Getting to grips with dance descriptions is certainly an acquired skill, and their interpretation leaves them open to “local variation”.  No problem as long as you always dance with the same group; and if you can remember, for example, the hundreds of Scottish Country Dances then you are very lucky.  Me?  I need a CribCard before every dance – or a check with the “little Green Book” as F.L. Pilling’s Scottish Country Dances in Diagrams is commonly known.

But as useful an aide-mémoire Pilling definitely is, it only tells you the known figure to perform or direction to move.  What it does not tell you is the precise positions of arms, hands, feet or legs (or eye contact!).  More complex dance forms need this information and much more, and one of the better known dance notation systems is Labanotation.  I asked Jean Jarrell, Tutor in charge of Notation Studies at Laban, Europe’s leading contemporary dance conservatoire in London, about its origins.

“Rudolf Laban was born in 1879 in Pressburg, Bratislava.  His father was an army general; a high ranking officer in what was then the Austro Hungarian Empire under Emperor Franz Joseph.  Laban had an eclectic education, frequently left to his own devices and at other times travelling extensively with his father.  He was exposed to different cultures, folk dance styles and rituals.  It is known that he witnessed the Dervish rituals and consequently the idea that movement can lead to altered states of consciousness attracted him greatly.”

“He was particularly interested in the movements of working people and used these as a basis for choreographic invention.  From this early period he was concerned by the lack of any symbolic mnemonic system to enable him to remember his movement patterns.  He also saw the lack of any kind of movement theory as a major handicap to the development of dance.  In 1910 he founded an artists’ centre in Ascona, Switzerland where he first met Mary Wigman who is, perhaps with Kurt Jooss, one of his best known pupils.  He was also a member of an art colony on Lake Maggiore and involved in the Dada movement which began life in Zurich in 1915‑16 where his influence was considerable.  Up until the outbreak of World War I his productions were increasingly performed in Munich, Vienna, Stuttgart and other European cities.  The impact of his work continued after the war with his numerous schools and his company.”

“He increasingly involved some of his colleagues and students in his search for a system of notation which he finally presented to the dance world in1928.  His book Schrifttanz was published and Kinetography Laban was publicly recognised at the Dance Congress in Essen.  At the outbreak of World War II, a number of dancers who had studied with Laban or his disciples fled to America and established the Dance Notation Bureau.  They also rechristened his system Labanotation.  Consequently the system that is used today has been considerably developed through the efforts of a number of people, although the basic principles have remained unchanged.  It can be used to document any kind of movement although undoubtedly the closer the movement parameters are to the principles of analysis of the system, the more effective it will be.”

I knew that Mats Melin had studied Labanotation so asked him how he used it.  “I learned elementary Labanotation as part of my Ethnochoreology studies and found it fascinating.  It is a very accurate notation system, but like any notation it is only as accurate as to how well it is notated.  The skill is not only to learn the symbols and how to use them, but to read a movement in itself.  If you were to notate a person walking 4 steps forward it is essentially only 4 symbols representing the 4 steps, but as you can notate how the person is walking – on toes, feet turned out, knees slightly flexed, arms moving, hands moving, head moving etc etc – all these aspects have to be taken in and recorded accurately, so a similar (identical would be impossible) reproduction by another person can be made.  If you can see the movement several times this becomes easier, but to notate a movement sequence once in real time is a real skill.  Labanotation is a logical notation system, it may look difficult, but so does the alphabet if you cannot read it.”

Jean Jarrell says, “The basic principles of Labanotation are highly logical and it is possible to learn to read basic step and gesture patterns in an hour.  Like any language, learning to speak (write) it takes a little longer.  However, ultimately the skill resides more in the analysis, in deciding what to document than it does in remembering notation rules.  At the end of a 30 hour course our first year students can read scores of much of the dance repertoire of today, which enables them to experience elements of their dance heritage they might not otherwise encounter.  Labanotation can record movement with a very high level of accuracy but all movement systems and all notation systems rely on convention, albeit sometimes unconsciously.”

Jean provided me with a sample of Labanotation and this is shown below.  When I first saw it I was as confused as many of you will be – but Jean has kindly provided some notes alongside it.  Looks more fun than Sudoku to me!  And far more useful too.

Pondering this lack of literacy in dance notation set Mats Melin wondering if this explained why dance is often at the bottom of the priority list in Western society: “If you look at literature, music and dance and rank them in order on how easily they are understood in notation form, they usually come out in just that order – literature i.e. reading, music and dance (last).  Why?  Most people, in UK – about 99% of the population – are literate; reading and writing is for most people second nature.  Music notation is something we are aware of.  We have seen a music score, and we have most likely at some point been exposed to how to read and understand it, and even though we may not necessarily know how to read it we are aware of it.  (I am not dealing here with learning to play music by ear, which is a different matter.)  What about general exposure to movement or “dance” notation (as in this case) then?  How many have actively been encouraged to learn a notation system for dance?  I am now not referring to dance descriptions using words, but with symbols as in Labanotation.  Unless you are specifically interested in this field you are not likely to be aware of it.  The art of writing (alphabets) has been with us for thousands of years, music notation for some 500 or so years, but dance notation only 70 years or thereabout and only in a limited way.  No wonder it is not in the general consciousness of our everyday lives.”

“Looking at the issue from this perspective it is easy to see why the written word is most easily understood and therefore most highly regarded and assessed, followed by music.  Dance/movement is not as easily understood in this respect.  You can discuss, if you have to, what is good or bad writing or a good or a bad music score, but is movement ever discussed in this context?  We discuss movement we like or dislike from our individual standpoint from our visual observations but hardly from a symbol notation basis.  Is this not often reflected in how dance is regarded when it is to appear at an event?  A typical scenario I have encountered is that there is never a question that the speaker (writer) would not be compensated in some way, and of course the musicians will be compensated, but it is not as certain that it is deemed necessary to compensate the dancers, and if they are, they are certainly not compensated on an equal basis with the other two categories.  I am happy to say that there are exceptions to this generalisation.  I am not sure if you agree with me, but I have seen it often enough to confirm this pattern.  There is a hierarchy of the level of importance attributed to each discipline, and I believe it reflects on how aware we generally are to each one of them.”

“What would happen if all three notation systems were taught widely at school simultaneously?  Reading and writing, music notation and movement notation would then be in our awareness from an early age and therefore possibly not questioned as to which one is more important?  Young children that have been taught simple Labanotation, as a game, have in a short time shown an understanding of what certain symbols represent and can reproduce simple movement patterns by looking at sequences of symbols just as well as they can form words and sentences by combining another set of symbols – the alphabet.  It is an interesting thought isn’t it?”

Yes, Mats raises a number of interesting issues there, and I wondered if the Dancing Masters of old had a responsibility for the lack of precise notations or a suitable system.  After all, if everyone had the “words” their income source would dry up wouldn’t it?  Hmm!  I leave the last comment to Rudolf Laban’s biographers: “Rudolf Laban's passion was to establish dance as an art of equal standing to its sister arts, a place it had never held.  It had to establish a medium through its own literacy, hence his burning desire to find a notation for dance.  Without literacy dance would never be taken seriously by the cultural elite.”

If you want more information about Laban and Labanotation check the website www.laban.org/laban/history/rudolf_laban.phtml