Ballet Instructor's Newsletter (10-22-03): A Brief History of Dance Notation
A Brief History of Dance Notation
By Shahab Nahvi
In 1588, Arbeau published “Orchesographie”. During this time, the dancer of the court was restricted in his or her movement. This limit on movement made the recording of dance easy. The upper body and arms held their position while the legs moved and changed the position of the dancer in specific patterns. Since the dance steps had their limit and were routinely performed, it had become common knowledge. These steps had specific names at which point the person who was recording the dance in writing only had to write the first letter of the name of that movement underneath the music score. In other words, the music score provided the backbone onto which these letters were written and specific timing was given to specific movement. Below it Arbeau was kind enough to diagram the floor patterns. This type of notation was in use for 200 years.
As dance became more complex it began to need a new method to document it since the existing method had become obsolete. Feuillet, a leading dancer, used Pierre Beauchamp’s dance notation method to document his work. He published “Choreographie, ou l’art de decrire la danse” in 1700. This system’s main focus was on footwork.
In 1721, Marie Camargo shortened her skirt a few inches in order to give her greater freedom in movement. During this period, arm and head positions were mainly decoration and since turnout and pointing of feet were common knowledge it was not necessary to write them down in the notations.
In 1831, the Romantic period for dance started with Filipe Taglioni’s choreography. Female dancers freed from heavy costumes and hard shoes, plus further shortening of their skirts, allowed them to push the dance movement to a new height. Shortly after, dance notation of the past were no longer adequate to record all the movements of upper, middle, and lower part of the body in the time given in relationship to the music.
Arthur Saint-Leon, choreographer of Coppelia (1870), published his system “Stenochoreographie ou Art decrire promptement la danse”. Basically his system was a small pen drawing of the movement below the musical grid. Some of the drawbacks for this system were that these pictures could not record movement in continuous motion, and the pictures were drawn from the point of view of the audience and not of the performer.
All of the above problems in dance notation and recording movement had to wait to be resolved until the 20th century. Fifteen varieties of dance notations began to circulate around the globe. Two of the most prevalent ones are Benesh and Laban notations. In 1928, Rudolf Von Laban (1879-1958) published “Kinetographie”, which later became known as Labanotation. This style of dance notation has no affiliation with any specific type of dance and is able to record any type of human movement, from folkloric to classical ballet and even factory workers’ movement.
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