Arts and medical humanity studies
Léa Andréoléty, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Litt&Arts, 38000 Grenoble, France
I use the concept of score as a tool for the exploration and mediation with my doctoral research. I conduct this research in the interdisciplinary field of the medical humanities – on one hand, the performance arts, with a focus on improvisational theater, and, on the other, pedagogy of the nursing sciences. The intersection of these disciplines and practices aims to observe and question the performative implications in the construction of the body during nursing training by offering a pedagogical practice to future nursing students in the form of regular workshops over the course of their three years in training. The score is a working tool that I use on the one hand for the preparation of these workshops tailored to the nursing students participating in this research and, on the other hand as a pedagogical practice within these same workshops, in order to observe, explore, and define movement and action with the body, space, and time.
I first encountered the notion of score applied to performance studies at the beginning of my doctoral research, in the work Partition(s) : objet et concept des pratiques scéniques (XXe et XXIe siècles) [Score(s): object and concept of stage practices (20th and 21st centuries)] by Julie Sermon and Yvane Chapuis. The authors relate the creation of a score to the work process involved in research implementation.
The researchers notably mention the notion of score-transcription, which gives way to two possible interpretations. It is understood, on one hand, as a tool of information synthesis at the meta-level, such as data to be analyzed in research. On the other, it is a tool of observation, comprehension, and organization of the body within the action. This is the approach I take in using this tool, as an object-tool of structuring action and as an intermedial inter-artistic object that allows us to observe action through its transcription process.
Score, in its graphic or visual quality, is employed as a means of structuring workshops – work on the group dynamic, the choice of practices to be used, the link between these different bodily and artistic practices – but also as a means of observing, testing, and experimenting with the performativity of future health professional bodies. As such, the students are invited to use and create scores, with considerable graphic freedom, in order to work on observation, representation, and exploration, then to conduct work in examining and analyzing the performative stakes of their movements, gestures, and postures. Thus, it is a tool for sensorial and graphic organization that allows the recognition of, for example, a body in movement, a precise gesture, or a more complex action within an exercise. In effect, the score allows various action modalities – movement analysis, examination of relationships to sensory systems, or implementation techniques of care actions, for example – to coexist within a precise temporal, spatial, and corporeal structure.
Field experimentation allows me to continuously challenge the framework of the workshop – whether pedagogical, ethical, or relational –and, in so doing, the tools for creating, structuring, maintaining, and transcending this framework. In addition, my use of score incorporates action construction, workshop facilitation, a framing device for the voice and body, as well as the structure of my own performativity within this pedagogical scope. Score, as a frame of time and space, can also be a fitting tool for structuring the workshops, for it makes it possible to implement a clear and precise framework for developing the action, all while taking into account how this action evolves (in keeping with the action-research processual nature which in turn repositions the practitioner).
Cite this item: Léa Andréoléty, “Partition”, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177553
Computer Science studies
Rémi Ronfard, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, Inria, CNRS, Grenoble INP, LJK, 38000 Grenoble, France
I have a background is engineering and I have spent my entire career in computer science research, first in the industry then with Inria [National Institute of Research in Science and Technologies] where I currently work as a senior researcher.
During my doctorate studies, I was lucky enough to be able to work on image sequences quite early on, at a time when this required powerful graphic machines that were very rare and highly prized. This soon led me to ask myself the question of how to describe these sequences. Computer music researchers have the musical score, which symbolically describes a recorded piece of music. For researchers in computer graphics, there was no “graphic score,” symbolically describing the moving forms contained in a video file. Several languages existed to symbolically describe each individual image, but none of them were capable of representing their arrangement in time.
Following my thesis, I joined the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) where I discovered that researchers from the Musical Research Group (GRM) were not using traditional scores, but other notations of their own. In fact, the “concrete music” that they were recording did not fit within the scope of tonal music. At the same time, I discovered that storyboards and exposure sheets could serve as scores for the creation of animated cartoons, but with a notable difference: they were generally intended for a single execution.
According to Nelson Goodman, the musical score is the perfect example of a notation language which allows the identification of an “allographic” work, which can be performed several times. It can be established on the basis of a single execution as it allows for the recognition of the same work in each of its subsequent renditions. In the same way, the theatrical text defines the totality of representations that can be derived from it, essentially through the exact transcription of the words there written. On the other hand, the staging does not constitute a work, according to Goodman, since it cannot be scored. But what is stopping us from considering that the gestures and impressions that make up a theatrical staging might be notated with enough precision to constitute a work? In this case, the notation would play the role of the theatrical score. This would allow for transcription of the staging as a work in and of itself after a single representation, as well as recognition of the work in all of its successive representations (Ronfard 2016).
As in the case of music, it seems likely that several scoring languages are necessary in order to record the numerous “dialects” of theatrical staging (Gagneré 2016). Some dance notations are already used as the scores of choreographic works; however, they are complex and difficult to read and transcribe. In both cases – dance and theater – computer sciences would allow for the generalization of score usage, if they could offer reliable, efficient methods of transcription and automatic reading. These are issues that we are currently exploring within my research team. (Garcia 2019, Garcia 2020, Schwarz 2021).
Cite this item: Rémi Ronfard, “Score”, translated by Caroline Schlenker, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2022, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177553
