Capturing of contemporary dance for preservation and presentation of choreographies in online scores

In this paper, we present a generic and affordable approach for an automatized and markerless capturing of movements in dance, which was developed in the Motion Bank / The Forsythe Company project (www.motionbank.org). Thereby within Motion Bank we are considering the complete digitalization workflow starting with the setup of the camera array and ending with a web-based presentation of “Online Scores” visualizing different elements of choreography. Within our project, we have used our technology in two modern dance projects, one “Large Motion Space Performance” covering a large stage in solos and trios and one “Restricted Motion Space Performance” that is suited to be captured with range cameras. The project is realized in close cooperation with different choreographers and dance companies of modern ballet and with multi-media artists forming the visual representations of dance.