5 ms·

A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

83 points by nullsub 2y ago

vikhik 2y ago
I've often considered the same things (Salsa), and it's interesting to see where he's going with it!
- fatcow 2y ago
  https://furius.ca/salsa-book/ https://furius.ca/salsa-book/ is a previous attempt!
  - knuckleheads 2y ago
    Thank you for pointing this out! I had seen this page previously and had tried halfheartedly to find a copy of the original pdf at the time and given up. Just now I tried again though and was able to find one. Seems like a great guide, thanks a ton!
- seer 2y ago
  Hah same - especially in the beginning - all the moves looked like programming functions - inputs and outputs, state mutations etc. Thing is, the more I learned the more I started to use internally consistent vocabulary, so I no longer needed analogs, but would construct new moves from older simpler ones. I don’t think though that this article captures the complexity of of social dance, maybe that’s why its so universally fun? Its not just arms, legs and body positions - there is weight transfer, musicality, disparity between partner’s skill levels, let alone all other dancers around you that you need to track so as not to have an accident. And thats before you start adding shines, styling and body movement. There _is_ an underlying system of course - every move has a finite possible exits, if you dance “by the rules” but dance evolution is all about breaking those rules. And if you’re at that level, you can start mixing other dances into your move set … Its all incredibly hard to reason about. Maybe thats why the gold standard is just to record your lessons and get back to them when you want to.
  - knuckleheads 2y ago
    A fun read on exits to a move is https://anthologen.com/2020/05/06/a-finite-state-dance-machine/ https://anthologen.com/2020/05/06/a-finite-state-dance-machi... . A different kind of dancing, but same type of thinking, about how to transition within the dance.
chrisjj 2y ago
Just me, or is this ornithology for birds?
- vlz 2y ago
  I see this as an almost scientific/scholarly exercise in modeling. While the author seems not to start with any intent to "do science" he or she tries to capture a concrete phenomenon abstractly in order to study it more closely, which is arguably at the heart of science or at least some of the sciences. The post is "almost" scholarly because it does not try to look into what others did before or currently, eg. prior attempts at notation of dance. I would be very surprised if there weren't any. Modeling cultural practices is also somewhat of a hot topic in the so called "Digital humanities" for what that is worth. A quick search for example brought up this article which talks about Dance Studies and attempts at digitization: https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/digital-research-in-dance-studies-emerging-trends-in-a-still-emerging-field-2/ https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/digital-research-in-dan... Anyways "ornithology for birds" is pretty fitting as this seems to just be anthropology for humans.
  - chrisjj 2y ago
    Indeed. Where it goes wrong is the notion it will help people learn how to dance.
    - geewee 2y ago
      I could see stuff like this helping advanced dancers come up with new stuff or perhaps help some instructors.
      - chrisjj 2y ago
        Indeed invaluable to help dance instructors come up with stuff to sell. Because its so well suited to incomprehensibility e.g. this famous example https://www.tangomovimentoterapia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/nivel3.jpg https://www.tangomovimentoterapia.com/wp-content/uploads/201...
  - 2y ago
virtualritz 2y ago
This partly happened in tango in the 90's, when Gustavo Naveira, Chicho Frumboli and Fabian Salas came together to create a structural and kinesiologica base for something that previously existed more as "an intuition". For each basic configuration of leader and follower and their bodies they looked at all permutations. Then they constrained it first to the subset of those that are possible to do at all, kinesiologically. Then further to the subset of those that could be danced with reasonable comfort. And finally the subset of those that are easy enough to be taught to students and would work on a crowded social dancefloor. None of this was done with the help of computers. The most systemic documentation of this is possibly Mauricio Castro's book "Tango -- the structure of the dance". But lately a lot of new books were published on tango technique; I may be out of the loop. A friend of mine who's also a tango professional is currently looking into the feasibility of doing a PhD thesis on this topic. He wants to use ML to spit spit out the full motion tree of tango. Both to be able to document it automatically, i.e. using generated 3D animations, as well as to discover new combinations the manual approach used by Naveira, Frumboli and Salas, over a quarter century ago, will have missed.
- fzeindl 2y ago
  I have had the same idea about martial arts. Not sure it is possible. In dancing you have at least some symmetric patterns and rhythm, in martial arts you have even more stances, rotation around more axes and arrhythmic moves. good dancing like good fighting isn‘t mechanical either, it is good because it relies on little imperfections. Just like MIDI files cannot replace a concert pianist. In the end I think motion capture of extremities along with some easing of paths and compression of point-clouds (think bezier curves) might be more worthwhile than a notation.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    > in martial arts you have even more stances, rotation around more axes and arrhythmic moves. I wonder how true this is. Specifically I think you could simplify the moves into steps with "who hits who" states. You could normalise out the rhythm, following the "everything's in 4/4 if you don't count like a nerd" idea. So you'd end up with just the key frames of either contacts/impact or change of the movement direction. Would martial arts really have even more variety here?
weinzierl 2y ago
This reminds me a bit of Siteswap notation for Juggling. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siteswap https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siteswap
- knuckleheads 2y ago
  I also enjoy juggling and have spent a lot of time try to reconcile siteswap notation into being somewhat useful for dancing. I haven't been able to make that much progress as compared to what I was able to show above, but in my heart I hope somebody figures it out someday. Maybe something to do with Cuban style arm knots, but who knows.
damhsa 2y ago
the supposed 15 hand holds is a little misleading as it doesn't account for holds where a hand is placed on the body, which is important to many dancing traditions, such as the mirror image polka hold, with the man's left arm stretched to his left holding his girl's right hand, and his right on her body, or the rotationally symmetric ceilidh hold, where both partners hold left hands, and pass their right hand over and through the hold to grasp their partner's left side, inside of their left arm. the statement needs a big caveat so it is clear that it does not accurately describe all real dance holds.
- geewee 2y ago
  Nor does it capture that you might be holding your hands in different ways, such as which side is rotated up.
  - knuckleheads 2y ago
    Yes all of that was purposefully left out. It's just about which hand is touching which other hand, not about how the hands are actually in contact. I was purposefully skipping those details to try and find something simple to build on.
lostemptations5 2y ago
I don't know. This is ok if it's helpful, but reminds me of why I quit playing chess: the mystery was lost. As I got more into chess and with the advancement of chess computers and championships, I felt there was little creativity left to have fun with the game. So for dancing, it's literally meant to be "danced". Of course you can figure out all the combinations and so on, but being overly analytical about it removes -- for me -- the entire reason to do it : to escape the intellectual world and do something kinesthetic. I understand I am probably an outlier here on HN. :)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bsder 2y ago
  > why I quit playing chess: the mystery was lost. Well, the problem is that with all the online resources, you quickly learn that chess is more about blunder avoidance than any brilliant, dynamic scheme. That takes a lot of the fun out of chess.
  - lostemptations5 2y ago
    Haha :))
- cryptonector 2y ago
  When I was a dance beginner I wanted to be more analytic about it. Surely one could write it all down and visualize and think about it with rigor! But, no. There are things that just have to be learned the hard way on the floor rather than by memorizing notation/images from a book. Dancing cannot be learned only from analysis. Professional dancers might be able to learn new dances quickly from notation, but let's not kid ourselves: professionals would have to spend some time recreating a dance on the floor, they would bring a great deal of experience that makes that task easier, and they wouldn't end up recreating the original quite the way its long-ago practitioners would see as equal. Amateurs would need quite a bit more time and guidance to recreate a dance well from notation.
- knuckleheads 2y ago
abernard1 2y ago
I enjoy the attempt to analyze the dancing (really choreography). But I'm surprised that in this new world of LLM hype not one word in there was dedicated to what dance really is: a language. Dance is a physical, kinesthetic language. And to riff on some of the posters, it's this expression and communication between the dancers that makes dancing worth dancing. There's also the social communication between the group, cultural "dialects" and "accents" (on1 vs on2, stylings, etc.) I began dancing when I realized there was an entire spectrum of the senses closed off to me from overthinking. Besides the specifics of "body language," good dancers can convey intense amounts of emotion. I met someone who could "talk" to me for hours and she never needed to say a word. While the poster attempts to represent dancing in terms of a symbolic language, I'd recommend anyone interested in dance to also try the opposite: realize the physicality is the language and medium of expression. It's more fun, and I promise you your style of thinking will enlarge and grow.
- matheist 2y ago
  Agree. I think the approach in TFA is like trying to analyze, say, improv comedy via a context-free grammar for English. There might be something there, in the syntax, but it misses a huge amount of semantics and paralanguage.
  - abernard1 2y ago
    Yeah. While I'm sympathetic to the attempt to formalize the representation, there's a psychology to this that a lot of people in tech seem to miss when I see them dancing. The reasoning goes: "if I understand and represent this choreography properly, I will be better at the activity of dance." Dancing, for them, is the end result of understanding a representation and then doing it. But the psychological shift is "if I understand my emotions and body properly, I will be able to use the representation of dance to convey that." While dance obviously needs a backing vocabulary of basics and moves, great dancers accidentally come up with better dance moves because their body mechanics combined with the dance's structure, musicality, and emotion constrain what they do. They—and I'm going to use this word intentionally—literally think and communicate through dancing. To use your phrasing, the "semantic" meaning of the dance is their emotions: the actual activity of dance is simply the representational outlet for that. When you're with a good dancer, your brain shuts off but you're still stuck within the aforementioned set of constraints. And that's when the magic happens. That's when you actually start speaking. That's when your improvised move is the only way you could have possibly said what you wanted to say.
nabla9 2y ago
Musical and Mathematical Design of Square Dance Singing Calls Part 1 - Guy L. Steele Jr. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_TqFOyYYmc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_TqFOyYYmc Guy L. Steele Jr.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele_Jr.
- cryptonector 2y ago
  Wow, that's pretty neat. I've not seen modern western square dancing and this calling business before. Certainly there is a language of moves/steps here that the dancers know well.
geewee 2y ago
Having danced for around a decade, I would say the hand positioning example is a bit reductive. The most obvious example is that there's only one variant of "both hands crossed over" - while it's true that the hands might only fit together one way, the things you can do with the hands depending on what arm is on top varies significantly. Having said that I'm pretty excited about the topic and what the author can do with it.
- viraptor 2y ago
  It is, but also it's a helpful simplification, I believe. It's kind of like a cup and a ring being topologically equivalent. Helps you talk about some generic thing without overloading with details. Then there are many more layers on top: palms facing up/down/side, cupped or pressed against, which part of the hand/arm/body are you holding, which one's on top, compression or stretch, at what height, etc.
  - knuckleheads 2y ago
    To me, it's explicitly about being topologically equivalent. I brushed up on my topology and knot theory when working on this to make sure I had it right. The post is considering two social dancers as connected components of two topological objects and the 15 different ways are all the different ways specific points of the surface (hands reduced to points that is) are able to connect. There's more topology as well when you start bringing in other characteristics of a position, like relative distance and orientation of the dances, you can find more equivalence classes for the other types of equivalences that fall out of that.
peanut-walrus 2y ago
Could someone explain what a hammerlock is and why it is significant? Searching just said it's a type of joint lock in wrestling which doesn't make sense to me in this context. Then again, I have never danced.
- viraptor 2y ago
  You can look for Bachata hammerlock specifically https://www.quicksteps.com.au/dance-lesson-videos/bachata/level-2/hammerlock-3/ https://www.quicksteps.com.au/dance-lesson-videos/bachata/le... It's interesting, because you have to do something active about it. If you move into hammerlock, you can't continue moving the same way anymore, so you have to decide on some combination of releasing hands, rotating in the other direction, staying and playing in that position, etc.
rho138 2y ago
I love how the page renders and then shits the bed when webgl is disabled.
- knuckleheads 2y ago
  I've added fixing that to my todo list, thank you for pointing it out, I hadn't thought to test that.
gradschool 2y ago
Choreology is an established discipline. There's no reason to re-invent it without improving on it. Some people might do it professionally. A big budget musical production typically will employ a choreologist to make notes during the rehearsals. Members of the company can ask for reminders about their parts, which the choreologist not only will have written down but will be a good enough dancer to demonstrate. https://www.britannica.com/art/labanotation https://www.britannica.com/art/labanotation
- knuckleheads 2y ago
  I've studied Labanotation and Benesh movement notation, among others, some on my own and tried my hand at annotating social dancing with it and didn't find it to be particularly useful for social danced partnerwork in particular. For Choreographed dances, I am sure having a choreologist on staff would be a god send. However, for improvised social dances, I don't feel like the dance notations that I have seen capture the cues and signals the lead sends to the follower in a way that is adequate to be learned from later on. If you have any resources about this though I would love to read them!
knuckleheads 2y ago
Hello! Zack here, author of the post, thrilled to see people excited about this stuff. A friend submitted this to HN and I just realized it, sorry for not swinging by sooner. Always happy to discuss this further, the blog post wasn't quite done yet and there will be more to add later. Will respond to comments when I have time.

83 points by nullsub 2y ago

vikhik 2y ago

I've often considered the same things (Salsa), and it's interesting to see where he's going with it!

fatcow 2y ago
https://furius.ca/salsa-book/ https://furius.ca/salsa-book/ is a previous attempt!
- knuckleheads 2y ago
  Thank you for pointing this out! I had seen this page previously and had tried halfheartedly to find a copy of the original pdf at the time and given up. Just now I tried again though and was able to find one. Seems like a great guide, thanks a ton!
seer 2y ago
Hah same - especially in the beginning - all the moves looked like programming functions - inputs and outputs, state mutations etc. Thing is, the more I learned the more I started to use internally consistent vocabulary, so I no longer needed analogs, but would construct new moves from older simpler ones. I don’t think though that this article captures the complexity of of social dance, maybe that’s why its so universally fun? Its not just arms, legs and body positions - there is weight transfer, musicality, disparity between partner’s skill levels, let alone all other dancers around you that you need to track so as not to have an accident. And thats before you start adding shines, styling and body movement. There _is_ an underlying system of course - every move has a finite possible exits, if you dance “by the rules” but dance evolution is all about breaking those rules. And if you’re at that level, you can start mixing other dances into your move set … Its all incredibly hard to reason about. Maybe thats why the gold standard is just to record your lessons and get back to them when you want to.
- knuckleheads 2y ago
  A fun read on exits to a move is https://anthologen.com/2020/05/06/a-finite-state-dance-machine/ https://anthologen.com/2020/05/06/a-finite-state-dance-machi... . A different kind of dancing, but same type of thinking, about how to transition within the dance.

chrisjj 2y ago

Just me, or is this ornithology for birds?

vlz 2y ago
I see this as an almost scientific/scholarly exercise in modeling. While the author seems not to start with any intent to "do science" he or she tries to capture a concrete phenomenon abstractly in order to study it more closely, which is arguably at the heart of science or at least some of the sciences. The post is "almost" scholarly because it does not try to look into what others did before or currently, eg. prior attempts at notation of dance. I would be very surprised if there weren't any. Modeling cultural practices is also somewhat of a hot topic in the so called "Digital humanities" for what that is worth. A quick search for example brought up this article which talks about Dance Studies and attempts at digitization: https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/digital-research-in-dance-studies-emerging-trends-in-a-still-emerging-field-2/ https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/digital-research-in-dan... Anyways "ornithology for birds" is pretty fitting as this seems to just be anthropology for humans.
- chrisjj 2y ago
  Indeed. Where it goes wrong is the notion it will help people learn how to dance.
  - geewee 2y ago
    I could see stuff like this helping advanced dancers come up with new stuff or perhaps help some instructors.
    - chrisjj 2y ago
      Indeed invaluable to help dance instructors come up with stuff to sell. Because its so well suited to incomprehensibility e.g. this famous example https://www.tangomovimentoterapia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/nivel3.jpg https://www.tangomovimentoterapia.com/wp-content/uploads/201...
- 2y ago

virtualritz 2y ago

This partly happened in tango in the 90's, when Gustavo Naveira, Chicho Frumboli and Fabian Salas came together to create a structural and kinesiologica base for something that previously existed more as "an intuition". For each basic configuration of leader and follower and their bodies they looked at all permutations. Then they constrained it first to the subset of those that are possible to do at all, kinesiologically. Then further to the subset of those that could be danced with reasonable comfort. And finally the subset of those that are easy enough to be taught to students and would work on a crowded social dancefloor. None of this was done with the help of computers. The most systemic documentation of this is possibly Mauricio Castro's book "Tango -- the structure of the dance". But lately a lot of new books were published on tango technique; I may be out of the loop. A friend of mine who's also a tango professional is currently looking into the feasibility of doing a PhD thesis on this topic. He wants to use ML to spit spit out the full motion tree of tango. Both to be able to document it automatically, i.e. using generated 3D animations, as well as to discover new combinations the manual approach used by Naveira, Frumboli and Salas, over a quarter century ago, will have missed.

fzeindl 2y ago
I have had the same idea about martial arts. Not sure it is possible. In dancing you have at least some symmetric patterns and rhythm, in martial arts you have even more stances, rotation around more axes and arrhythmic moves. good dancing like good fighting isn‘t mechanical either, it is good because it relies on little imperfections. Just like MIDI files cannot replace a concert pianist. In the end I think motion capture of extremities along with some easing of paths and compression of point-clouds (think bezier curves) might be more worthwhile than a notation.
- viraptor 2y ago
  > in martial arts you have even more stances, rotation around more axes and arrhythmic moves. I wonder how true this is. Specifically I think you could simplify the moves into steps with "who hits who" states. You could normalise out the rhythm, following the "everything's in 4/4 if you don't count like a nerd" idea. So you'd end up with just the key frames of either contacts/impact or change of the movement direction. Would martial arts really have even more variety here?

weinzierl 2y ago

This reminds me a bit of Siteswap notation for Juggling. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siteswap https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siteswap

knuckleheads 2y ago
I also enjoy juggling and have spent a lot of time try to reconcile siteswap notation into being somewhat useful for dancing. I haven't been able to make that much progress as compared to what I was able to show above, but in my heart I hope somebody figures it out someday. Maybe something to do with Cuban style arm knots, but who knows.

damhsa 2y ago

the supposed 15 hand holds is a little misleading as it doesn't account for holds where a hand is placed on the body, which is important to many dancing traditions, such as the mirror image polka hold, with the man's left arm stretched to his left holding his girl's right hand, and his right on her body, or the rotationally symmetric ceilidh hold, where both partners hold left hands, and pass their right hand over and through the hold to grasp their partner's left side, inside of their left arm. the statement needs a big caveat so it is clear that it does not accurately describe all real dance holds.

geewee 2y ago
Nor does it capture that you might be holding your hands in different ways, such as which side is rotated up.
- knuckleheads 2y ago
  Yes all of that was purposefully left out. It's just about which hand is touching which other hand, not about how the hands are actually in contact. I was purposefully skipping those details to try and find something simple to build on.

lostemptations5 2y ago

I don't know. This is ok if it's helpful, but reminds me of why I quit playing chess: the mystery was lost. As I got more into chess and with the advancement of chess computers and championships, I felt there was little creativity left to have fun with the game. So for dancing, it's literally meant to be "danced". Of course you can figure out all the combinations and so on, but being overly analytical about it removes -- for me -- the entire reason to do it : to escape the intellectual world and do something kinesthetic. I understand I am probably an outlier here on HN. :)

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bsder 2y ago
> why I quit playing chess: the mystery was lost. Well, the problem is that with all the online resources, you quickly learn that chess is more about blunder avoidance than any brilliant, dynamic scheme. That takes a lot of the fun out of chess.
- lostemptations5 2y ago
  Haha :))
cryptonector 2y ago
When I was a dance beginner I wanted to be more analytic about it. Surely one could write it all down and visualize and think about it with rigor! But, no. There are things that just have to be learned the hard way on the floor rather than by memorizing notation/images from a book. Dancing cannot be learned only from analysis. Professional dancers might be able to learn new dances quickly from notation, but let's not kid ourselves: professionals would have to spend some time recreating a dance on the floor, they would bring a great deal of experience that makes that task easier, and they wouldn't end up recreating the original quite the way its long-ago practitioners would see as equal. Amateurs would need quite a bit more time and guidance to recreate a dance well from notation.
knuckleheads 2y ago

abernard1 2y ago

I enjoy the attempt to analyze the dancing (really choreography). But I'm surprised that in this new world of LLM hype not one word in there was dedicated to what dance really is: a language. Dance is a physical, kinesthetic language. And to riff on some of the posters, it's this expression and communication between the dancers that makes dancing worth dancing. There's also the social communication between the group, cultural "dialects" and "accents" (on1 vs on2, stylings, etc.) I began dancing when I realized there was an entire spectrum of the senses closed off to me from overthinking. Besides the specifics of "body language," good dancers can convey intense amounts of emotion. I met someone who could "talk" to me for hours and she never needed to say a word. While the poster attempts to represent dancing in terms of a symbolic language, I'd recommend anyone interested in dance to also try the opposite: realize the physicality is the language and medium of expression. It's more fun, and I promise you your style of thinking will enlarge and grow.

matheist 2y ago
Agree. I think the approach in TFA is like trying to analyze, say, improv comedy via a context-free grammar for English. There might be something there, in the syntax, but it misses a huge amount of semantics and paralanguage.
- abernard1 2y ago
  Yeah. While I'm sympathetic to the attempt to formalize the representation, there's a psychology to this that a lot of people in tech seem to miss when I see them dancing. The reasoning goes: "if I understand and represent this choreography properly, I will be better at the activity of dance." Dancing, for them, is the end result of understanding a representation and then doing it. But the psychological shift is "if I understand my emotions and body properly, I will be able to use the representation of dance to convey that." While dance obviously needs a backing vocabulary of basics and moves, great dancers accidentally come up with better dance moves because their body mechanics combined with the dance's structure, musicality, and emotion constrain what they do. They—and I'm going to use this word intentionally—literally think and communicate through dancing. To use your phrasing, the "semantic" meaning of the dance is their emotions: the actual activity of dance is simply the representational outlet for that. When you're with a good dancer, your brain shuts off but you're still stuck within the aforementioned set of constraints. And that's when the magic happens. That's when you actually start speaking. That's when your improvised move is the only way you could have possibly said what you wanted to say.

nabla9 2y ago

Musical and Mathematical Design of Square Dance Singing Calls Part 1 - Guy L. Steele Jr. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_TqFOyYYmc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_TqFOyYYmc Guy L. Steele Jr.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele_Jr.

cryptonector 2y ago
Wow, that's pretty neat. I've not seen modern western square dancing and this calling business before. Certainly there is a language of moves/steps here that the dancers know well.

geewee 2y ago

Having danced for around a decade, I would say the hand positioning example is a bit reductive. The most obvious example is that there's only one variant of "both hands crossed over" - while it's true that the hands might only fit together one way, the things you can do with the hands depending on what arm is on top varies significantly. Having said that I'm pretty excited about the topic and what the author can do with it.

viraptor 2y ago
It is, but also it's a helpful simplification, I believe. It's kind of like a cup and a ring being topologically equivalent. Helps you talk about some generic thing without overloading with details. Then there are many more layers on top: palms facing up/down/side, cupped or pressed against, which part of the hand/arm/body are you holding, which one's on top, compression or stretch, at what height, etc.
- knuckleheads 2y ago
  To me, it's explicitly about being topologically equivalent. I brushed up on my topology and knot theory when working on this to make sure I had it right. The post is considering two social dancers as connected components of two topological objects and the 15 different ways are all the different ways specific points of the surface (hands reduced to points that is) are able to connect. There's more topology as well when you start bringing in other characteristics of a position, like relative distance and orientation of the dances, you can find more equivalence classes for the other types of equivalences that fall out of that.

peanut-walrus 2y ago

Could someone explain what a hammerlock is and why it is significant? Searching just said it's a type of joint lock in wrestling which doesn't make sense to me in this context. Then again, I have never danced.

viraptor 2y ago
You can look for Bachata hammerlock specifically https://www.quicksteps.com.au/dance-lesson-videos/bachata/level-2/hammerlock-3/ https://www.quicksteps.com.au/dance-lesson-videos/bachata/le... It's interesting, because you have to do something active about it. If you move into hammerlock, you can't continue moving the same way anymore, so you have to decide on some combination of releasing hands, rotating in the other direction, staying and playing in that position, etc.

rho138 2y ago

I love how the page renders and then shits the bed when webgl is disabled.

knuckleheads 2y ago
I've added fixing that to my todo list, thank you for pointing it out, I hadn't thought to test that.

gradschool 2y ago

Choreology is an established discipline. There's no reason to re-invent it without improving on it. Some people might do it professionally. A big budget musical production typically will employ a choreologist to make notes during the rehearsals. Members of the company can ask for reminders about their parts, which the choreologist not only will have written down but will be a good enough dancer to demonstrate. https://www.britannica.com/art/labanotation https://www.britannica.com/art/labanotation

knuckleheads 2y ago
I've studied Labanotation and Benesh movement notation, among others, some on my own and tried my hand at annotating social dancing with it and didn't find it to be particularly useful for social danced partnerwork in particular. For Choreographed dances, I am sure having a choreologist on staff would be a god send. However, for improvised social dances, I don't feel like the dance notations that I have seen capture the cues and signals the lead sends to the follower in a way that is adequate to be learned from later on. If you have any resources about this though I would love to read them!

knuckleheads 2y ago

Hello! Zack here, author of the post, thrilled to see people excited about this stuff. A friend submitted this to HN and I just realized it, sorry for not swinging by sooner. Always happy to discuss this further, the blog post wasn't quite done yet and there will be more to add later. Will respond to comments when I have time.