Moving, annotating, learning: MotionNotes LabDays - a case study

This article investigates how dance annotation practices might expand and shape teaching and learning in dance performance and training environments. We focus on a central case study: the MotionNotes LabDay workshops that took place within the context of the EU-funded project, CultureMoves (2018–2020). CultureMoves was an interdisciplinary project investigating connections between dance, site, cultural heritage and digital storytelling. The project developed a series of digital tools for articulating the effects of technology on dance praxis alongside a close ethnographic reading of archival cultural heritage data from Europe's digital library, Europeana. The focus of this article is on MotionNotes, a web-based annotator for dance videos/streams where multiple annotation track timelines include text, images/marks, URL, drawings and voice annotation. The MotionNotes practical LabDay sessions revealed three main areas of possibility for the annotator: in the teaching of dance material, in the remaking and transmission of existing work and as a choreographic tool for creating new work. Across all three areas, the multimodal learning possibilities offered by annotation reflected visual perceptions of live dance practice and also prompted dance artists and learners to think differently about their dance making, teaching and learning processes.