Problems in Reconstructing a Movement Choir

When I get asked what I’m doing with dance at a dinner party, I usually say that I teach tap and ballet and take some classes – the real answer is just too long and involved.  Here in the blog I can geek out and give the real answer to the question “what are you studying in graduate school?”.

I want to see what a movement choir of Rudolf Laban really looks like.  Aspects of movement choirs and their notation make them extremely difficult to reconstruct from the notation score.  The choirs have scores, but the scores are difficult to read.  They’re not written in everyday notation (ha ha – “everyday” Labanotation!), but in a simpler form of the language that existed during its development.   They also make use of Knust’s group notation, which applies symbols usually used on body parts to whole groups, allowing for description of choreography which prioritizes the logic of the mass.  This group notation is so fascinating.  Systems of movement description demonstrate the needs and preferences of the dance forms which created them.  I would say they also demonstrate the cultures that created those dance forms.  If this is true, the graphic, elaborate symbols of group notation as applied to Laban’s movement choirs show very clearly the importance of the human mass to movement choir practitioners, and possibly to modern humanity.  The mass was industrialization and danger, it was also the way to salvation, through returning to true community organized not around buying and selling, but the simple bond of humanness.  The amateur choristers wanted to break out from the oppressive mechanization, but to do it in a mass.

The notation of Titan, Laban’s movement choir from 1928 is so much more about these shifting and reforming geometric patterns than about individual body movement.  A regular notation score has many symbols for each part of the body within the staff, but these scores are filled with symbols in the margins to show how the group interacts.  Within the staff is relatively sparse, with a few steps, or broad movements of the arms and upper-body together.  The contrast between what needed to be recorded to notate a movement choir, and what for a contemporary dance is so big that in notation we’ve had to add columns to the staff just to hold everything we want to say about the body.  But no, what was important for a participant in a movement choir was staying in a rigorously exact relationship to the group.  Movement choirs were idealism in action fueled by the belief that their performance could bring a return to man’s natural, pre-industrial state of grace.

So the scores are not written in the language or mood of a contemporary dance or Labanotation practitioner, but an archaic one.  Resources do exist to read them such as chapters Ann Hutchinson Guest’s Advanced Notation Series, or Odette Blum’s writing on older forms of Notation in the Advanced Packet published by the DNB.  Resources in the DNB Extension Archives held at Ohio State include Shrifftanz, the original treatise of Labanotation, and many papers of Albrect Knust designed to explain this group notation.

Sheila Marion has also established that systems of Notation will tailor themselves to the stylistic aspects of the dances they represent.  The system will convey only information deemed necessary while assuming that the reader will be knowledgeable in that style, and thus infer stylistic elements back into the movement upon reconstruction.   The bodily movements in a movement choir are in whatever the style of dance is that was so popular in 1920′s Germany.  At the time a huge amateur movement spread across the middle and working classes to learn and perform dances.  The Shriftanz manual shows in it’s large-print, almost leaflet styling that the new Labanotation was designed to disseminate dance as quickly and easily as possible.  Helen Priest Rogers, who studied with Laban in 1936 in Germany, explains how the scores were distributed across networks of amateur dance clubs to facilitate the new dance.  These scores were written with expediency and ease of use in mind.  I don’t have a bodily understanding of the style, though I know that Laban was seeking to develop a new dance form that emphasized mobility and defined space through the use of the body.  Without a deep understanding of the style, I will have a more difficult, but not impossible time understanding what is indicated in these scores.

The movement choirs’ participatory nature also creates a problem.  Reconstruction from the score of most dances calls for in depth study of the style, and the context of the dance, as well as detailed analysis of the score in order to accurately coach dancers to perform the movement in front of an audience.  In a movement choir, especially at their beginnings, the performers were the audience.  They have little or no dramatic content, and the movement is very simple.  What they are about is the way they made the participants feel – particularly 1920′s German middle class participants reeling from a late and rapid industrialization.  Imagination goes a long way, but the process of truly reconstructing a movement choir presents the problem of coaching performers in a more complex way than ordinary reconstruction.

Of course, all reconstruction of historic dance is problematic, as Selma Jeane Cohen demonstrates in Next Week, Swan Lake.  We can never really know what a dance looked like, or in the case of a movement choir, what it looked and felt like, at its first performance.  There is so much we can’t know, but I believe that highlights the importance of using what we do know, and bringing all available resources to bear on each reconstruction.