Eva Dale  0:00  
From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work being done by faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. From departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials, mathematics and languages, among many others, the college always has something great happening. Join us to find out what's new. 

David Staley  0:32  
I am pleased to be joined today by Hannah Kosstrin, Associate Professor of Dance at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. She is a dance historian whose work engages with dance, Jewish, and gender Studies. Her book "Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow" was a finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association of Jewish Studies. She is Project Director for KineScribe, a Labanotation iPad app supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and faculty lead for the Laban lens, a Laban based HoloLens application, and we're going to talk about both of those here very shortly. Welcome to Voices, Dr. Kosstrin. 

Hannah Kosstrin  1:15  
Thank you so much for having me. It's really exciting to be here.

David Staley  1:18  
Well, and I am interested to learn more about the KineScribe and Laban Lens, but you have to first of all start by telling us what Labanotation is.

Hannah Kosstrin  1:26  
Sure. Labanotation is a notation system for dance, so it's conceptually similar to music notation. So Labanotation tells you where your body parts go in space and time. Basically, there's lots of different kinds of details, but that's the basic concept of it.

David Staley  1:44  
Well how does it, how does it do that? Because it strikes me that I understand music notation and I understand sort of written notation, but dance has so many what idiosyncratic moves: How does one develop a notation for all that idiosyncrasy?

Hannah Kosstrin  1:57  
It's such a good question. So there is still a codified language that Labanotation works within. Within that system, there are different ways of defining how your body is standing, where your body goes in space. So within the codified vocabulary of the Laban systems, there's a notation system, and then there's also a movement analysis system. There are different ways of understanding where your body is in space. So if you're near the ground, or if you're kind of just standing on two feet, or if you're in the air, or what direction your body is going. So once you kind of understand all of those parts of it, then the system goes off your body parts. So your elbow could be going to the side in what we call the middle level, or you could be looking down in front of you into the low level. So there are different ways to do it. The notation system is built on a staff, like music notation, exactly like music notation. It's read a little bit differently. It's vertical, and you read from the bottom up to the top, so that if you hold the paper in front of you, or the iPad, if you will. Yes, you can kind of follow along, just like those old like footstep dance patterns, like with all of the old ballroom dance that you see in all those old movies. So you can kind of hold it in front of you and move down it that way. It's intended to be read kind of in that direction. And what happens is the staff is divided into different areas. So if you think of a musical staff, and you know that the treble clef and the bass clef, each of those bars represent a different part of the scale. And then on the Laman notation score, it's also divided. We call them columns, and each column kind of represents a different part of the body. So based on where a symbol is, you know what that symbol is telling you to do.

David Staley  3:40  
As a dancer, how closely do I adhere to this? How much of this is sort of what my interpretation of what the signs say?

Hannah Kosstrin  3:46  
It's such a good question. Sometimes it depends on how you're using it. So, there are a couple of different ways to use Laban notation, and then another kind of scoring from the Laban systems, called motif. So  Labanotation, sometimes we call it structured notation, is very close to the movement, in a sense that it is often used as a really good documenting tool. So every movement that happens is notated. Some notators are more or less close to all of the quote, unquote rules, like the grammatical rules for how it works. But if you pick up a score of a dance that was notated, it's a pretty close document to what the notator, who was in the room at the time wrote down. And so as you read through it, you will read through that dance as if you were to pick up a piece of music and read it. And so that's pretty close to the movement. A motif score gives you a general idea of what's happening. So whereas an 11 notation score, I might read it and I might read, okay, I'm stepping forward and my right knee is bending slightly, and my shoulder is leading in, and then I'm going to flap my elbow, or something like that. When you read a motif. Score. It scores the general outline of the movement, what some movement analysts call aboutness. Aboutness aboutness, which I apply with glee to like everything in my life. And what it essentially says is it gives you the overall shape. So instead of saying, I'm going to step forward and bend my knee slightly and lean my shoulder in and flat my elbow. The aboutness might just be that I am moving towards forward, low, and it's really nice, actually, especially when working with movement that you're choreographing. Because with the motif score, you can kind of put down a bunch of symbols and then make a dance based on it, yeah, or you can take a dance that you have made and kind of analyze it in a way. So sometimes I find it really exciting when I'm working with students and they go through and they motif score one of their dances, and they say, oh my gosh, I never go to the floor. And I can say, Oh, I know, I've seen that, but there's something about doing that motifing that gives sort of a critical eye to what's happening in the movement. So those are the two kind of ways that the apps use the notation well. 

David Staley  6:04  
And I want to talk more about the apps, but I'm just curious to know, so you talk about Labanotation as a kind of record of a dance, is it also something that a choreographer then hands to a dancer? In other words, in the way that I would hand a musical score to musicians, say, play, this is this how dancers sort of learn a dance? 

Hannah Kosstrin  6:21  
It's a really good question. It depends on where you are. We're actually really lucky here at Ohio State, our department has a real history of being a center for this kind of work, and my colleague Valerie Williams recently just staged one of assoculos works. This work called rooms, which is a very, very famous dance from the 20th century, and she staged it from score. And so, she read the dance from the score and then taught it to the dancers. And then a representative from the Sokolow Dance Foundation, who's one of the members that kind of administers so close estate, comes and kind of checks the dance and coaches the dancers so it doesn't happen everywhere. But you know, one of the ways to learn, particularly repertory from concert dance from the 20th century. It's a really valuable tool for that genre.

David Staley  7:08  
Yeah, let's talk about the technology then. So, tell us about what KineScribe is. 

Hannah Kosstrin  7:12  
Sure. Kinescribe is an iPad app that writes Labanotation scores. It is kind of like a word processor, but for Labanotation, if that metaphor makes sense, it's an app that I originally built when I was in my first job at Reed College, they supported the first building of it. We got an NEH grant from digital humanities for it, which was really exciting. And then when I came here to OSU, we moved it over here, and so I've been building it in collaboration with my colleague Chris summers in dance, and we just did an update this past summer, so it's out of the gate again and ready to go. And essentially, we used a desktop program called lab on writer, which we had developed at Ohio State years ago. And the programmer from Laban writer was the same person who programmed kinescribe, so I had gotten in touch with him and essentially said, Have you thought about putting Laban writer on the iPad? And when I was at Reed, there was this initiative right when the iPads came out fresh to faculty, if you can figure out how to use an iPad in your teaching, you know, we'll give you an iPad to play with. And I sort of said, I'd like an iPad to play with. So, so I got in touch with David, because I had known him from before, and he essentially said, if you can fund it, I'll build it, you know. So we kind of went through this whole thing. And so kinescribe works very similarly to lab on writer, for folks out there who are familiar with that program. And then there are some updates the way it works. So essentially, you're on your iPad, and you open a score. And then there are different ways that you build the score. There's a little palette, and you choose the symbols off the palette, and you just accumulate them one by one on the score. You can move them around. You can make them change colors.

David Staley  8:56  
So rather than writing this by hand, exactly, I'm doing this on the iPad. What are their affordances?

Hannah Kosstrin  9:01  
You know, there are some, and some of them are new, even with the updates with the iPad. So initially, the portability was super exciting, because so often you're working with just a bunch of different pages, and now it's just, you know, it's one device. You're there, you can play music from it. Oh, okay, interesting. I mean, the app doesn't play music, but your iPad does Right, right, right. And then you can also, like, use the video feature on the iPad to capture some videos. So you can flip back and forth and have all of that there. And also, when you're reading scores, you can import them, and instead of having to flip through a whole bunches of paper, you can scroll through you can zoom in. So all of those kinds of things that you know, from handwriting, typewriting to word processor, similarly, from handwriting to can ascribe those kinds of advancements. But in this most recent update, particularly with the addition of the Apple Pencil, it is a new world. It is amazing because in the first iterations of. Can describe, you know, you're using your finger, and it was fine, but you really had to kind of figure out the angle on the screen. And the symbols can get quite small and detailed. And it was really great for the motif description, which is the general ideas, you know, the symbols are larger and that kind of thing. Whereas with the structured notation, you use the same symbols, just they tend to be smaller when you use them. And so with the pencil, it's as if you are writing on a piece of paper, so you get that level of detail, but you've got the digital so you can move things around. It's still early days, in a sense, but really, where this can grow is super exciting.

David Staley  10:35  
Well, tell us about Laban Lens, another application?

Hannah Kosstrin  10:38  
Sure. Yeah. So Laban Lens is an application for the Microsoft HoloLens, which is a mixed virtual reality. 

David Staley  10:45  
Oh, mixed reality, like virtual reality. 

Hannah Kosstrin  10:46  
It's like virtual reality, but you can see the people that you're with. So you know you're in the visor, and then holograms are projected in front of your field of view. But because it's mixed reality, you can see the space that you're in. So I could be wearing one, you can be wearing one, we can be seeing each other, and we can see the studio that we're in, or the space that we're in. Doesn't have to be a studio. You can see the space that you're in, and so you can still dance together. You're not blocked off, as with virtual reality. And what Laban lens does is it scrolls the Laban notation scores right in front of your face. It's pretty amazing. So what happens when you're in there? I know. So when you're in the lens, what you see in your field of view are a couple of things. Up to the right hand corner, there's a little cube, and that cube has all of the symbols on it. And what I'm doing right now is I'm gesturing up to my upper right quadrant, if I were to look up and to the right from my, you know, right eye, that's where I'm looking. 

David Staley  11:47  
There's lots of hand movements here, for the listeners. 

Hannah Kosstrin  11:49  
Yes, I'll try to try to use my movement description skills to describe my gestures. So from that cube, you can pick from all of the lava notation symbols. And essentially, what you do is you use the hand gestures. So the Microsoft HoloLens is based on different hand gestures that the camera on the lens sees, and then stuff happens in the applications. So you use a little tap gesture, which is HoloLens, not ours. You know, it's the functionality is in the device. And you tap on a symbol, and then it appears on the score, which is kind of over on the left hand side of your viewfinder. And then, similarly to the way that you build the score on the iPad, from picking it off a palette and dragging it onto the score, you pick it off that little cube palette, it goes on the score, and then you can manipulate the size, or, you know, you can make it a fun color, and then you build the score, and then you press play, and then it scrolls. So that amazing. It is amazing because it's hands free, which seems like such a small thing for such a high duty device. But what I have found, both using it myself and using with my students, is that the kinesthetic pickup is much faster. So, when you're using...

David Staley  12:56  
Kinesthetic pickup, that means...? 

Hannah Kosstrin  12:58  
Getting it into your body a lot faster. One of the challenges with reading Labanotation from scores is that it's sometimes hard to embody a dance smoothly. When we learn dances from other people, we're so used to kind of seeing what they're doing and then just doing it in our body, and sometimes when you read a dance from score, it can feel blocky to get into it, especially if it's a dance from another time, and your body just moves differently from the way that people moved at that time, or you are trained in a different practice than those people were trained in. So one of the things that always kind of slows people down when reading from score, or I should say it doesn't actually slow them down, because it's part of the process. But one of the things that Laban Lens has really quickened is that process of really being able to perform the movement full out sooner. So when you're reading a score, either on paper or even on the iPad, you look down at it, and you have to hold on to it, so you're looking down to see what it is, and then you look up and put yourself in the space when your hands are occupied, hands are occupied, yeah. So if you have an arm gesture, you have to let go with one hand and then do and then if you have two arm gestures, or if you need to do a roll or turn upside down, or something like that. So one of the things that's really cool about the lens is that the score still scrolls, but you can be anywhere the score is always in front of your face. 

David Staley  14:20  
Well, it sounds like you can use this application for creative purposes, absolutely choreographing a dance while you use it. Is that the intention? 

Hannah Kosstrin  14:29  
Yeah, absolutely. The intention is twofold, actually, maybe threefold, even, certainly, while you're in the studio, you can notate the dance you're doing, or you can kind of put a bunch of symbols on the score and make a dance from those. I did that a lot with my students, and we had a really good time, you know, kind of seeing what we had on the score and then making the dance from there. You can also, we're hoping it's not there yet, but we're hoping in the future that we'll be able to import scores so that you can learn the dance from the score there and, you know, maybe collaborate with people. And other lenses and other places you know, to dance together in that way. And then, you know, we've got some other kind of dreams of, how could this work in our special collections in the archives, where we have the dance notation Bureau collection that has moved from the dance notation bureau in New York to Ohio State, the dance notation Bureau is kind of the headquarters for Labanotation study in the United States, and Ohio State Department of Dance has had a long standing relationship with them. And so, you know, we have these ideas for how can Laban Lens interact with that work in the archive, and how might also, in some other iteration, there be some kind of physical rehabilitation, or, you know, some other kinds of medical applications for it, but that's a little bit still early days, a little bit down the road.

Gretchen Ritter  15:47  
Hi. I'm Gretchen Ritter, Executive Dean and Vice rovost for the Ohio State University's College of Arts and Sciences. Did you know 16 of our programs are ranked in the top 25 in U.S. News and World Report, with nine of those 16 in the top 10? That's why we say that the College of Arts and Sciences is the intellectual and academic core of the Ohio State University. Learn more about the college at artsandsciences.osu.edu.

David Staley  16:26  
So my sense is that the Department of Dance does a lot with technology and dance, yes?

Hannah Kosstrin  16:31  
Yes. We do technology in a lot of different ways, actually, the Labanotation, digital projects have had a long history in the department. I mentioned Laban writer, which was the desktop program that Lucy Venable and others started developing, I think even in the early 80s on, like an IBM with IBM, old thing had the ball, and they made a special font for it. I forget what that typewriters, yes, but it was sort of like a first step of a word processor. Goodness, yeah. So for a long time, and then my colleague harmony bench has been doing a lot with data analytics, type work with her mapping touring and Dunham's data projects, a lot of that mapping work that's really exciting. My colleague Nora Zuniga Shaw does a lot of work with interactive performance, with different kinds of digital elements. We share the space with the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design. We have a motion lab where our students do a lot of interactive work. There. My colleague Mitchell rose is a dance filmmaker and teaches dance film, and then harmony is former editor of the screen dance journal and does a lot with dance on screen. So our department engages with technology in a lot of different ways. And one of the things that I'm really excited about is the way that digital technology in particular, can introduce a different kind of way of engaging with the body. A lot of folks in our department are interested in how that happens in performance, but I'm actually interested in it on the back end. You know, how can these digital applications help us understand what's going on in the body. How can they get us into a historical understanding of what's happening in the body and what has happened in the body? And so that's the part of it that I'm interested in. But, you know, it's so broad that it's a real privilege actually, to be in a place where there are so many ways to think about digital technology that we can kind of parse the different aspects of it. 

David Staley  18:21  
You just mentioned history in the past, and I noted in the introduction that you're a dance historian, so I'd like to talk about the book "Honest Bodies". So tell us what were some of the main findings of your book? 

Hannah Kosstrin  18:31  
Sure. So "Honest Bodies", and the subtitle is "Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow". And so in the book, I argued that so close choreography circulated American modernism and communism among predominantly Jewish channels of the International left between the 1930s and the 1960s in New York, Mexico City and Israel. And I initially set out to write that book to find out why Sokolow was not called before the house on American Activities Committee. She was, as you maybe can gather from the description active in leftist politics when it was popular to do so, she was a leader of the workers dance movement in the 1930s and as time went on, she ended up moving where she worked so that she could still be in a revolutionary community. So from New York, and then the Mexican government brought her in in the late 30s. She stayed there pretty much through the 1940s and was, you know, like buds with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and all those folks. And then in the 50s and 60s, was mostly in Tel Aviv, but was around Israel, and really kind of identified with the socialist Zionism that was kind of governing social politics at the time there. And so, as I was, you know, kind of thinking about the 1950s and seeing how so many of her compatriots, fellow travelers, if you will, from the 30s, were systematically being called up before the House un American Activities Committee. You know, my first thought was, why not so close she was in all the right places at all the right times,  why wasn't she called? I was never able to answer that question.

David Staley  20:03  
That was my next question. 

Hannah Kosstrin  20:05  
Yeah, I have some hunches as to perhaps why.

David Staley  20:09  
Well, give us your hunch.

Hannah Kosstrin  20:10  
That we can talk about, maybe off camera. Oh, but when it became clear to me that I wouldn't be able to answer that question, I started asking, Well, what questions can I answer with this work? One of the things that I really started thinking about was, well, what was the work doing? Clearly, people were drawn to this. And as I started looking through the daily worker and the new masses and really these leftist newspapers from the 1930s that reviewed a lot of dance, it just became so clear to me that she was speaking to a group of people who wanted to hear what she was saying. She was driving masses of audience members to see her work. She was in conversation with choreographers who were doing similar things in Germany and in Mexico City and in Palestine and Israel and so it was really confusing to me why she was never called. And I did do a FOIA request, and the FOIA request did not help me in answering the question, Why wasn't she? Yes, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request ended up also being contacted by the CIA. You were, I was, which was exciting and surprising to receive a letter from the CIA, but I guess it's pretty routine. If you do a FBI request, they automatically, I guess, forward it to the CIA. And so apparently the CIA had a file on Socolow that they said that they would not share and that I could appeal. And I appealed, and they appealed my appeal. And so it never quite went anywhere. So I have some ideas, maybe, about what was going on there, but I have no conclusive evidence. So essentially, what I really started seeing was how her choreography was activating these values. And the idea of honest bodies comes from the way that she demanded a certain kind of performance from the dancers that she worked with. She often would go off this very stanislavskian idea that you don't have honest movement from a dishonest body. And she would often demand of her dancers. She would often say things like, I don't believe you, in order to kind of pull a really earnest performance out of them. She was also known as someone who is incredibly demanding. So that also goes hand in hand with that. But the idea of honest bodies kind of comes from this idea of a real earnestness and sincerity that she demanded in performance that kind of became a barometer for the way that her choreography moved through the bodies of the dancers with whom she worked. And then also, because I was never quite able to figure out socolos relationship to our State Department or our CIA, that there was some aspect here of she's flying under the radar in some way. You know, how is she flying under the radar, but how does that also give her a certain kind of power in the work that she's doing?

David Staley  22:52  
You have said of this work, and maybe of all your work in dance history, that you are interested in history from an embodied perspective. What does that mean? 

Hannah Kosstrin  23:01  
Yeah, I'm really interested in what it means to feel like you're inside of a body at different points in time. And this started for me when I was in college. Actually, I majored in dance at Goucher College in Baltimore, in Maryland, and I danced for a company called choreography antique, which was headed by one of the faculty members there, Christelle bond. And one of the things that we did, well, the thing that we did there was that we performed social dances from European and American traditions between like the late medieval period and the 1950s and one of the things that I really learned there was thinking about history from an embodied perspective, in terms of the different kinds of dances that you would do at different time periods. And I got so used to feeling what it was like to be inside the costumes that whenever I hear certain music, I feel like I should be wearing like, you know, an 1860s this, that, or the, you know, ballgame or something. But the thing about embodied history that really got to me, actually, was when I was learning how to do Baroque dance. And Baroque dance is from the 1600s from the court of Louis the 14th, and the dress for that contains a corset. And so all the way through my training in learning how to do this movement practice, my teachers were always telling me to put my arms down. My arms would always kind of float up, not super high, but kind of just out to my sides, because I identified as a modern dancer. In all my other dance classes, I was being taught how to take up as much space as possible. And here they were telling me to take small steps and get my arms down to the side, pretty much like right next to my hips. And I just apparently had a hard time following that instruction, even though in my head I was like, I am doing it, but in my body, I was not. But then they laced me into a corset for the first time, and suddenly all I could do was have my arms down to my sides, because my. Or so was completely restricted. My breathing became shallow and my arms were restricted in terms of their movement, and so I started performing the movement correctly, but it also gave me a really good sense for what it was like to be a woman of a certain cultural and class stature at that point in history, and that's what really kind of got me interested in understanding what it's like to be a person in different points in time and in different kinds of contexts. Yeah. And so now, in my scholarship, one of the things that's really important for me is to really portray to the reader what the dance looked like, and if, for some reason, I have experience with that dance practice. I draw on my own practice to also talk a little bit about what it feels like from the inside, not in a super autoethnographic or phenomenological way, but I just I draw on my own sense in my body of what it feels like in order to describe it, because that feeling of knowing what it was like or not knowing what it was like, because you never quite know, but just the shift, you know, at the age of 20 to say, oh, that's what it's like. You know, to be at that station in life was really eye opening for me.

David Staley  26:11  
Well, and I'm interested in your next project, which is called "Kinesthetic Peoplehood, and I'm particularly interested with an idea from this book about dance as data. What could that possibly mean? 

Hannah Kosstrin  26:24  
Sure, sure. So dance as data is something that I have started thinking about in terms of evidence. The book incorporates this idea, not necessarily as a central tenet of the book, but kind of how I'm thinking about the methodology behind it. And it actually goes back to thinking about embodying history, and how we can use movement as evidence that when we're doing dance history or dance studies, which is the broader field that encompasses dance history, ethnography and theory, that the movement is the evidence. And because of my work with the Laban systems, with Laban notation and Laban movement analysis, those systems give me a very specific, codified vocabulary for identifying very specific details in movement. So it's not that I'm necessarily imposing that vocabulary on the things, but because I've had such extensive training in those systems, when I watch movement, my brain just is automatically like ticking through, you know, that's that, that's that, that's that. But then I also work to translate those kind of data points of elbow, Forward, middle, you know, things that are not quite, you know, poetic, into movement description that really gives the reader a sense of what's happening, as if you were there in the middle of the action. So for me, dance as data is about using dance movement as evidence, but then also knowing that it actually can get very specific. You know, there's often this conversation that dance is ephemeral and disappears and but actually it remains. Rebecca Schneider's a performance scholar, and she talks about how performance remains. And there is something that I think is very real about not only how dance and movement and experiences still live within our kinesthesia, they still live within our body knowledge, but there's also something about really being able to define movement in such a way that you can use it as very specific evidence.

David Staley  28:22  
When you say kinesthetic knowledge, or body knowledge, what does that mean?

Hannah Kosstrin  28:26  
A couple of different things. Kinesthetic knowledge is really knowing where your body is in space and feeling how it's working together. Some people might call it proprioception, but essentially understanding through your viscera, through your muscles and bones, through the way that your body feels, lets you know where things are happening similarly, kinesthetic knowledge is also a mode for different kinds of cultural knowledges, different kinds of practices, or different kinds of ways that the body engages in moving through certain kinds of practices or rituals or that kind of thing. In my work, I'm really thinking about kinesthetic knowledge as understanding in the body something that is connected to how I cerebrally understand something, but sometimes I understand it viscerally or kinesthetically before it gets to be cerebral. But there's a certain kind of texture in understanding something through the body that then, you know, I can apply to the way that I'm understanding a certain historical moment.

David Staley  29:35  
Hannah Kosstrin, Thank you.

Hannah Kosstrin  29:37  
Thank you very much. 

Eva Dale  29:38  
Voices from the Arts and Sciences is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University, College of Arts and Sciences Technology Services Studio. Sound engineering by Paul Kotheimer, produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Eva Dale.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai