Dance and Movement Notations

In "Envisioning Information" by Edward Tufte there is a chapter where several dance notations are shown and analyzed (pages 114-119). In that section, there is one very interesting quote on the limitations of these notations, from Lincoln Kirstein, of the New York City Ballet, (from his book "Ballet Alphabet"):

A desire to avoid oblivion is the natural possession of any artist. It is intensified in the dancer, who is far more under the threat of time than others. The invention of systems to preserve dance-steps have, since the early eighteenth century, shared a startling similarity. All these books contain interesting prefatory remarks on the structure of dancing. The graphs presented vary in fullness from the mere bird’s-eye scratch-track of Feuillet, to the more musical and inclusive stenochoreography of Saint-Léon and Stepanov, but all are logically conceived and invitingly rendered, each equipped with provocative diagrams calculated to fascinate the speculative processes of a chess champion. And from a practical point of view, for work in determining the essential nature of old dances with any objective authority, they are all equally worthless. The systems, each of which may hold some slight improvement over its predecessor, are so difficult to decipher, even to initial mastery of their alphabet, that when students approach the problem of putting the letters together, or finally fitting the phrases to music, they feel triumphant if they can decipher even a single short solo enchaînement. An analysis of style is not attempted, and the problem of combining solo variations with a corps de ballet to provide a chart of an entire ballet movement reduces the complexity of the problem to the apoplectic.

This paper has a review of some of the dance notations mentioned in the book and others, and some interesting quotes as well: http://ewic.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_eva15_mpa2_paper2.pdf

kai-qu / notation

Dance and Movement Notations #10