Traditional Dance Contextare several limitations in the recording systems used by dance companies, organisa-
tions, folk clubs and bodies that perceive preservation of dances as part of their mis-
sion. For example, archival information in the form of documents and books offer rich
information about dance as an agent of cultural meaning but fail to present the move-
ment and stylistic aspects of dance genres. On the other hand, video addresses move-
ment/audio aspects, but at the same time it lacks information about the wider context,
meaning and cultural significance of the dance event recorded. Despite these limita-
tions, video is currently the most efficient way of preserving dance of any kind. An
example of systematic work in this direction is the LADD project [6] in the USA
(LADD Dance Heritage Coalition). Furthermore, available information on the Web,
relevant to dance, as part of the cultural education, is more or less unstructured (in the
form of collections of HTML pages, PDF documents etc.). As such, it is hard to ac-
cess and require additional processing before teachers and/or students can use it.
The objective of the Open-Dance project [7],[8] is the development of a web based
platform that bypasses these problems and offers a structured set of learning tools
based on a goal-driven learning framework. In the next section we review previous
work that analysed the application of interactive technologies to dance. Following
that, we describe the learning context that we adapt in our approach. We focus the
main discussion on the description of our dance digitization pipeline using an optical
motion capture system. The last part describes the web-based 3D visualization mod-
ule and we give results from user evaluation sessions. For the sake of clarity, in the
context of this paper as well as in the Open-Dance project we use the term “traditional
dance” instead of “folk” as defined in [9] i.e. “Dances that have evolved spontane-
ously from everyday activities and are informally passed from one generation to an-
other”.