Developing a Virtual Ballet Dancer to Visualise Choreography

This paper describes the development of a virtual ballet dancer that is designed to help visualise choreography. Recreating dance not only involves how to achieve the steps but also the quality of the movement to express emotions. The aim is to create a visualisation system that could be used to understand the choreography with expressive movement when resurrecting ballet scores. Real-time computer graphics are ideally suited to bridge the gap between written choreographic notation and performance, via the creation of a virtual dancer. In theory, a realistic virtual performance can be driven from a machine-readable version of dance notation with a virtual dancer. This paper presents the setting and evaluation of key poses which form the foundation for ballet steps (combinatin of key poses) and how the application of Laban’s Effort factors can be used for expressive interpolation between these poses.