Moving in the Cube: A Motion-based Playful Experience for Introducing Labanotation to Beginners

Labanotation is one of the most used systems for notating, analysing, and preserving movement and dance, an important part of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Labanotation consists of a powerful expressive symbolic language for documenting movement with a long history in dance research, history, and anthropology since its introduction by Rudolf von Laban in the beginning of the 20th century. A number of valuable scores in this language are curated in both physical and digital archives throughout the world, describing both traditional dances and works of historical choreographers. Nevertheless, while Labanotation is considered the official language of dance scholars, it is not at all popular among dance educators, students, practitioners, and choreographers. In fact, few people of the dance community are familiar with it. One of the reasons is that it is considered a quite difficult symbolic system with a long learning curve, and practitioners are not easily motivated to learn it. Together with dance experts, we co-designed a movement-based experience in Kinect, based on the principles of playful design, to introduce dance and non-dance experts to Labanotation introductory concepts and symbols. We evaluate the experience with both people that have experience in dance or other movement practices, as well as participants with no expertise in movement or dance. The results show promising findings toward changing the attitude of the participants toward Labanotation, and all participants seemed to memorize or start learning the logic of this symbolic language for movement. We discuss the results of the evaluation on the whole experience and the potential of this symbolic language in the digital environment, as well as the potential and challenges that arise from this experiment based on the background of the participants, the limitation of the applied technology and interaction, as well as feedback on the introduced symbolic language.