Svikt, meter, force and weight

Egil Bakka

Svikt, meter, force and weight

Egil Bakka

visibility

…

description

3 pages

link

2 files

Turi Mårds, a master 2 student at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences (NIH) and student of folk dance at the University of Trondheim 3 / Rff -center (UNIT / Rff-s) has recently started to work on a dissertation about svikt in Norwegian folk dance 4 . A point of departure is to look into how the advanced equipment NIH has for motion analysis can be used for analysis of fundamental aspects of Norwegian folk dance. Turi has previously written a semester essay about Halling and the Halling somersault that has aroused interest among Norwegian Halling dancers (Mårds 1993). The thesis contains a biomechanical analysis of actual Halling somersaults, and is an interesting contribution to the debate about the notions that the community of Halling dancers and has and has had, about how a Halling somersault should be performed.

Svikt, meter, force and weight 1 Egil Bakka Turi Mårds, a master2 student at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences (NIH) and student of folk dance at the University of Trondheim3 / Rff - center (UNIT / Rff-s) has recently started to work on a dissertation about svikt in Norwegian folk dance4. A point of departure is to look into how the advanced equipment NIH has for motion analysis can be used for analysis of fundamental aspects of Norwegian folk dance. Turi has previously written a semester essay about Halling and the Halling somersault that has aroused interest among Norwegian Halling dancers (Mårds 1993). The thesis contains a biomechanical analysis of actual Halling somersaults, and is an interesting contribution to the debate about the notions that the community of Halling dancers and has and has had, about how a Halling somersault should be performed. The analysis and description of the svikt patterns have become an important component in Norwegian folk dance manuals (Bakka 1991), and svikt patterns are important in the analysis of the relationship between music and dance (Blom 1993). Svikt analysis as it is used today, is almost exclusively built on direct observation, observation of own movement as well as the movement of others, directly or on film or video. Modern, advanced measuring devices have rarely been used for Norwegian folk dance, at least not as the basis for published work. There are, however, many gait studies, which are largely based on various types of technical measurements that have provided an important basis for svikt analysis. Even if a good deal have been written about the svikt in Norwegian folk dancing, it is mostly based on notions and ideas that in themselves are not discussed in writing. In discussions I have had with Turi as one of her supervisors, we concluded that it would be helpful that I summed up some of these notions, and I hope they may be of interest to readers of Nffletter. The first, fundamental issue is to which degree measuring will show patterns that corresponds the regularities that we experience in dance movement and dance music. How much of the correspondence between music and dance lies in actual, measurable and systematic correlation between body movement and sound and how much is it the perceptual interpretation that creates the experience of harmony. This is an interesting research question in itself. There are extensive investigations on the perception of sound, but as far as I know few about the perception of body movements. It is a fairly well established hypothesis, at least for Norwegian folk dancing, that the experience of meter and beat in dance steps mainly relate to svikt patterns. We look at svikt and the weight transfers as the central structuring factors in dance steps. In the analysis of the relationship between music and dance, a particularly interesting question is what point or part in a svikt curve corresponds to the beat in the music. 1 This article was written in Norwegian in 1994, and is here in an English version, translated and adjusted by Egil Bakka in 2014. 2 The degree was at that time called «hovedfag». 3 Now the Norwegian University of Science and Technology 4 The dissertation was submitted in 1999 and later published by the Rff-sentret (Mårds 1999) It is reasonable to believe that there is one definable point or moment that has the beat or pulse function for the movement in the continuous flow of raisings and lowerings of the body, which we call svikt. Many dancers and musicians describe the beat or pulse that keep music and dance together in harmony as a crescendo or a peak of intensity. In music, stress or accentuation of a note may create an intensity climax. In dance, it is reason to believe that the point where body weight creates the strongest pressure against the floor constitutes an intensity peak. To me the lifting and the falling of the body is a particularly dramatic side of the dance movement, and to stop my falling stands out as something particularly strong and clear in the experience of movement. I realize however that the lifting and falling, even if it is necessary as a principle of locomotion, may not as accentuated and dramatic in all kind of dancing. It would be interesting to check whether it is possible to find a stable correlation between beats in music and definable points or phases in measurements on pressure platforms. A problem in this will be to define and visualize intensity peaks in music to compare to the pressure measurements of movement. The beat tapping of the fiddler will not necessarily correlate with intensity climax in the accentuation or stress the marks the beat in music. In principle, one should probably look on the musicians beat tapping and intensity peaks in the playing as two different phenomena, even if one might expect full or close correlation. Thus, an aim is to see if one can isolate and define one or a set of elements in the pressure measurements that corresponds to the beats in music, and thus be able to form more solid hypotheses about what is experienced as intensity climax in pressure measurement curves. In folk dance, work has often presented as svikt curves where the vertical movement of the center of gravity i.e. vertical movement in space as the vertical axis and time as the horizontal axis. Let us assume that we have made reasonably secure hypotheses about how the element representing the beat puts itself in pressure measurement curves. Then it will be interesting to see if one can generate rules for how the element representing the beat places itself in the conventional svikt curve. One might believe that the element representing the beat has a relatively stable position at the lowest point of the curve, or one may think that the location can vary considerably providing the dancer a different feeling of how he or she is relating to music. Many dancers and musicians claim that one can be “early or late on the beat”. It is an interesting question whether this can be read as different placement of “movement beat” in one way or another, and if this can be seen in pressure measurement curves and / or the conventional svikt curve. With regard to educational issues, it may be interesting to look at what muscles are active to create the different moments in the svikt curve, and how and when the main efforts come. It is a well know problem that a teacher while teaching can transmit a misguided understanding of how a movement comes into being. References Bakka, Egil 1991 Om svikten i turdansane i: Semb, Klara Norske Folkedansar . Turdansar s. 58-64. Oslo Blom, Jan-Petter 1993 Rytme og frasering - forholdet til dansen in: Fanitullen. Innføring i norsk og samisk folkemusikk. red.: Bjørn Aksdal og Sven Nyhus s. 161-184 Universitetsforlaget, Oslo Mårds, Turi 1993 Hallingkast. En mekanisk/organisk analyse. Fordypningsoppgave Norges Idrettshøgskole. Utgitt av Rff-sentret, Trondheim Mårds, Turid 1999 Svikt, kraft og tramp: en studie av bevegelse og kraft i folkelig dans. Rff-sentret, Trondheim. 115 p.

Svikt, meter, force and weight This article was written in Norwegian in 1994, and is here in an English version, translated by Egil Bakka in 2014. Egil Bakka Turi Mårds, a master The degree was at that time called «hovedfag». student at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences (NIH) and student of folk dance at the University of Trondheim / Rff - center (UNIT / Rff -S) has recently started to work on a dissertation about svikt in Norwegian folk dance The dissertation was submitted in 1999 and later published by the Rff-sentret (Mårds ????). A point of departure is to look into how the advanced equipment NIH has for motion analysis can be used for analysis of fundamental aspects of Norwegian folk dance. Turi has previously written a semester essay about Halling and the Halling somersault that has aroused interest among Norwegian Halling dancers (Mårds 1993). The thesis contains a biomechanical analysis of actual Halling somersaults, and is an interesting contribution to the debate about the notions that the community of Halling dancers and has and has had, about how a Halling somersault should be performed. The analysis and description of the svikt patterns have become an important component in Norwegian folk dance manuals (Bakka 1991), and svikt patterns are important in the analysis of the relationship between music and dance (Blom 1993). Svikt analysis as it is used today, is almost exclusively built on direct observation, observation of own movement as well as the movement of others, directly or on film or video. Modern, advanced measuring devices have rarely been used for Norwegian folk dance, at least not as the basis for published work. There are, however, many gait studies, which are largely based on various types of technical measurements that have provided an important basis for svikt analysis. Even if a good deal have been written about the svikt in Norwegian folk dancing, it is mostly based on notions and ideas that in themselves are not discussed in writing. In discussions I have had with Turi as one of her supervisors, we concluded that it would be helpful that I summed up some of these notions, and I hope they may be of interest to readers of Nff-letter. The first, fundamental issue is to which degree measuring will show patterns that corresponds the regularities that we experience in dance movement and dance music. How much of the correspondence between music and dance lies in actual, measurable and systematic correlation between body movement and sound and how much is it the perceptual interpretation that creates the experience of harmony. This is an interesting research question in itself. There are extensive investigations on the perception of sound, but as far as I know few about the perception of body movements. It is a fairly well established hypothesis, at least for Norwegian folk dancing, that the experience of meter and beat in dance steps mainly relate to svikt patterns. We look at svikt and the weight transfers as the central structuring factors in dance steps. In the analysis of the relationship between music and dance, a particularly interesting question is what point or part in a svikt curve corresponds to the beat in the music. It is reasonable to believe that there is one definable point or moment that has the beat or pulse function for the movement in the continuous flow of raisings and lowerings of the body, which we call svikt. Many dancers and musicians describe the beat or pulse that keep music and dance together in harmony as a crescendo or a peak of intensity. In music, stress or accentuation of a note may create an intensity climax. In dance, it is reason to believe that the point where body weight creates the strongest pressure against the floor constitutes an intensity peak. To me the lifting and the falling of the body is a particularly dramatic side of the dance movement, and to stop my falling stands out as something particularly strong and clear in the experience of movement. I realize however that the lifting and falling, even if it is necessary as a principle of locomotion, may not as accentuated and dramatic in all kind of dancing. It would be interesting to check whether it is possible to find a stable correlation between beats in music and definable points or phases in measurements on pressure platforms. A problem in this will be to define and visualize intensity peaks in music to compare to the pressure measurements of movement. The beat tapping of the fiddler will not necessarily correlate with intensity climax in the accentuation or stress the marks the beat in music. In principle, one should probably look on the musicians beat tapping and intensity peaks in the playing as two different phenomena, even if one might expect full or close correlation. Thus, an aim is to see if one can isolate and define one or a set of elements in the pressure measurements that corresponds to the beats in music, and thus be able to form more solid hypotheses about what is experienced as intensity climax in pressure measurement curves. In folk dance, work has often presented as svikt curves where the vertical movement of the center of gravity i.e. vertical movement in space as the vertical axis and time as the horizontal axis. Let us assume that we have made reasonably secure hypotheses about how the element representing the beat puts itself in pressure measurement curves. Then it will be interesting to see if one can generate rules for how the element representing the beat places itself in the conventional svikt curve. One might believe that the element representing the beat has a relatively stable position at the lowest point of the curve, or one may think that the location can vary considerably providing the dancer a different feeling of how he or she is relating to music. Many dancers and musicians claim that one can be “early or late on the beat”. It is an interesting question whether this can be read as different placement of “movement beat” in one way or another, and if this can be seen in pressure measurement curves and / or the conventional svikt curve. With regard to educational issues, it may be interesting to look at what muscles are active to create the different momenta in the svikt curve, and how and when the main efforts come. It is a well know problem that a teacher can build teaching say the misguided understanding of how a movement comes into being. References Bakka, Egil 1991 Om svikten i turdansane i: Semb, Klara Norske Folkedansar. Turdansar s. 58-64. Oslo Blom, Jan-Petter 1993 Rytme og frasering - forholdet til dansen in: Fanitullen. Innføring i norsk og samisk folkemusikk. red.: Bjørn Aksdal og Sven Nyhus s. 161-184 Universitetsforlaget, Oslo Mårds, Turid 1993 Hallingkast. En mekanisk/organisk analyse. Fordypningsoppgave Norges Idrettshøgskole. Utgitt av Rff-sentret, Trondheim

Log In

Svikt, meter, force and weight

Related papers

Related papers

Related topics