Following the proposal of Gelfond and Vasiliev (2016 J. High Energy Phys. JHEP10(2016)067), multi-particle scattering amplitudes are represented as conserved higher-spin (HS) charges. The advantage of such reformulation is that multi-particle amplitudes acquire the form of an integral of a closed form in the correspondence space unifying usual space-time with the twistor-like spinor space. This allows one to identify seemingly different formulae for amplitudes in terms of twistor and space-time integrals. An example of tree MHV amplitudes of Yang–Mills theory is considered in detail. Our results are derived using unfolded dynamics formulation of massless fields. In these terms all information on the amplitude is contained in a single function that, even for lower spin amplitudes, can be interpreted as a HS symmetry parameter. The proposed technique can be useful to relate different approaches to amplitude calculations.