Sarah Gibbard Cook
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My Fifteen Minutes of Choreography Fame

11/5/2018

10 Comments

 
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Renaissance, square, contra, social, modern, international folk: I’ve done many kinds of dance over the years, none of them well. When I failed the audition for the modern dance honorary Junior Orchesis in high school, the judges said my choreography was creative and original but I didn’t point my toes on the leaps.

Composing dances was always fun. Even as a beginner, my response to any new step was, “Here is my variation.” Floor plans in choreography appealed to the same part of me as maps and house plans. My teacher, Toni Intravaia, was among the few dance instructors anywhere to teach children Labanotation, a system to record human movement on paper. That led to my implausible credential as a prize-winning choreographer with “Country Capers,” national winner of the Dance Notation Bureau’s Junior Dansnotator Choreography Contest.

Today, handheld devices can record movement electronically, and digital technology lets me rediscover “County Capers” on my computer. Labanotation expert and Dance Notation Bureau co-founder Ann Hutchinson Guest turned 100 this past Saturday. Toni Intravaia died this past April at 95. I’m ever grateful for their encouragement of children’s creativity more than half a century ago, even if I never did learn to point my toes. 
10 Comments
Lisa Imhoff
11/5/2018 08:32:09 am

That is so cool. Is Labanotation available as an app? Or something similar?

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Sarah link
11/5/2018 11:50:59 am

Cool indeed! A search for "Labanotation software" yielded www.labanotator.com, which makes sense but I've never used. My childhood was too long ago for apps. We did it all by hand on graph paper.

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Lisa Imhoff
11/5/2018 12:18:58 pm

Did you see the recent Nova (I think if was Nova) on Neanderthal? The researchers put some markers on living humans, and entered a lot of data on Neanderthal skeletons, such as they were wider and lower than modern humans and other things different about their stature. They didn't have the range of motion of certain joints, or stuff like that. Then, the modern humans were video'd walking around and running and climbing and such, and a computer translated that into an animation of how a Neanderthal would look doing the same thing. That basic technology of animation has been around for a long time, but I thought it was cool how the computer could convert it to accommodate the Neanderthal skeleton. Well, anyway, it would only be a short leap from there to having the computer score (map?, notate?) choreography, I bet.

Sarah link
11/5/2018 02:08:33 pm

Lisa, what a cool idea! No, unfortunately I missed the show. It would have been all the more fun now that we're aware of our bit of Neanderthal ancestry. I don't know whether computer Labanotation can transcribe directly from movement (comparable to voice transcription) or if it's more like a keyboard, just making it easier to enter the symbols than having to draw each one.

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Rebecca link
11/5/2018 07:47:43 pm

I'm so impressed at the choreography notation and your winning modern dance contest entry! So many talents you have : ) Rebecca

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Sarah link
11/6/2018 06:59:59 am

Less credit to talent and more to the teacher who gave Morgantown girls the opportunity to study this. I doubt the contest brought in much competition!

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Beth Genne
11/5/2018 09:09:08 pm

hmmm.....

Balanchine, Graham, Gibbard (why not!)

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Sarah link
11/6/2018 06:53:19 am

Grin. Like my brother in the music sphere, who at age seven sent the New York Philharmonic "Gibbard's First Symphony"" with a request to play it in their next concert.

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Paul Intravaia
11/19/2019 10:07:33 pm

Hi Sarah:
How wonderful to hear about a student my mother taught!
Please email me when you get a chance.

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Sarah Cook link
11/20/2019 07:50:28 am

Paul, delighted to hear from you! Your mother was important in my growing up. Emailing you separately.

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

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