A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

This partly happened in tango in the 90's, when Gustavo Naveira, Chicho Frumboli and Fabian Salas came together to create a structural and kinesiologica base for something that previously existed more as "an intuition".

For each basic configuration of leader and follower and their bodies they looked at all permutations.

Then they constrained it first to the subset of those that are possible to do at all, kinesiologically.

Then further to the subset of those that could be danced with reasonable comfort.

And finally the subset of those that are easy enough to be taught to students and would work on a crowded social dancefloor.

None of this was done with the help of computers.

The most systemic documentation of this is possibly Mauricio Castro's book "Tango -- the structure of the dance".

But lately a lot of new books were published on tango technique; I may be out of the loop.

A friend of mine who's also a tango professional is currently looking into the feasibility of doing a PhD thesis on this topic.

He wants to use ML to spit spit out the full motion tree of tango.

Both to be able to document it automatically, i.e. using generated 3D animations, as well as to discover new combinations the manual approach used by Naveira, Frumboli and Salas, over a quarter century ago, will have missed.

I enjoy the attempt to analyze the dancing (really choreography). But I'm surprised that in this new world of LLM hype not one word in there was dedicated to what dance really is: a language.

Dance is a physical, kinesthetic language.

And to riff on some of the posters, it's this expression and communication between the dancers that makes dancing worth dancing. There's also the social communication between the group, cultural "dialects" and "accents" (on1 vs on2, stylings, etc.)

I began dancing when I realized there was an entire spectrum of the senses closed off to me from overthinking. Besides the specifics of "body language," good dancers can convey intense amounts of emotion. I met someone who could "talk" to me for hours and she never needed to say a word. While the poster attempts to represent dancing in terms of a symbolic language, I'd recommend anyone interested in dance to also try the opposite: realize the physicality is the language and medium of expression. It's more fun, and I promise you your style of thinking will enlarge and grow.

I don't know. This is ok if it's helpful, but reminds me of why I quit playing chess: the mystery was lost.

As I got more into chess and with the advancement of chess computers and championships, I felt there was little creativity left to have fun with the game.

So for dancing, it's literally meant to be "danced".

Of course you can figure out all the combinations and so on, but being overly analytical about it removes -- for me -- the entire reason to do it : to escape the intellectual world and do something kinesthetic.

I understand I am probably an outlier here on HN. :)

Having danced for around a decade, I would say the hand positioning example is a bit reductive. The most obvious example is that there's only one variant of "both hands crossed over" - while it's true that the hands might only fit together one way, the things you can do with the hands depending on what arm is on top varies significantly.

Having said that I'm pretty excited about the topic and what the author can do with it.

the supposed 15 hand holds is a little misleading as it doesn't account for holds where a hand is placed on the body, which is important to many dancing traditions, such as the mirror image polka hold, with the man's left arm stretched to his left holding his girl's right hand, and his right on her body, or the rotationally symmetric ceilidh hold, where both partners hold left hands, and pass their right hand over and through the hold to grasp their partner's left side, inside of their left arm. the statement needs a big caveat so it is clear that it does not accurately describe all real dance holds.

Musical and Mathematical Design of Square Dance Singing Calls Part 1 - Guy L. Steele Jr. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_TqFOyYYmc

Guy L. Steele Jr.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele_Jr.

Just me, or is this ornithology for birds?

Choreology is an established discipline. There's no reason to re-invent it without improving on it. Some people might do it professionally. A big budget musical production typically will employ a choreologist to make notes during the rehearsals. Members of the company can ask for reminders about their parts, which the choreologist not only will have written down but will be a good enough dancer to demonstrate.

https://www.britannica.com/art/labanotation

Hello! Zack here, author of the post, thrilled to see people excited about this stuff. A friend submitted this to HN and I just realized it, sorry for not swinging by sooner. Always happy to discuss this further, the blog post wasn't quite done yet and there will be more to add later. Will respond to comments when I have time.

I've often considered the same things (Salsa), and it's interesting to see where he's going with it!

Could someone explain what a hammerlock is and why it is significant? Searching just said it's a type of joint lock in wrestling which doesn't make sense to me in this context.

Then again, I have never danced.

This reminds me a bit of Siteswap notation for Juggling.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siteswap

I love how the page renders and then shits the bed when webgl is disabled.