The Written Language of Dance or Preserving Dance on Paper

Abstract

Dance is a universal phenomenon and has existed throughout history although it often seems to have done so in isolation. However, its basic material, the human body used in an expressive and symbolic way, is fundamentally the same. By discovering an international means of communicating the dance experience verbally or through a written text of some kind, cross-cultural communication through dance would arise without having to actually witness a performance. Ann Hutchison, a specialist in Labanotation (the most widely-used dance notation system), believes that part of the reason why people have refrained from using a written method of recording dance was the fear that by analyzing too deeply a medium such as dance ve would lose its spontaneity and original impact.' It seems, however, that this would be the very bridge connecting different languages without having to perform an entire dance in order to communicate its expression. Dance has been handed down from generation to generation by means of imitation and by oral tradition. And yet movement can be understood and analyzed by studying kinesics and by breaking it down to its various components of Time, Space and Energy. Although actual written records of dances have existed since the 15th century it is only since the late 1920's that several well-defined attempts were made to preserve dance by using a recorded, written language. Myron Nadel states in The Dance Experience that a language, when recorded, becomes literature2 and that because of the non-verbal and physical nature of dance it has been closer to legend than to literature. The creation of dance steps is known as choreography which, in fact, is a misnomer because the double root of the term comes from the Greek