Friday, June 22, 2012

Mindy Aloff Defends Dance Notation

Submitted by Mei-Chen Lu and Alice Helpern - June 22, 2012

The DNB is honored to share Mindy Aloff's excellent article defending dance notation which was posted in the February 2012 issue of Dancing Times. It goes without saying that her writing is eloquent and well-researched.

"Talking Point:  Mindy Aloff Defends Dance Notation"


1 comment:

  1. Interesting how much scores are there at the DNB.
    I would have estimated it to about 50 or some more, but surely to be less than 100 scores. In the article it's mentioned, there are 972 scores...

    And nothing of it can be made available for the public?

    Then of course it's obvious why nobody is trying to learn notation... if writing is harder then reading (as mentioned in the article), potentially interested people who might just want to read a notation (for dancing the piece or just learn reading it for later use) will not find any bigger piece, which is worth reading it.

    Only reading snippets that were written just for learning purposes might not be interesting enough... at least not in the long run.

    Would you start learning a language that nobody does use in daily life and in which texts to read are not, or not easy, to get?

    This is, how notation will stay uninteresting...
    ...at least until copyright of the scores fades out, so that they can be made publicly available...
    ...so here, it seems, the copyright issues are blocking progress.
    Or are there other reasons why the material (at least in part) is not online?

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