Choreography creation requires high proficiency in artistic and technical skills. Choreographers typically go through four stages to create a dance piece: preparation, studio, performance, and reflection. This process is often individualized, complicated, and challenging due to multiple constraints at each stage. To assist choreographers, most prior work has focused on designing digital tools to support the last three stages of the choreography process, with the preparation stage being the least explored. To address this research gap, we introduce an AI-based approach to assist the preparation stage by supporting ideation, creating choreographic prototypes, and documenting creative attempts and outcomes. We address the limitations of existing AI-based motion generation methods for ideation by allowing generated sequences to be edited and modified in an interactive web interface. This capability is motivated by insights from a formative study we conducted with seven choreographers. We evaluated our system's functionality, benefits, and limitations with six expert choreographers. Results highlight the usability of our system, with users reporting increased efficiency, expanded creative possibilities, and an enhanced iterative process. We also identified areas for improvement, such as the relationship between user intent and AI outcome, intuitive and flexible user interaction design, and integration with existing physical choreography prototyping workflows. By reflecting on the evaluation results, we present three insights that aim to inform the development of future AI systems that can empower choreographers.

翻译：编舞创作需要高度的艺术与技术技能。编舞者通常经历四个阶段来创作舞蹈作品：准备阶段、工作室阶段、表演阶段和反思阶段。由于每个阶段存在多重约束，这一过程往往具有个体化、复杂性和挑战性。为协助编舞者，现有研究大多聚焦于设计数字工具以支持编舞过程的最后三个阶段，而对准备阶段的探索最为不足。为填补这一研究空白，我们提出一种基于人工智能的方法，通过支持创意构思、创建编舞原型以及记录创作尝试与成果，来辅助准备阶段的工作。我们通过允许在交互式网络界面中编辑和修改生成的动作序列，解决了现有基于人工智能的动作生成方法在创意构思方面的局限性。这一功能的提出源于我们对七位编舞者进行的形成性研究所得出的见解。我们邀请六位专业编舞者对系统的功能性、优势与局限进行了评估。结果凸显了系统的可用性，用户反馈表明其提升了创作效率、拓展了创意可能性并优化了迭代流程。同时，我们也识别出若干待改进领域，例如用户意图与人工智能输出结果之间的关联性、直观灵活的用户交互设计，以及与现有实体编舞原型设计工作流程的整合。基于对评估结果的反思，我们提出三点见解，旨在为未来赋能编舞者的人工智能系统开发提供参考。