2010 Volume 15 Issue 3 Pages 379-388
We have long been conducting research on the description and reproduction of body motion based on Labanotation, and developed a system called LabanEditor. Labanotation uses a symbolic description and it is said that the notation can even describe motions of the fine each finger of a dancer. However, since, in this case, the resulting score staff will become extremely complicated, only the basic description has usually been used. On the other hand, there are styles of motion particular to traditional dances, and if we restrict ourselves to handling these dances, the basic notation scheme is insufficient to describe these motions. Based on the above, we investigated a method of describing and reproducing CG animation of highly-stylized traditional Noh plays using plain Labanotation. This has been realized by preparing motion template files which represent specific motions in Noh plays. We can handle any stylized dance motions other than Noh by preparing separate motion template files. In addition, we made improvements in the functionality of LabanEditor as follows: importing VRML models of stages, background sceneries and characters for dancers which correspond to the various types of dance, and controlling the quality of movements. The evaluation showed that both the system and the method satisfied our initial requirements.
