StreamingLaban – Low bandwidth format for dance encoding with Labanotation

In the world of music, a variety of digital symbolic music representations exist, from performance oriented (e.g. MIDI) to score oriented (e.g. MusicXML). Contrary to this, in the related world of dance, while a paper friendly symbolic representation exists and is widely adopted (Labanotation or Kinetography Laban), a similar digital open standard has not yet been created. While there have been a few attempts so far, they have focused on encoding types, which require loading of all data before execution, as well as encoding more data than is necessary. Our goal is to create a format that can allow real-time encoding, decoding and interpretation of Labanotation. In the paper, we describe the format, its inner workings and ways of encoding and decoding various