an orchestral peformance. Below you can see an example of Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring, visualized by composer, pianist and software engineer Stephen Malinowski. It’s designed to communicate and represent the complex relationships that underly any symphonic performance. In this example, we can really understand what is happening in the performances, and we can see the relationships between each instrument; it’s beautifully revealed. Take a look at animated notation too. It contains a great archive of notations:

  The composers listed here represent a diverse array of notational and compositional approaches, but what they have in common is that each composer has at one time or another utilized some form of animated music notation in a dynamically-scored context.

• Cage and Notation: John Cage was known for his experimental notations (we already briefly encountered them in Module 3’s warmup, see Notations 21). Cage broke the conventions of the traditional score using all manner of graphical forms to communicate his indeterminate compositions. But he’s not alone. Brian Eno, Krzysztof Penderecki and Cornelius Cardew have used non traditional notations to represent their scores. Take a look at their approaches here and this follow up thread on experimental music notations for lots more examples

• Theatre: The components of drama are well defined in theatrical performance, for example plot is built through the combination of exposition, conflict, climax and resolution. These elements can be used to unpack and decompose almost any narrative form - and are a great starting point to developing descriptive notation for performance. Of course there are many other elements at play - stage directions, music, cues, and lots of other things all have a role.

On the stage Beckett’s QUAD is a great example of rule based theatre and notation that very clearly describes a performance. This notation provides a structured sequence for four actors to enter, cross and exit the stage without encountering each other and avoiding the other. Take a look at the video to understand how it’s is implemented.

• Dance: Like music and theatre, movement performance equally has lots of notations that can be used to describe and choreograph the structure of the performance and the qualities of movement from performers. Of these [Laban movement analysis]((http://www.movementhasmeaning.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/LMA-Workshop-Sheet.pdf) is perhaps one of the best known. It’s “a theoretical and experiential system for the observation, description, prescription, performance, and interpretation of human movement.^*”

Projects like OSU’s Synchronous Objects take this much further. A collaboration by William Forsythe, Maria Palazzi and Norah Zuniga Shaw, Synchronous Objects combines video documentation of movement performance and choreography with rich overlaid notations that describe the quality of movement and the interactions between performers. They also create 3d visualisation of that movement to interrogate performance in multiple modalities.

Motion Bank continued this work, capturing dancers’ movements with video cameras and Microsoft Kinect and animating that data to create 3d representations of movement.

“For instance, Deborah Hays has a solo project in which she choreographed a piece called “No Time to Fly,” taught it to 20 different dancers, had them rehearse it for three months, and then asked the dancers to perform it. It was part of a 14 year project in which she taught a new dance annually to a new group of dancers. It was a way to share or spread her work throughout the world. A sort of movement meme.” ^*

If you’re interested, this article covers more on data and choreography.

Documentation:

A suggested format for documentation is as follows. You should include a write up of the following:

• Performance - Describe the performance you selected and why. Include (if possible) a video/audio file or embed it from an online source.
• Product - What was the final representation. What did you create? What is it composed with (materials, shapes, forms)? Describe the textures, colors, etc.
• Method - Describe the rules behind the notation you developed and your approach to annotating the performance. You must cite at least one framework you drew inspiration from.
• Reflection - Do you think you captured the content and aesthetics of the audio accurately? Is it recognizable as the original sound? What did you learn? What would you do differently?

Each of these sections should be no more than 150-200 words max. and well illustrated (images, videos, etc.)

For the Project Info’s goal description: it must be tweetable - summarise your outcome in no more than 140 characters