I first came across dance notation in a fascinating New York Times piece discussing the financial woes of New York City’s Dance Notation Bureau. The Bureau was a repository of Labanotation – an intricate system of movement notation developed by a man named Rudolf Laban in the early 20th century. For X years, the Dance Notation Bureau had documented and archived these elaborate visual scores, but after years of mismanagement, the archivists and the scores they had worked so hard to create and protect were at the brink of auction. Fortunately, the story had a happy ending – all of the staff was rehired to continue documenting new works (and digitize their archives), and their work continues to breathe life into once forgotten works. But having already been a fan of systems of taxonomy (I’ll just wave my nerd flag here) the story piqued my interest in Laban, his methods, and the idea of dance notation in general.
Rudolf Laban was the Hungarian-born choreographer and dance theoretician who formalized Labanotation in the 1928 publication of ‘Kinetographie Laban’. It’s not the only type of movement notation – attempts to notate the language of dance have been made since the 1600’s, and there’s another contemporary system called Benesh notation that is popular alternative – but for our purposes, the minutiae of the different systems don’t make a whole lot of difference. I’m more interested in the broad strokes they all share. And also, a disclaimer – dance notation is, I suppose, less a system of taxonomy and more of a method of recording and cataloging a media – however, for our purposes, it still is worth discussion because it is a system that breaks down a creative medium into its component parts. this site.
The most interesting thing I read in the NYT article was the following line: “Laban’s original vision was to give dance a written form so that it can be reproduced. Without that, he felt, dance would never be a respected art form.” In this element, I find a strong connection with McCloud’s work. For most people, comics remain a medium of fancy, relegated to the back pages of the newspaper. But by formalizing the elements of that medium, McCloud could easily show the relationships between his comics and ‘fine’ art. So, for McCloud, taxonomy is a great populist tool.
For Laban though, I think the obsession with systematization was (a bit) more practical. Like other performance arts, the defining characteristic of dance is its temporality – every performance is entirely unique, and once executed, will never happen again the same way. That real-time element is also a real practical problem – how can pieces authentically be reproduced over time if there isn’t some type of permanent document defining the composition? Imagine a scoreless orchestra having to learn pieces by picking out every part by ear from another performance – it would take an eternity, and over time, the original edges of the composition would be lost. So by divorcing the medium from its defining element, Labanotation loses the authenticity of the original, but creates a permanent document of the medium.
Laban and McCloud both remove time from the description – and i will too, at least at first. Check in again tomorrow!
