Motif Creation based on Movement Content: A Proposal for Developing Traditional Dance Education

Abstract

Traditional dance is considered today as preserving established spatial–rhythmical patterns without the liberty to create new ones. The paper introduces an approach based on the analysis of spatial changes in dance to interpret content at an abstract level to discover the underlying movement concepts. The content is discovered via the analysis of several legényes motifs by original Hungarian dancers. The concepts are used as foundations to create new patterns by contemporary dancers, which still represent all the hidden features of traditional dancing but may reflect individual creativity. The results suggest a direction of progression where the foundation of development is the movement analysis with the organically connected dance notation and the interpretation of content present new sense in dance, to manifest the creative mind of dancers. The approach is expected to revitalize the true, in a good sense competitive nature of traditional dancing.

Keywords: dance education, dance analysis, content analysis, dance motifs, Laban kinetography, traditional dance, ethnochoreology, Hungary, dance notation

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