Word: laderman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Laderman's notations are more emotional signposts than they are exact directions to the choreographer. They indicate the type and the intensity of dance emotion, e.g., tense, joyous, somber, 'that he thinks appropriate at different places in the score. The notations can also indicate such basic things as 1) when the dancer should dance or stand still, 2) whether the dancer should move quickly or slowly, 3) what relation the dancer's next movements should bear to the movements just completed. To convey these directions, Laderman relies on musical notes together with music's diacritical markings...
...dedicated dance fan and an occasional writer of ballet music, Brooklyn-born Composer Ezra Laderman, 32, has long wanted to bring dance music and choreography closer together. He believes that the present methods of fitting dance to music or music to dance, or combining the two by a rough collaboration between composer and choreographer, often produce conflicting feeling between movement and melody. A year or so ago Laderman tried to solve the problem in his Duet for Flute and Dancer by writing the dancer's part into his score as though the dancer were another musical instrument...
Full of Flute. Composer Laderman stumbled onto his technique one night after hearing a flutist friend give a fine recital. Laderman returned home so "full of flute" that he sat up all night composing. As he wrote, he began to visualize dance images. Rather than lose them, he improvised dance notations above the musical staff to correspond with the flute solo. Next morning he found that the notations accurately recalled the dance images. He took the score, now titled Duet for Flute and Dancer, to Dancer-Choreographer Jean Erdman, asked that she choreograph...
Greater Opportunities. In Choreographer Erdman, Laderman found a musical partner who was not concerned by the emotional restrictions placed on her work. At the first rehearsal she read the annotated dance score aloud (da-da-da-da, da-di-da-di) to see how its rhythms keyed with those of the flute. Then she translated the rhythms into movements. The completed Duet, premiered last year, was an elegant, admirably contained piece. Last week's far more complex work, also choreographed by Jean Erdman, was a wittily detailed examination of the love life of a voraciously modern woman...
...Composer Laderman believes that if his notation demands more of both composer and choreographer it also offers them greater opportunities. It can go a long way, Laderman feels, toward closing the gap-between what is currently seen and what is heard in the dance theater...