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Taking Note with Dr. Valarie Williams
354 Plays1 year ago
Season One, Episode Three: This month's guest is Labanotation expert, Dr. Valarie Williams. Dr. Williams is a Professor at The Ohio State University, Department of Dance. She is Director of the Dance Notation Bureau Extension Center for Education and Research at Ohio State. Dr. Williams teaches, stages, and documents movement nationally and internationally. She is a 1987 Presidential Scholars in the Arts honorable mention recipient in ballet, she apprenticed at the Paris Opera Summer Program in Evian les Bains, France; toured with Lincoln Center Institute Touring Programs for four years serving as dance captain; and performed with the Dallas Opera and Sharir Dance in Austin, Texas. Williams holds a BFA from The Juilliard School, an MFA and PhD from Texas Woman’s University, and is a Certified Professional Notator.
OhioDance A State of Dance is a six-part series coming out the fourth Friday of each month through November 2023.
This podcast is driven by the OhioDance mission to secure the foothold of dance in Ohio through increasing visibility, firming viability, and elevating the position of dance in Ohio.
In 2016, a five-person team set out on a mission to capture the achievements of persons and institutions who have shaped the intricate diversity of dance history and practice within the state of Ohio and weave them together in an easily accessible digital format. This we call the OhioDance Virtual Dance Collection. As of 2023 we have highlighted 33 individuals and institutions. The team has traveled over 5000 miles and interviewed 100 individuals in all five regions of Ohio. vdc.ohiodance.org
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Transcript
Introduction and Host Welcome
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome to a State of Dance, sponsored by Ohio Dance and hosted by independent choreographer and interdisciplinary artist Rodney Veal.
00:00:22
Speaker
Today we're speaking with Dr. Valerie Williams, a professor at the Ohio State University Department of Dance. She is director of the Dance Notation Bureau Extension Center for Education and Research at Ohio State. Dr. Williams teaches, stages, and documents movement nationally and internationally.
00:00:41
Speaker
She is a 1987 Presidential Scholar in the Arts Honorable Mention, recipient in Ballet. She apprenticed at the Paris Opera Summer Program in Evian-Leban, France, toured with Lincoln Center Institute touring programs for four years, serving as dance captain, and performed with the Dallas Opera and Cherire Dance in Austin, Texas.
Dr. Valerie Williams' Background and Connection
00:01:03
Speaker
Williams holds a BFA from the Juilliard School at MFA and PhD from Texas Woman's University and is a certified professional notator. We are here to wish a very warm welcome to Dr. Valerie Williams. Thank you for joining us Valerie. How are you doing? I'm great. Thanks for having me Rodney.
00:01:22
Speaker
I love it. And so for our viewers, we have a little bit of history. Dr. Williams served on my committee as a graduate student at the Ohio State. So full caveat, we have her and just a joyous time and experience. And so I'm excited to have you on to talk about all things notation.
Dance Notation Bureau Overview
00:01:40
Speaker
So we're going to focus in on the DnB collection. So the Kallag holds the largest collection of dance notation scores in the world. Can we give the audience a basic definition of the dance notation bureau and what notation is?
00:01:58
Speaker
Sure, sure. The Dance Notation Bureau was founded in the 1940s and it is in New York City, New York. And it is still today active and a service organization and still continues to notate works, just like the works of Jacqueline Knight and the 12 choreographers they notated last year. Labanotation is a system for recording and analyzing movement that uses different shapes
00:02:27
Speaker
and is a time-based system. It looks, you know, how music has a score. Well, dance has a score. And in fact, we can use those scores for copyright purposes so that choreographers who have their choreography and notation can turn in that lava notation score and have it copyrighted. And then the D&B Extension Center is here at Ohio State. That's the Dance Dotation Bureau Extension Center.
00:02:55
Speaker
And it is the one that's in charge of teaching and research and is open to any person who would want to come through the Department of Dance. And if you're really looking, you know, say, I still don't really know what Labanotation is, you can Google Labanotation and up will come some images of a score. And you can also go to the Dance Notation Bureau website or the Dance Notation Bureau Extension Center website at Ohio State.
00:03:24
Speaker
The D&B Collection came here in 1968 with Lucy Venable when the Department of Dance was being established by our first chair, Helen Alkire. And Lucy Venable, Professor Emeritus, she's now deceased, but she had danced with Jose Limon Company in the 1950s and 60s. And she was interested in starting a Dance Notation Bureau Extension Center
00:03:50
Speaker
And Lucy, back in 1968, was the current director of the Dance Notation Bureau in New York City. And so when Lucy came to establish the D&B Extension Center, as we call it, she brought with her the original scores, all the handwritten, pencil drafted, lava notation scores. There are around 600 of them.
00:04:13
Speaker
and around 1,000 scores that hold world dance forms from 61 countries and cultures.
Dance Notation Collection Access
00:04:20
Speaker
And they reside in our university library's Theater Research Institute Special Collections. And they are curated by Mara Frazier, who is relatively new. She is in her fourth year as our Curator of Dance and Assistant Professor of University Libraries.
00:04:39
Speaker
And so they actually reside across the oval from the DMV Extension Center in the vault of Thompson Library. And then we have some copies here in the DMV Extension Center for scholars and our students to use.
00:04:57
Speaker
Oh, that is super cool. And I love how you described it. It's like across from the vault, the vault. And so it sounds ominous, the vault that, that doesn't have public access, but really how can people in the general public have access? Cause that's a pretty amazing collection that's started out with a large number that I'm sure the number has quadrupled since. Um, and so how can a public have access to this?
00:05:22
Speaker
Sure, well, anyone in the world can come visit us here in the Department of Dance at the D&B Extension Center. We have, in the center, we mostly have teaching materials, and we have videos of any type of work that we've reconstructed or restaged from notated scores, and have scholars from around the world come in and drop in on our classes.
00:05:48
Speaker
So here in the Department of Dance, the extension center resides just next door to my office here. And then as a person who wants to pull out an original score, all you do is just walk over to Thompson Library and you can make an appointment with Mara.
00:06:06
Speaker
and she can pull any scores that you want and you can look at those in the reading room. And so they're available for anyone, any person in Ohio, any dancer in the United States, any scholar in the world. And in fact, we have two courses here that I teach where students are utilizing the scores and making their own types of experiences and projects with them.
00:06:30
Speaker
So one is Embodied Access that's sponsored by one of our former board of trustees members, the Ratners. And that's a course that looks at the thousand scores that are from around different cultures and countries. And students are interested sometimes in their own heritage or they're interested in a country they want to go to. And so they can study the movements in those scores over in the library.
00:06:53
Speaker
And then we have analysis, which is something every undergrad takes here. And you took it as a grad student, right? Yes, I did. I did. I'm very appreciative of that, by the way.
00:07:06
Speaker
And so we try to keep it current and keep it cool. So just about 10 weeks ago, when we were finishing up that course, we had students who were interested in reading Beyonce's Single Ladies and Megan Thee Stallion's Walk. And so Jaquelle Knight is the choreographer, of course, and he has recently partnered with the New York Dance Notation Bureau
00:07:31
Speaker
and has had many of these choreographies notated, not only of his own work, but of other choreographers and artists of color. So Jaquel and two of the notators, Lynn Weber and Sean Ferguson, joined us after we had read Beyonce's and Megan Thee Stallion's two dances. So that was pretty cool.
00:07:54
Speaker
That is pretty awesome. I mean, and I kind of it's a great segue into this because because I think a lot of people think about dance notation, the scores as being only based in the traditional dance forms, you know, the ones that people are aware of, modern classical ballet, neoclassical ballet. But it really is encompassing world dance and
The Significance of Dance Notation
00:08:13
Speaker
pop culture. I mean, how exciting is that? And so why is it so important for us to document these things in this way?
00:08:21
Speaker
There's a continuum of how notators think about notation and its value. I sort of am on a sliding scale. I really believe in its value as an objective way to put down on paper and look at movement in a different way than you do through embodied knowledge or you do from reading descriptions of movement or you get from watching a film or video or looking at photographs.
00:08:49
Speaker
And so it helps our students sort of analyze their own choreographic tendencies and preferences when they notate their own movement phrases. It provides them access to choreographers and repertory that they wouldn't normally have access to. And it really just helps put down in paper something that is not going to go away. I mean, for all the video that we have on VHS,
00:09:13
Speaker
Everything had to be transferred to CDs and DVDs, and that's all had to be transferred to a cloud. So we find that sometimes the most current and hip thing fades three or four years later and is not useful anymore. But we always have a pencil and a pad of paper, so it's a useful thing to have for different reasons.
00:09:34
Speaker
I love that. I love the fact that you talked about pencil and paper versus technology. I mean, my encountering as a visual artist, there's this whole question of the preservation of some video artist, because the technology, you can't find the materials or the supplies to kind of repair the machines that play back. And so the fact that it's pen and paper, pencil and paper, that simple.
00:09:57
Speaker
Which I love, which I actually love. My experience of the scores was with the work that you did on Anna Sokolow's Steps of Silence when I was in grad school. I have to say that was my first introduction to the use of a score. And I was just enamored by it. A little daunted.
00:10:15
Speaker
I'm very jotted by it, but I was enamored by it. So when people are looking at the score who may not have ever encountered it, it really is its own language. And so can you kind of talk about what you could see on the page? Yeah. Well, you know, it's a three line staff and it's vertical. And we start at the bottom of the page and read up and we start from the left of the page and read to the right.
00:10:38
Speaker
And part of what it will tell you is where your center of gravity is moving in space, and it will give you a sense of how divided your body parts might be and where they're moving in space. And with floor plans, it's a great sort of check-in where you can see where your dancers are on the stage at any one point in time.
00:11:00
Speaker
and with facing pins it'll tell you where you're facing in the stage or in the room and it just gives you a perspective that is almost like a photograph in a way for those of you who think visually or sometimes I have like a photographic memory and you can just see oh okay everything's moving forward these are all forward symbols and everything's moving forward
00:11:21
Speaker
or everything's just in place, a little rectangle. And I'm just going to stay in my place. I know I don't move during this part. And so it provides a way of looking at things, but it really is like circles and triangles and squares and rectangles. And then you'll have little funny, like a C is for head from the Latin kaput.
00:11:43
Speaker
Yes, I remember that. I do remember that. Yeah, so it's a little C and then like your hands will have five little flags on its little mark to show that it's your hand and they slant down because they come off your torso. So they're just tricks to remember what the different body parts look like and what the different shapes look like.
00:12:02
Speaker
which I love. And so it may sound daunting to the novice, but there are also notes in the margin when there are things that cannot translate. And I mean, talk about that. I mean, it's just I found that very fascinating. That was a combination of the two. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in the case of the project you were part of, you know, Steps of Silence had not been done since 1968 when Anna staged it on Reptoid Dance Theater.
00:12:28
Speaker
And of course, part of that project was to pull some of the original dancers together and help us literally reconstruct it. So we had some score of Ray Cook, but it was not a complete score. And it was missing all of the beginning information. I don't know if you remember that or not.
00:12:47
Speaker
Yes, I do. Yeah, the poems you all recited and in silence and in darkness. And so, you know, it was really a two-year project that was funded actually by the National Endowment for the Arts to reconstruct and repurpose and put together interviews of the original dancers, photographs, the score. We had a partial film of it from Jerome Robbins Special Collections in the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center.
00:13:11
Speaker
And so in the margins of Ray's score, he would say, you know, like sheer terror or you're trapped and can't get out, or this is a heavy and weighted feeling. Same thing when I notated B.B. Miller's work, Pray.
00:13:26
Speaker
You know, she would say, this really is a guttural roar. And so, you know, you put down the side there, this is a guttural roar. Or, you know, this is like a flapping like a bird. And so you put that down on the side of it. And it just helps people sort of understand. And when you see that little symbol and you read the suggestions or the coaching from the choreographer, it's so helpful and gives you another dimension into what the dance can be. I absolutely love that.
00:13:55
Speaker
I do have a question because it's like when you talked about reconstructing it because there was not a score, is that a very difficult task to undertake and is that a common practice because dance is such an infernal art form and we have lost choreographers to mortality? Is that a common practice as we're trying to fill in the gaps in dance history and getting these scores?
00:14:16
Speaker
Well, there's a lot of debate about the terms reconstruction, restaged, directed, and for my own self and my own practice. I really think about staging or directing from a labanotation score when the score is complete, like we did with water study this last fall in the Limon Company. That was a complete score. So we just staged the work from the score. But in the case of a project we did last summer out of the Extension Center,
00:14:43
Speaker
with Amber Emery Mayer and Mara Frazier and two of our BFA students Lacey Slats and Abby Buchanan. We literally went back into the archives here at Ohio State in special collections to the D&B collection.
00:15:00
Speaker
The George Balanchine Foundation asked us to find the original notation of Balanchine's Galliard section from Agon. So it had been lost. And so we spent, I think I spent about a week going through folders. There were two boxes of Agon folders.
00:15:18
Speaker
And so I literally went through every single paper to see if I could find the Galliard section for Agon and we found it. It was the original draft notes. So as a notator, you go into the studio, you capture the movement as best you can. It's all your own shorthand. And then you go home afterwards and you clean it up, write it up. We now have a computer program, Laban writer, that Lucy Venville created here.
00:15:47
Speaker
that you input it into and you analyze and think about it. You know, it's a whole year process. But in this case, this part of AgOn had never been finalized. So all we had were Billy Mahoney and Anne Hutchinson Guess original notes from being in the studio with Balanchine. And so we put it together. Paul Bose, who's on the Balanchine Trust and on the Balanchine Foundation and a Stager of Balanchine's Works came
00:16:13
Speaker
We figured out this was it. We sort of sight read it. And then Amber, Mara, and I worked with two of our dancers because it has two women dancers in it and taught it as best we could to our dancers. It did not have a lot of arms, but all the footwork and all of the timing was there. And then we traveled to New York City, ballet.
00:16:32
Speaker
studios and staged it on two artists from New York City Ballet this past summer. So in that case, we literally reconstructed it and then worked with Barbara Walzak, who was one of the original dancers, and Francia Russell, also a second generation dancer of Agon. And so they were able to talk about the arms and talk about where the arms should be. So then we pieced that together with our own note.
00:16:58
Speaker
That's amazing. That's absolutely amazing. So that section of Aegon, the Galliard section, are they planning to reintroduce it into the ballet or is this just to kind of capture it? This was really just to capture it. The George Balanchine Foundation has a video archives of lost choreography. They try to document at least three to four dances every quarter. In this case, they were interested in also documenting the lost choreography. All right.
00:17:24
Speaker
So we're going to take a little bit of a break and then when we come back, I'm going to talk to Dr. Valerie Williams about all things notations and scores and her personal involvement in the future. So stay tuned.
00:17:43
Speaker
We want to remind you that if you like what you're listening to and are not a member of OhioDance, you can go to OhioDance.org and click the membership button to join and receive the many benefits that come with your membership. You can also donate through our purple donate button.
00:18:08
Speaker
And so Valerie, I have a question because you've had such a, you know, with performers and as artists who are dancers and movement makers, how do you step into this world of scoring and notation? Was that like a desire or is this something you stumbled upon? I'm very curious about it because it was daunting to observe you in practice with Anna Sokolow's steps of silence when we were, when I was in grad school. So I was always wanting to ask the question like,
00:18:37
Speaker
get into this world. As an undergraduate at Juilliard back in the day, it was required two years of notation. So it had always been part of the curriculum there. And when I was a student, Muriel Topaz had just finished directing the Dance Rotation Bureau in New York.
Journey into Dance Notation
00:19:00
Speaker
and had just replaced, well, you can't replace, had followed suit after Martha Hill's retirement from leading the dance division. And so Muriel was a notator as well as a stager and highly connected to all of the modern dance companies and ballet companies at the time and had notated a lot of Anthony Tudor work.
00:19:22
Speaker
So at that point, Juilliard had a two-year course on lava notation. So you came out able to read or notate anything that you really wanted.
00:19:32
Speaker
And then as I progressed through life, I began to realize it was a fun way to still be in the studio and not always have to be in charge, but to get to understand how choreographers work. And so I went and did notator training in New York City. My third year I was here at Ohio State.
00:19:52
Speaker
So that was part of my offer here is that at some point within the first six years, I needed to go do notator training. And it was a great experience. And when I returned, Lucy Venable had retired and Odette Bloom had retired. But they were very supportive in helping me sort of think about how to notate and what to notate and just great advisors and great women to be able to bounce things off of over the years.
00:20:21
Speaker
That's a little bit of how I got into
Documenting Black Women Artists
00:20:23
Speaker
it. Just this year, my dear friend and colleague, Crystal Michelle Perkins, who of course is a former member of Dayton Contemporary Dance Company and Associate Artistic Director of Dayton Contemporary Dance Company. Yes, she is. Professor here at Ohio State's Department of Dance.
00:20:38
Speaker
She and I put together a big dream about three years ago and submitted requests for funding and proposal. And we titled our project, Archiving Black Performance, Memory, Embodiment, and Stages of Being. And we're really thinking about how can we document the work of some of our most favorite and endearing
00:21:01
Speaker
Black women artists, performers, and choreographers. And we had four that we wanted to start with. And so we have just finished a two-year cycle of this first part of the project and have welcomed Ursula Payne, who is Interim Vice Provost at Slippery Rock University, former chair of the Department of Dance there.
00:21:23
Speaker
and who was Dr. Pearl Primus's demonstrator at ADF. And so she came and staged the bouchache etude, and we notated it. Oh, wow. I mean, talk about amazing experience. Yeah. And then in full circle, Julie Brody, who's a notator herself up at Kenyon College, who runs the dance program up there,
00:21:45
Speaker
She said, well, I'll read your score. So she and her students read the score and Ursula returned to check it. So to make sure that what I'd written was actually what the dance was. So it's not only been here at Ohio State, but it's now been up to Kenyon. And then we had Carolyn Adams here, of course, the first black woman dancer in Paul Taylor American Modern Dance Company in 1967. He waited for her to graduate from college and welcomed her into the company.
00:22:14
Speaker
And she came and we staged parts of heirs from score, which of course Carolyn originated with Christopher Gillis. And then she taught her beautiful solo from runes. And that was not notated. So we captured that in sort of that pencil draft format.
00:22:30
Speaker
but it's not completed yet. And then Bebe Miller, an alum and distinguished professor emeritus, agreed to do our project too, and she came and taught Ring for 1989 solo, and we were able to document it with about three different camera shoots, about a thousand photographs, and notated it. And then we just last week hosted Diane McIntyre, also an alum, was the first assistant of Lucy Venable in the D&B Extension Center here.
00:22:59
Speaker
in 1968. And she, of course, had reconstructed from images and photographs Helen Tamiris' How Long Brethren. And so we read a section of that from the notation score and she came and coached us. And she and Bebe and Dr. Melanie Wack Dixon had wonderful conversations. Alfred Dove joined us. Susan Bradford of Jason Institute hosted us down at the Lincoln. Jamal Brown came, a choreographer came and joined us.
00:23:29
Speaker
So it really became quite a wonderful feeling in family community in which to talk about the work of these women and the importance in their legacy. So that's part of what's going on currently here at the Extension Center. Oh, that alone is as worthy of a book.
00:23:47
Speaker
I mean, just bringing all of these individuals together in that process. I'm sitting here like with this big smile on my face, the notion of being in a room with these people and watching this unfold. How lucky. It's really interesting to me because that's one of the things I think you even instilled in me.
00:24:04
Speaker
with scoring, that this is a living document. This is not static. There's a sense of history. There's a sense of humanity and purpose in the work. So that stuck with me from 2008, 2009, when steps of silence. So I want our audience to understand, that's what's happening now, but I have a question about the future because it's, you said it was a two-year process of training, but really in essence, it's a lifetime of training.
00:24:30
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She says with a sigh. So what's the future look like? How do you feel about the future of notation and scoring and its impact?
Technological Advancements in Dance Notation
00:24:42
Speaker
I think it's a great way to jump off and into other things. You know, we have Dr. Hannah Costran here, who's an alum of the program, I think was here at some time when you were here. I think she was obtaining her PhD. I think she was one of the first PhD class. Yes.
00:24:57
Speaker
Yes, and I know Hannah, we talk not very frequently, but when we do, it's all joy. Yeah. Well, you know, she had created Kennescribe, which was less detailed version of Laban Rider in a way. And she's repurposing that and making it more detailed and really highly coded and working with the original coder, David Rowley, to see about how they can bring that into 21st century kind of work.
00:25:23
Speaker
on iPads or using your mouse on your laptop or ways you could do things on your phone. So maybe even like a way you could take your pencil draft if you did it on an iPad and it could automatically be moved into the correct shapes and purposed onto the computer program. She's also done a lot of work with Laban Lens, which is sort of like a virtual reality way to read a score.
00:25:49
Speaker
So you can upload a score into her virtual reality glasses and you can dance your score and you don't have to hold it. It's just right there in front of you, like glasses. So in that ways, you know, there's some real interesting technological things happening. Just recently I've been working with a research collaboration network of biological motion neuroscientists.
00:26:14
Speaker
and biologists. And we've published an article last year on how to utilize sort of the principles that underlie lava notations. So, you know, just how to look at movement from a certain way or how to provide a vocabulary for movement. And so we've been hosted at SIBC in Phoenix last year with graduate students and with dancers
00:26:42
Speaker
and with these biologists and neuroscientists workshops on how to look at movement. So you have multiple ways to look at it and not just your own discipline specific way. So in that way, lab annotation has some value beyond just preserving dance and then staging dance.
00:27:02
Speaker
But it can actually contribute to how do we analyze biological motion and what can we learn from that? And what do we learn from the way then that our bodies are learning? And what can that do for us in the future for neurology? You know, thinking about different Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, different neurological ways.
00:27:20
Speaker
that you can use these principles of notation and the sort of vocabulary that it lays out and a way to think about movement. I love that. I was just thinking about that because I teach a class at Sinclair
Student Engagement and Exploration
00:27:33
Speaker
Community College. And right now I'm working with several students in a dance class at Sinclair Community College who are neurodivergent. And I could see the practical application of exploring through notation and scoring. There are different ways of looking at movement.
00:27:50
Speaker
Yeah. And I mean, as far as like the next generation, I had two dancers this year do their arts distinction, BFA undergraduate projects that involved lava notation. So it was lovely to see one of them work on Ted Shawn's Jacob's Ladder. And she went out to the Pillow and did some research and really looked at the masculinity aspects.
00:28:13
Speaker
of his work and then had another dancer that learned the Woman in White solo from Martha Graham's Diversion of Angels and went out to the Graham Center and was coached and came back and talked about different ways of learning movement and how learning it off the page and then learning it with Peggy Lyman Hayes at Graham
00:28:34
Speaker
you know, really gave her multiple ways to think about herself as a performer and what she preferences and doesn't preference. And I've got another student right now, a junior, going into senior year, who's going right now, proposal to notate his own choreography and also to learn the Gloria solo from Jose Limon's Misabrevis and go out to the Limon Institute and be coached this summer by Dante Pulleo, the artistic director.
00:29:04
Speaker
So there's lots of little pockets going on. And so they can read. They can go deeper into writing. There are ways to use it for just looking at masculinity and movement and what that means and all sorts of ways to get it outside of the archives.
00:29:21
Speaker
Oh, that is great. This is so great to have this conversation with you because I think it goes back to your original point. This is open to the public and it can be accessed not just from the perspective of dance and then movement, but I could just see educators, I could see those who are working in neurodiversity science come to the bureau and investigate it from a different perspective and angle. And that's what dance does. So thank you for doing what you do. Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure.
00:29:54
Speaker
A State of Dance is produced by Ohio Dance and hosted by Rodney Veal, executive producer Jane DiAngelo, editor and audio technician Jessica Cavender, musical composition by Matthew Peyton Dixon. Ohio Dance would like to thank our funders, the Ohio Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio State University Dance Preservation Fund, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, the Columbus Foundation, and the Akron Community Fund.