Noa Eshkol and Abraham Wachman
Noa Eshkol
The late Noa Eshkol was a Professor Emeritus at Tel-Aviv University. She studied dance in Israel (with Tehilla Roessler) and London (with Sigurd Leeder). Early experience included participation as dancer and as choreographer at the Chamber Theatre in Tel-Aviv, and teaching posts at various institutes of education in Israel. While in London, she realized the need for a new system of movement notation that would allow her to write the dances she had composed. She started her work on notation there.
Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation is the fruit of collaboration with Avraham Wachman, formerly Eshkol's student and currently Professor Emeritus of Architecture and Town Planning at Haifa Technical Institute. Their work together culminated in the publication, in 1958, of the first book on the notation method. (see publications).
In 1968 Eshkol founded the Movement Notation Society. A few years later she was appointed to set up a research centre for movement notation at the Faculty of Visual and Performing arts at Tel Aviv University. Her dances are actually experiments used to analyze movement. The activities of the Movement Notation Society and the Research Centre of Movement Notation are reflected in the publications published by the two institutions (see publication). These activities include the application of EWMN in different fields such as dance composition, graphic-kinetic art, animal behavior, neurophysiology and the study of other notation systems.
A permanent team, the Chamber Dance Group, formed by Eshkol for the practical applications of her research and compositions, performed in Israel numerous times (Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem and other places), the U.S.A. (Urbana, Ill., Columbus, Ohio, and other Universities), London (The Place), and Italy (the Festival di Due Mondi, Spoleto).
Avraham Wachman
Avraham Wachman, Professor Emeritus at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa – was born in Poland and emigrated with his parents to Israel at an early age. After serving in the Israeli army, Prof. Wachman studied in the "Chamber Theater School for acting" in Tel-Aviv, where Prof. Eshkol was teaching Movement. Eshkol posed before the students the yet unsolved and universal need for a consistent, versatile, efficient and user-friendly system of Movement Notation. She encouraged the students to deal with that problem. The collaboration between the two originated there. Professor Wachman went on to finish his academic studies in the Faculty of Architecture and Town-Planning in the Technion and became a full time faculty member there. Apart from his academic activities, he was also a practicing architect. In 1986, Prof. Wachman became the Dean of the faculty of Architecture and Town-Planning and in the same year he was named to the Alfred and Marion Bar Chair for Architecture. He held that position until his retirement in October, 2000.
Prof. Wachman's main research areas include: (1) Architectual Morphology (Built Forms Morphology: Round and Orthogonal Architecture. Urban Morphology); (2) A Morphological Approach to Geometric Topics (Finite and Infinite Polyhedra. Tessalations and Space-Packings. The geometry of Virus Shells. A "Morphological Approach" to Teaching Geometry in Elementary and High schools). He also collaborated with M. Kleinman on developing a computerized graphic representation and analysis of simultaneous-movement "envelopes". Apart from the book "Movement Notation" which he co-authored with Prof. Eshkol (see publications), he wrote "Round Orthogonal Building" which was published by the Technion in 1968 and "Infinite Polyhedra" which he co-authored with Burt and Kleinman in 1974.