Reishi Watanuma

The passing on and preserving of advanced technical skills has become an important issue in a variety of fields, and motion analysis using motion capture has recently become popular in the research of advanced physical skills. This research aims to construct a system having a high on-site instructional effect on dancers learning Nihon Buyo, a traditional dance in Japan, and to classify Nihon Buyo dancing according to style, school, and dancer's proficiency by motion analysis. We have been able to study motion analysis systems for teaching Nihon Buyo now that body-motion data can be digitized and stored by motion capture systems using high-performance computers. Thus, with the aim of developing a user-friendly instruction-support system, we have constructed a motion analysis system that displays a dancer's time series of body motions and center of gravity for instructional purposes. In this paper, we outline this instructional motion analysis system based on three-dimensional position data obtained by motion capture. We also describe motion analysis that we performed based on center-of-gravity data obtained by this system and motion analysis focusing on school and age group using this system. © 2011 The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan.

This research explores how information technologies can support learners' tacit knowing, that is a process to the state in which they can practice a thing but they cannot express what they know by logical language, through exploratory interviews to instructors and learners of Nihon Buyo about usability of motion capture. From the interviews, we found that motion capture can play a role providing new points of view in the process of try-and-error learning and finding learners' own methods.

Nihon Buyo, which is a traditional Japanese dance, consists of several mediums including dance, music and costume. The dance creates multiple effects including meaning, sense and spectacle using these mediums. These effects can represent concrete meaning just as words do, and this meaning expresses in the lyrics of the accompanying music. The concrete meaning of the dance gestures can be derived from the meaning of the lyrics. In short, the meaning of Nihon Buyo has been considered to be equivalent to the meaning in the lyrics of the accompanying music.<br>In this paper, we analyze another process of generating concrete meaning in Nihon Buyo. We look at "Musume-Doujouji (1753)" which is one of the masterpieces of Nihon Buyo, as an example.<br>First we assume that there is a structure in which various relations between the mediums and the effects exist. Then we indicate that the process of generating meaning is not as simple as interpreting from lyrics to gesture, but has a more complicated system in this structure. Last, we conclude that the concrete meaning of Nihon Buyo is not equal to the meaning of lyrics but is generated from the system of the structure. In this sense, the concrete meaning of lyrics can be expressed by the gestures. This paper illuminates the historical change of Nihon Buyo and its method of representation.