180 Victoria WATTS

Inscribing the body

Victoria WATTS

The Perpetual ‘Present’ of Dance Notation

Abstract:
Dance notation systems disclose information about the historically located experience of moving while at the same
time necessitating that understanding of the moving body be accessed through the very particularities of the reader’s/
dancer’s own contemporary body. Practices of dance notation—graphic, iconic, symbolic documentations of dance
and movement—date back to the 15th century in Europe. Most commonly their history has been conceptualised as a
quest for a viable, ‘universal’ system of documentation, regardless of the intention of the inventors. I argue instead that
systems of dance notation are intimately connected to the visual and physical cultures of the time and place in which
they were developed. Each system provides insight into the way its inventor and users conceptualized their experiences
of the moving body. However, these systems do not represent the dance in a mimetic way. In spite of my expertise as
a notator, using Benesh Movement Notation and Labanotation, I cannot ‘see’ the dance when I read a dance score.
Rather, the notation serves as a visual technology through which embodiment is encoded and can be re-enacted.
That is to say, dance notation does not primarily visualize how the body looks—visual markers of identity are absent
from the score—but instead gives graphic form to the experience of moving. This encoding does not happen in the
symbols themselves but through the interplay amongst the symbols and between the score and the reader/dancer. In
this paper I explore the paradoxes of past/present, text/embodiment, and objectivity/subjectivity that animate research
using dance notation systems.
Keywords: Dance notation, embodiment, cultural phenomenology.

Introduction
Dance notation, predominantly used a
means of documenting and preserving dance,
pulls its readers/performers into the ‘present’
at exactly the moment those same readers are
attempting to uncover something about the
past. For the Bodies In Question conference I Victoria WATTS
aimed to explore this paradox with assembled University of South Australia
peers, all of whom were conversant with Victoria.Watts@unisa.edu.au
the ideas about embodiment and visuality
that underlie my analysis of visual systems EKPHRASIS, 2/2014
designed to symbolize the actions of moving BODIES IN BETWEEN
bodies. Is this paradox inevitable in terms of pp. 180-199
 The Perpetual ‘Present’ of Dance Notation 181

bodily knowing? I hoped their questions and insights might help me work towards a
more rigorous articulation of this idea and to make connections to other new areas of
enquiry about embodiment. At the same time, I thought there might be scope to share
some ideas about the notation score as a ‘present’, as a gift of sorts, sent by dancers,
choreographers, notators of the past as though their works were cryogenically frozen:
a gift to the contemporary world that can be reanimated at will.
In this paper, alongside my further articulation of this paradox that animates
practices of dance notation, I attend to the theoretical frames that have shaped my
enquiry to date and I point readers to some useful illustrated sources on the history
of dance notation. I weave together quite personal reflections from my own practice
as a notator using Benesh Movement Notation [BMN] and Labanotation with more
distanced scholarly analysis of notation, its history and its epistemology, and call on
readers to lend their own bodies to an understanding of this text and its notation
examples through the inclusion of written instructions on how to perform a short
dance extract. These shifts in authorial voice echo the slippages between past/present,
text/embodiment, and objectivity/subjectivity that arise in my investigation of notation
as an object and method of research.

Recognising the perpetual present

In June 2010 I attended a mixed bill of works performed by The Royal Ballet at
the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.1 Waiting for the curtain to go up I skimmed
the adverts in the glossy program, perused the familiar company biographies and
the various contextual notes on the evening’s productions. I came across an article
by freelance Benesh Movement Notation2 (BMN) choreologist Harriott Castor Jeffery
entitled “New Notation.” In it she describes the process and the purpose of recording
a new work with specific reference to Christopher Wheeldon’s Tryst, on the bill for that
night. An illustration of her rough notes was included (23), as were a couple of neatly
mastered frames from a final version of the score with photos of the movement they
describe (24-25). It was very informative for the lay reader, but insofar as it traversed
the same ground as countless other short articles promoting notation from the 1950s
onwards (Beck; Cohen; Guest “The Dance Notation Field Here and Abroad”; Hall;
Kummel), it occurred to me that dance notation and the discourses that surround it
appear to occupy a perpetual present-tense.
The title alone—“New Notation”—hints at the novelty and the immediacy of the
notation enterprise and makes clear that, in an age of digital video, graphic scores
are still being written, but on another level it also misleads the reader into thinking
that notation itself is new. Rudolf and Joan Benesh began developing their notation
in the mid 1940s before it was officially launched and simultaneously adopted by the
national ballet company in 1955. Moreover, the Royal Ballet has had a team of staff
notators using the Benesh system since 1960 when Faith Worth was employed as the
first full-time choreologist (Worth). Fifty years later and this is still a new notation? On
182 Victoria WATTS

this evidence, the notation would seem no newer than the company itself. However,
the same debates about the value of any dance notation system circulate now as they
did in the early and mid twentieth century and earlier (with the exception of questions
about film and video): its ability to capture the nuances of choreographic intent; its
efficiency; the possibility to recreate dances from score with authenticity; its accuracy
in lieu of, sometimes in contrast to, the memories of original cast members; and its
utility in light of film and video recordings. Dancers and choreographers do not
commonly read or write notation and are frequently surprised when they encounter
BMN or Labanotation for the first time. Their daily practice has instead relied upon
oral/kinaesthetic transmission. It is as though systemizing a means of recording
choreographic work on paper is still a new idea.
Moreover, this perpetual present seems to be at play in the invention and reinvention
of methods of recording dance on paper. For example, Jack Steel’s Shorthand Dance
Notation, developed in 1994 to code Israeli folk dance, differs little in principle from the
very first notations of which we have evidence back in the 15th century. They both use
letters and other abbreviations to refer to steps in a codified vocabulary. Or consider
later developments in dance notation systems. Vladimir Stepanov’s Alphabet des
mouvements du corps humain, published in 1892, adapts music notation for the purposes
of recording classical ballet. In 2009 Greg Varlotta also decided to adapt music notation
when he devised his system “Footnotes” for recording tap dance (Massey).3
I see the perpetual present in each new attempt to grasp the ‘now’ of choreography
and put it in a form that can resist the passage of time. It is perhaps the same
unthinking disregard for notations passed (and for notation’s past) while striving to
create notation’s present that engenders a situation in which Ann Hutchinson Guest
can wryly observe that it is easier to invent a notation system than it is to work out
how to use it (cited in Ryman “Review: [Untitled]” 81). And it may be this same pre-
occupation with the present moment in performance that leaves a dearth of accounts
of the development of dance notation systems and makes reviewing the history of
dance notation so difficult. In 1984 Peter Brinson remarked that the history of the
world’s movement notation systems had yet to be written just as the use of notation
itself was also only just beginning (in Brown and Parker 7). That same year saw the
publication of the first of Ann Hutchinson Guest’s two pioneering books on dance
notation and its history. It seems absurd that only one person’s account of these strange
visual artifacts, these obscure semiological systems, should have circulated in English
for the past twenty years.4 Laurence Louppe’s edited collection of essays, Traces of
Dance, discusses the notation field quite broadly, covers systems past, present, and
future, and runs through a brief chronology of various attempts by choreographers,
dancers, and computer programmers to fix a graphical record for movement. Rich with
illustrations, this book presses, quite obliquely in places, at some of the philosophical
issues surrounding a practice of notation, but its intent is not to understand if and
how the relationship between danced action and written record shifts through time,
 The Perpetual ‘Present’ of Dance Notation 183

nor how the notations themselves reflect, encourage, or even stifle this process. Alan
Salter’s journal issue “Notation and Theory” reviews several movement notations in an
attempt to convey the variety of approaches possible. This work has not been available
to a wide audience and is not particularly concerned with the history of notation as
such. As it is, the two books by Guest have defined the parameters of the field.
In Dance Notation: The Process of Recording Movement on Paper Guest gives a
truncated account of the history of her discipline and weighs in on which of the three
major systems in current use—Labanotation, Eshkol-Wachmann Notation [E-WN],
or BMN—is the most accurate and efficient.5 Her subsequent book, Choreo-Graphics:
A Comparison of Dance Notations from the Fifteenth Century to the Present, remains the
only text to present an overview of the development of dance notation in Europe
and North America. Her taxonomy of systems is widely and most often uncritically
accepted, as is her narration of the teleological progression from simple letter codes
and word abbreviations to the sophisticated, universally applicable, movement
analysis of Labanotation. Here again, although Guest has done more than almost any
other scholar to pull together rich visual sources in her writing of the history of dance
notation, she has done so with a belief that Labanotation is where the quest for a
workable, universal system of movement notation should end. In introducing the final
category of her widely used taxonomy she writes:
So far, in following through the centuries, we have seen the expected progression
in the type of method used to record movement: from word abbreviations to track
drawings, to stick figures (visual systems), to modified music notes and now, finally to
use of abstract symbols. (Choreo-Graphics 102)
As such, her descriptions of past systems focus on the ways in which they do or do
not meet the demands of the present.
As I was writing my doctoral thesis I thought this perpetual present occupied by
dance notations both animated and obliterated my research efforts. I was convinced
that an analysis of the development of various systems of notation and their respective
changes over time could reveal changes in embodied subjectivity. If each system, each
score strives to document the dance of its moment in its moment, to give form to the
‘now’ of dancing, then each system, each score was surely imbued with the values
(aesthetic, physical, and cultural) of its moment of production. By reading these scores,
by examining these systems I could uncover a felt sense of historical embodiment, of
what it would feel like to move, to dance in a different era. At the same time, this focus
on perfecting notation for the present moment, and on documenting work rather than
reflecting on the processes and practices of the field appeared to have led to a paucity
of published scholarship from which my own endeavours could grow. I have come
to see this paradox as being not merely at the heart of my own research but rather as
illuminating a vital tension at the heart of the dance notation enterprise.
184 Victoria WATTS

More than moving: ‘fleshing out’ the dance notation project

Although the history of dance notation has most commonly been conceptualised as
a quest for a viable, ‘universal’ system of documentation, I suggest instead that systems
of dance notation are intimately connected to the visual and physical cultures of the
time and place in which they were developed, and that an analysis of the these systems
can disclose insights into the ways inventors and users saw and experienced the moving
body. It is now widely acknowledged that vision is not a purely biological process but
that we understand and in turn shape our visual world in ways that are cultural. The
social construction of the visual and the visual construction of the social can be seen as
a major theme in the field of Visual Culture Studies (Elkins; Evans and Hall; Gunning
174; Mirzoeff 248; Mitchell 91; Jenks). At the same time scholars have also come to
understand that our corporeal practices, though apparently natural, are part of a rich
cultural fabric. In spite of Marcel Mauss’ compelling argument in his essay Techniques
of the Body (1934) that even our most apparently natural corporeal practices—such
as sleeping, running, going to the toilet—are inflected by culture, differing between
peoples on earth and changing over time, it seems to have been harder for this idea to
gain traction. Within Dance Studies, Cynthia Novack’s ethnographic study of Contact
Improvisation, Sharing the Dance, provides a thoroughly worked example of the ways
in which physical culture is imbricated with social and political movements. However,
in setting the context for her research, she notes the lack of attention cultural observers
have paid to the body, suggesting that “If researchers do pay attention to movement
and the body, it may be only in order to see the ‘mind’ which lies behind it” (7). Even
in the wake of the ‘turn to the body’, it seems scholars are still coming to grips with
the idea that our embodiment may in fact constitute the “existential ground of culture”
just as Thomas Csordas (“Somatic Modes of Attention” 135) argues.
Csordas attempts to map a methodological trajectory based on the contention that
studies under the rubric of embodiment are not about the body per se but are about
culture and experience as understood from the standpoint of being-in-the-world.
As such, embodiment studies demand a synthesis of the immediacy of embodied
experience with the multiplicity of cultural meanings in which we are immersed. In
an early article that discusses his research on spiritual healing Csordas suggests that
[e]mbodiment as a paradigm or methodological orientation requires that the body be
understood as the existential ground of culture—not as an object that is ‘good to think,’
but as a subject that is ‘necessary to be’. (“Somatic Modes of Attention” 135)
He points out that in anthropology analyses have been based on semiotic models
such that cultures are understood as having properties similar to texts. By contrast, a
model based on embodiment suggests that “embodied experience is the starting point
for analyzing human participation in a cultural world” (Csordas “Somatic Modes of
Attention” 135). He suggests that the unstable and culturally variable ways in which
the relationship between body and self is understood raises two possibilities: first, that
 The Perpetual ‘Present’ of Dance Notation 185

the body is cultural-historical as well as biological and material; second, and inverting
the terms of the first proposition, that culture and history are bodily phenomena as
well as products of ideas, symbols and material conditions. To explore this further
he draws a parallel between embodiment and textuality and notes that the focus on
text and structure arising from the insights of the linguistic turn effectively erased
‘experience’ from theoretical discourse. He writes that
textuality has become, if you will, a hungry metaphor, swallowing all of culture to the
point where it became possible and even convincing to hear the deconstructionist motto
that there is nothing outside the text. It has come to the point where the text metaphor
has virtually. . . gobbled up the body itself. . . I would go so far as to assert that for many
contemporary scholars the text metaphor has ceased to be a metaphor at all, and is taken
quite literally. (“Embodiment and Cultural Phenomenology” 146)
As Csordas points out, while this kind of focus on text and structure closes the gap
between language and experience, it eliminates the dualism not by transcending it but
rather by reducing experience to language, discourse, or representation.
In response to this reduction, Csordas posits a cultural phenomenology for its ability
to disclose experience, placing being-in-the-world alongside representation. Csordas
invokes Merleau-Ponty, finding him most useful for his project since “his work
suggests that culture does not reside only in objects and representations, but also in
the bodily processes of perception by which those representations come into being”
(“Embodiment and Cultural Phenomenology” 147). He states his contention simply
thus: “In brief, the equation is that semiotics gives us textuality in order to understand
representation, phenomenology gives us embodiment in order to understand being-
in-the-world” (“Embodiment and Cultural Phenomenology” 147). In effect, Csordas
is calling for a move away from understanding culture as operating from the neck
up towards a more holistic awareness that cultural knowledges are grounded in the
body. Consequently, he suggests several constructs that might be useful for ‘fleshing
out’ a methodological approach for analyzing culture and self from the standpoint of
embodiment. One of these is the cultivation of somatic modes of attention: “culturally
elaborated ways of attending to and with one’s body in surroundings that include
the embodied presence of others” (“Embodiment and Cultural Phenomenology” 151).
My work with notation systems relies on just such a process of somatic attention.
To attend bodily is to be present. To dance the score in order to discover something
about historical modes of embodiment is to be caught in the chiasm of body, space
and time—moving here and now in search of the movement there and then.6 But in
reflecting on this mode of attending with and through the body in reading dance
notations, I move beyond the binary that Csordas sets up between textuality and
embodiment, between representation and being-in-the-world. My objects of study
serve as graphic symbol systems that represent a facet of human culture in a textual
way at the same time as they are inescapably tied to practices of embodiment. I am
186 Victoria WATTS

faced not with either textuality or embodiment but an intimate compact of both at one
and the same time. This is indisputably a ‘subjective’ process in that it relies upon my
own embodied experiences in reading and interpreting the source material. This may
seem disquietingly lacking in objective, externally verifiable, empirical evidence, but
only if a radical view of subjectivism—that experience is always private, unstructured
and unrepresentable—is adopted. Scholars such as Mark Johnson and George Lakoff
argue convincingly that the ‘objectivity’ in question here is always mythic: it promotes
a dichotomizing between objectivity and subjectivity that runs in tandem with other
discredited modes of binary thinking. I take seriously the contention that cognition
is embodied and that we, as subjects, are not radically ‘other’ to the environment we
live in but rather are, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, wholly enworlded.7 Thus, there is
no ‘object world’ as such, out there. As Lakoff and Johnson contend: “the real world is
not an objectivist universe, especially those aspects of the real world having to do with
human beings: human experience, human institutions, human language, the human
conceptual system” (Metaphors We Live By 218). I follow their lead then in adopting
what they term an “experientialist perspective” (Metaphors We Live By 230).
This brings to light a further paradox in relation to the status of the knowledge
and understanding elicited through an engagement with dance notation. Although
undeniably subjective in its reliance on my own felt response to the encoded movement,
my analysis of the scores is always anchored to a highly refined set of symbols that form
a signifying system and as such reflect collectively held values that arise at the nexus
of corporeal experience and more distanced analytical reflection. While these symbols,
in performance, are always experienced ‘subjectively’ by the reader/performer, the felt
dimension of this experience is not wholly private and incommunicable. Indeed, there
is a high degree of intersubjective consensus as to the meaning of notation symbols that
might provisionally qualify them as ‘objective’ as any other written text. The notation
community may debate the very fine points of if, when and how a tilt of the chest
feels/looks different to a fold of the whole torso, but it has a detailed symbology and
vocabulary, derived from years of observation, discussion and refinement, to which
these subtle discernments can be referred.

Animating the symbols

Usually, one of the big surprises when people encounter a widely used notation
system like BMN or Labanotation is the discovery that these systems do not represent
the dance in a mimetic way. In spite of my expertise as a notator, using Benesh
Movement Notation and Labanotation, I cannot always ‘see’ the dance when I read
a dance score. Rather, the notation serves as a visual technology through which
embodiment is encoded and can be re-enacted. That is to say, dance notation does not
primarily visualize how the body looks—visual markers of identity are absent from
the score—although there are times when for certain actions it does provide a vivid
visual trace of the paths of limbs through space.
 The Perpetual ‘Present’ of Dance Notation 187

Figure 1: Phrase from The Betrayed Girl’s Solo, The Rake’s Progress (De Valois, 1935)
notated by Victoria Watts in Benesh Movement Notation8
In figure 1, there is no indication given of the height, weight, race, or age of the
dancer. It is impossible to see what the dancer looks like from the information provided
here. Instead, dance notation gives graphic form to the experience of moving rather
than merely showing the visual appearance of the mover. For BMN, the five-line stave
provides a matrix upon which the position of extremities of the body can be plotted. If
you imagine a body stood up against that matrix, the top of the dancer’s head would
align with the top line of the stave, the top of the shoulders with the next line down,
then the waist, and next the knees. The feet would be flush against the bottom line.
The score here should be read from left to right, and is divided into bars rather like
music. The number 3 at the beginning indicates that there are 3 beats in each bar. I
have added in dotted vertical lines along the top stave to show how the bars are broken
up into ‘frames’ of movement, rather like filmstrip. Below I translate the meaning of
the symbols in the first five frames of this score into instructions for you to follow. I
encourage you to stand and try to physicalize the descriptions given.
1. Your feet are touching with the left behind the right. We know this is a ballet so
let’s assume some turn-out. There is no information about which way you are
facing so we can assume you are facing front. Your hands are in contact with the
body, underside of left hand touching left side of the waist and underside of right
hand touching right side of your waist.
2. Then, your head turns so your nose points to the right.
3. It turns to point back the other way to the left.
4. Next, your elbows are bent in front of you midway between waist and shoulder,
your hands are in front of you at shoulder height, your wrists are facing forwards,
and your hands are flexed forwards a medium amount. Your hands moved there
from your waist in a pretty direct route. At the same time your head assumed a
straight facing once again.
188 Victoria WATTS

Step forwards on your right foot and at the same time immediately make an 1/8
turn to the right. At the end of the step you should have a bent right knee and your left
leg should be straight with just your toes touching the floor directly behind you. While
you are stepping your hands move to the same level as the middle of your head in
front of you and your arms straighten. Your wrists are now facing down to the ground
and your hands are flexed backwards. Your head is tilted to the right, just a little, and
also turned to the right just a little.
Figure 2 shows the same extract of choreography but this time notated using a
different system of analysis. Labanotation is read from the bottom of the page towards
the top and the centre line of the stave serves as a timeline and denotes a bisecting of
the body. Symbols to the right of the centre line generally represent an action with
a body part on the right side of the body and vice versa. Further, the length of the
symbols represent the length of time take to complete an action. As in BMN, the
sequence is divided up into bars, correlating movement with music. Try to let my use
of language below guide you in understanding the different conceptions of movement
that Labanotation gives rise to, even when describing the same choreographic action.
1. You are standing, facing front, with your centre of gravity directly over your base
of support — in this case your feet — and they are together with the right foot
placed directly in front of the left. As I said before, we know this is a ballet so
let’s assume a degree of turn-out. Your arms are down by your sides, with hands
directly below shoulders, but you also have a 90º bend at the elbows. Your hands
are in contact with each side of your waist.
2. Your face is directed out to the right side.
3. Your face is turned to the left side.
4. You make 1/8 turn clockwise with your weight on your left leg. At the same time
your arms raise in front of you such that your hands are at about shoulder height
and your arms are contracted. By this I mean your hands have moved closer to
your shoulders. When the arms are straight there is no degree of contraction and
when the arms have contracted so far that the hands are as close to the shoulders
as possible there is said to a 6 degree contraction. In this instance there is a 4
degree contraction in the arms and the palms of the hands are facing forward.
The head returns to normal here.
5. You take a step forward to the front right corner and end with the weight over
that new point of support, with your center of gravity lowered somewhat closer
to the floor (the result being you have a bent knee on your standing leg). Your
left leg extends behind you with toes still touch the floor. At the same time your
arms lengthen somewhat into just one degree of contraction and move a little
higher such that your hands are now higher than shoulder height. Your palms
hold their facing to the front and the head turns 1/8 to the right and tilts to the
right simultaneously.
 The Perpetual ‘Present’ of Dance Notation 189

Figure 2: Figure 1: Phrase from The Betrayed Girl’s Solo, The Rake’s Progress (De Valois, 1935)
notated by Victoria Watts in Labanotation.
190 Victoria WATTS

If you took the time to try to move through my written instructions you surely got
a sense that this process of decoding individual symbols and reassembling them in
the body places the score at quite some remove from a mimetic representation of the
dance. The symbols themselves provide points of orientation but you have to fit them
to your own body, especially as you try to join individual instructions together and
make them flow in the correct rhythm. It is for this reason I suggest the dance does not
reside in the symbols themselves but rather is preserved through the interplay amongst
the symbols and between the score and the reader/dancer. Movement is abstracted from
the moving body and ‘captured’ on paper but can only be re-accessed in the act of
moving. To be realized, the movement must once again be particularized to the body
of the reader/dancer.

Dancing history in the here and now

Throughout this paper I have alluded to the fact that I consider dance notation—
both the many systems and the scores they variously engender—to be a cultural
practice. That is to say it both shapes and is shaped by all the various forces of culture
at play during the time of its creation and use. It is, consequently, dynamic. These
cultural forces include the visual and the physical. I tested this contention in a case
study, examining four different scores of George Balanchine’s ballet Serenade, two
written in BMN and two in Labanotation and spanning a period of just over twenty
years, from 1964 to 1988, in the performance history of the work. I did find that there
was a marked difference in physicality that came through the earlier scores than the
later scores (Watts). The earlier scores appeared to give rise to a more grounded,
rather more angular and percussive performance mode whereas the later ones had
softened considerably with more circularity and more flourish. If we were fortunate
enough to be in a room together I would pick out some moments from each of the
scores and demonstrate specifically how they can capture very nuanced differences in
movement quality. I would remind you that these differences are not mere artefacts
of a notator’s fancy but can be understood within the context of broader shifts in
embodiment, tracing kinaesthetic regimes or ‘corporeal epistemes’9 much as Martin
Jay and his contemporaries, laid out their ideas about ‘scopic regimes’ (borrowing the
term from Christian Metz). My work with scores gives flesh to an understanding of
the kinaesthetic regimes.

Conclusions
Dance notation scores are rich with information about dances. From a quick glance
at a score a notator can glean information about how many people are dancing and
where they are in space in relation to each other; discern something of the density
and complexity of the action and the overall structure of the work; and assess her/
his own degree of familiarity with the movement vocabulary. Nonetheless, these
same scores tell very little about moving, and even less about a more holistic notion
 The Perpetual ‘Present’ of Dance Notation 191

of embodiment, until they are brought to life through the reader’s own body. I think
this bodily knowing, this necessity of a lived, corporeal understanding is one of the
strengths of dance notation as a resource for scholarship. As I noted above, research
using these archival sources necessitates a bridging of Csordas’ aptly identified gap
between representation and being-in-the-world. Moreover, there is a literal bringing
back to life of the historical object—the documented performance. The ‘present’ of the
preserved dance, lost to us in the past as a performance that we can see and experience,
is given again through the body of the dancer in the here and now. The past, preserved,
is made present. We can feel and subsequently see the difference between dancing the
1964 version and the 1983 version of the ballet. But, unlike a fly preserved in amber,
the dance in the score cannot be observed as it was. Not simply because we can only
understand the past through the lens of our contemporary experience but also, and
I want to suggest more crucially, because we can only access this embodied history
in dance by pulling it into the present and making it live again. Employing Csordas’
cultural phenomenology in order to try and recover historical shifts in modes of moving
brings me to a fuller awareness of the meat and bones of my own flesh. The more I
seek to encounter the documented history of my art, and to explore how the stylised
movements of dance lie at one end of a continuum within a broader physical culture,
the more the joyful necessity of using my own body as the means of discovering/
understanding pulls me back into the present moment of experience. Insofar as the
past is repeatedly brought back to life in the reanimating process of performing the
notation score, it is also repeatedly effaced, diluted, negated by the force of the here
and now in which it is lived.10
192 Victoria WATTS

Figure 3: An example of a word abbreviation system. This is a page from Thoinot Arbeau’s dance treatise Orchésographie,
published in 1588. Prose descriptions of elements of the dance, forming part of the discussion between dancing master
and his pupil Capriol, are accompanied by lists of letters that serve as an aide-mémoire for the sequence of steps in
one of the basses danses of the day.
 The Perpetual ‘Present’ of Dance Notation 193

Figure 4: An example of a track drawing system. The Beauchamps-Feuillet system (1671) was widely used in the early
18th century. The example here shows two dancers starting side by side (at the bottom of the page) and tracing the
pattern shown as they move through the dance, moving apart, making a quarter circle to come back together, and then
heading back down the room side by side. The ornate curlicues along the path indicate actions of the legs—what kinds
of steps to take, what part of the foot is in contact with the floor, and so forth. No indication is given here for carriage
of the arms or body.
194 Victoria WATTS

Figure 5: An example of a stick figure system. The figure shows Arthur Saint-Léon’s La Sténochorégraphie, published in
1852. Saint-Léon is one of a very few inventors of a notation system who was also a highly successful choreographer,
being the man responsible for choreographing Coppélia (1870). In the illustration one stave of movement is placed
above each stave of the musical score and a small stick figure shows separately port de bras along the top line and
actions of the feet and legs on the lines below that.
 The Perpetual ‘Present’ of Dance Notation 195

Figure 6: An example of a music note system. The close relationship between music and dance in western theatrical
traditions can be seen in many dance notation systems. Indeed, figures 4 and 5 both correlate dance notation with the
musical score. It is unsurprising then that there have been many attempts to adapt the symbols of musical notation to
represent analysis of movement. This example, from Vladimir Ilyich Stepanov’s Alphabet des mouvements du corps
humain (1892) shows the adapted music notes arranged over three staves below each stave of music.
196 Victoria WATTS

Figure 7: An example of an abstract symbol system. Margaret Morris published her Dance Script in 1928 in the book
The Notation of Movement. Like Stepanov and some others before her, she attempted to analyse dance movement
from anatomical principles rather than on the basis of codified dance vocabulary. My thanks go to the Margaret Morris
Movement Association for their kind permission to reproduce.
 The Perpetual ‘Present’ of Dance Notation 197

Notes:
1 Chroma / Tryst / Symphony in C. Wayne MacGregor, Christopher Wheeldon, George
Balanchine, chors., The Royal Ballet, The Royal Opera House, London, June 10th 2010.
2 The Royal Ballet is one of a handful of professional dance companies that employ staff
notators, or choreologists, to aid in the preservation and restaging of repertory.
3 Rhonda Ryman observes: “Despite differing basic perspectives, it is interesting that systems
begin to resemble one another as they expand. Conté, Zorn and Eshkol-Wachmann, for
example, use numerical short forms to specify ballet positions. Floor plans look remarkably
similar in Benesh and Labanotation.” Ryman does not speculate as to why this might be the
case. Nor does she assess whether these common features improve from system to system or
simply recur without substantial modification. Rhonda Ryman, “Review: [Untitled],” Dance
Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 4.1 (1986).
4 In 1983 Claudia Jeschke published Tanz Schriften. Ihre Geschichte und Methode [Dance Writings.
Their History and Methods – my translation] but this is only available in German. I can
confirm that she follows Guest’s taxonomy for classifying notation systems. The book
includes illustrated explanations of a very wide range of dance notation systems. However,
my relatively poor skills in reading German have prevented me from making a thorough
study of this text. Claudia Jeschke, Tanz Schriften. Ihre Geschichte und Methode (Oberholzner,
Laufen: Comes Verlag, 1983).
5 See Rhonda Ryman’s review in Dance Research for a balanced and informed critical response
to Guest’s work. Ryman is one of just a handful of bilingual notators, having trained to
advanced level in both Labanotation and BMN. Ryman, “Review: [Untitled].”
6 My thanks to the reviewer who reminded me that the present of dancing enfolds the past—
both the history of the dancer’s body, the choreographic traces, and the tradition of dance
itself—and the potential for movement as the trajectory of performance reaches relentlessly
onwards through time. At the same time, moving here and now in search of the movement
there and then is also movement in search of the next move, the next moment, and manifests
the future tense—the “I will” and the “I can”.
7 Raymond Gibbs and Shaun Gallagher have both drawn on the findings of recent discoveries
in neuroscience, experimental psychology, and cognitive science to present reasoned
accounts of the important role human embodiment plays in the development and functioning
of human perception and cognition. Raymond W. Jr. Gibbs, Embodiment and Cognitive Science
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the
Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).
8 A version of the choreography notated here can be seen danced by Nicola Katrak in The
Royal Ballet’s 1982 production of the ballet, available on youTube. The notated phrase begins
at about 59 seconds into the clip, after she has placed her sewing on the floor. “Betrayed Girl’s
Solo,” The Rake’s Progress. Ninette de Valois, chor. The Royal Ballet, 1982. YouTube. <www.
youtube.com/watch?v=clJ_ayzpBbM>
9 Susan Leigh Foster explains corporeal epistemes thus: “Choreography, kinaesthesia, and
empathy function together to construct corporeality in a given historical moment. By looking
at them alongside one another over time, it is possible to argue for the existence of corporeal
epistemes that participate in the production of knowledge and the structuring of power.”
(Foster 13)
10 Of course, practices of notation range more broadly than the focus in this article, on
reanimating the past, might lead a reader to believe. Alongside the ongoing process of
198 Victoria WATTS

documenting new and canonical repertory, scholars and artists in the field explore ways of
using systems such as Labanotation and Eshkol-Wachman notation to provoke new ways
of moving and inspire new choreographic activity. And notators share their expertise in
movement, its observation and analysis, in interdisciplinary forums. For example, a recent
symposium, The 1st Workshop of Anthropomorphic Motion Factory: “Dance Notations
& Robot Motion” gathered notators from across Europe to begin discussions about new
collaborations in relation to robotics at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse, France, November 13-14,
2014. At the very same time, a panel discussion on “New Directions in Notation Research”
was taking place as part of the Society for Dance History Scholars/Congress on Research
in Dance conference at Iowa State University (November 13th-16th 2015). The field remains
vibrant and readers interested in current research practices would be well advised to seek
out proceedings of these events when they are published.

Works Cited:
6. ARBEAU, Thoinot. Orchesography. 1588. Trans. Beaumont, Cyril W. New York: Dance
Horizons, 1968.
7. BECK, Jill. ”Labanotation: Implications for the Future of Dance”. Choreography and Dance 1
(1988): 69-91.
8. BROWN, Ann Kipling, and PARKER, Monica. Dance Notation for Beginners. London: Dance
Books, 1984.
9. COHEN, Selma Jeanne. ”Notation, Anyone? Dance Notation Bureau Celebrates Its 20th
Anniversary”. Dance Magazine.July (1960): 44-.
10. CSORDAS, Thomas J. ”Embodiment and Cultural Phenomenology”. Perspectives on
Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture. Eds. Weiss, Gail and Honi Fern Haber.
New York: Routledge, 1999. 143-62.
11. _______”Somatic Modes of Attention”. Cultural anthropology 8.2 (1993): 135-56.
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com 1982.
13. ELKINS, James. Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2003.
14. EVANS, Jessica, and Stuart Hall. ”What Is Visual Culture?” Visual Culture: The Reader. Eds.
Evans, Jessica and Stuart Hall. London: Sage Publications, 1999. 1-7.
15. FOSTER, Susan Leigh. Choreographing Empathy. Kinesthesia in Performance. Abingdon; New
York: Routledge, 2011.
16. GARAFOLA, Lynn. ”Dance for a City. Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet”. Dance for a
City. Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet. Eds. Garafola, Lynn and Eric Foner. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999. 1-52.
17. GUEST, Ann Hutchinson. Choreo-Graphics: A Comparison of Dance Notation Systems from the
Fifteenth Century to the Present. 1989. New York: Gordon & Breach, 1998.
18. ________ ”The Dance Notation Field Here and Abroad”. Dance Magazine (1956): 36-37, 55-59.
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Visual after the Cultural Turn. Ed. Dikovitskaya, Margaret. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
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20. HALL, Fernau. ”Benesh Notation and Choreology”. Dance Scope.Fall (1966): 30-37.
21. JEFFERY, Harriott Castor. ”New Notation”. Programme for Chroma / Tryst / Symphony in C
2010: 22-25.
 The Perpetual ‘Present’ of Dance Notation 199

22. JENKS, Chris. ”The Centrality of the Eye in Western Culture: An Introduction”. Visual Culture.
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24. KUMMEL, Herbert. ”Toward a Literacy of Dance: Have You Read Any Good Ballets Lately?”
Arts in Society 13.2 (1976): 236-41.
25. LAKOFF, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. 1980. Chicagor: The University
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26. ________ Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New
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27. LOUPPE, Laurence. Traces of Dance: Drawings and Notations of Choreographers. Paris: Éditions
Dis Voir, 1994.
28. MASSEY, Catherine. ”Writing Dance: Three Forms of Tap Notation”. Dancer. April/May
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29. MAUSS, Marcel. ”Techniques of the Body”. Economy and Society 2.1 (1973): 70-88.
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34. SAINT LÉON, Arthur. La Sténochorégraphie, Ou Art D’écrire Promptement La Danse. Paris:
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