Notation Reloaded: eXtensible Dance Scripting Notation

Abstract

This paper presents a new form of dance notation that has a hand written and machine readable format: eXtensible Dance Scripting Notation (xdsn). The notation system is designed to be quick to write, simple to learn and able to handle complex, emergent and deconstructivist dance works. The machine readable format of xdsn is platform independent, searchable, and well formed to encourage the development of dance notation software. An overview of the system is given illustrating its context in current contemporary dance ontology and as a mechanism for notation driven avatar animation. eXtensible Dance Scripting Notation was developed by the author of this paper in direct response to a proposal from Michael Klein for alternative methods of dance scripting. The system (version 0.3), is currently in localised use and will be developed at the School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich. This work will be undertaken as a Phd Research project under the leadership of Professor John Glauert.