The Mischief of a Renegade Dance Notator

Impossible Scores: The Mischief of a Renegade Dance Notator

A process of generating movement with creative Laban dance notation scores repurposes this system of movement description while challenging its traditional use as a tool for documentation and preservation of choreographic works.  This paper describes my work with creating, dancing and disseminating scores that convey indeterminate choreographic ideas.  I discuss the initial inquiry, sketches, subsequent challenges, final product, and proposed next steps with attention to the conceptual aspects.  I draw from firsthand experience; my own thoughts, discussions and studio practice as well as writings from music, dance, and cultural theorists support and situate the work.

This project arose as an idiosyncratic response to several factors.  I was inspired by salient facts about the history of dance notation and perceived attitudes among dancers about the system.  Experiences reading and writing dance notation and a personal interest in destabilizing the predominant, positivist approach to dance reconstruction found in my field were also factors that led to this particular investigation.

Dance notation has historically had a mysterious polarizing effect in the culture of Western concert dance.  Practitioners who feel that notation of dance legitimizes, proliferates, and supports the work of dance argue with those who view notation as a reductive activity that eviscerates dancing of its ephemeral essence.  Many students in my dance department resist the required coursework in Laban studies, as they would mathematics classes—only more vehemently.  Students are offended by the static appearance and reductive nature of structured notation.

Moreover, dancers in the pro-notation camp have responded to predominant anti-notation sentiment with defensiveness about their practice that seems to deepen the divide.  Notators discuss among themselves the benefits of their practice with a sense of being misunderstood and underappreciated.  In a discussion of the demise of Feuillet notation, Ann Hutchinson Guest sides with Angiolini in criticizing Noverre, with his strong sentiments of opposition to that system (Dance Notation 66-67).

Dance notation is also the site of conveyance of power within the field of dance. Hutchinson Guest links the fall of Feuillet’s popularity to the ascendancy in dance among the uneducated, here with a tone of lament:

However the benefits of written dance are not to be assumed.  Activities of dance preservation and reconstruction spark lively discussions of the location of original dance and issues of ownership and copyright (Cohen, 1-18). The relationship of Feuillet’s work to the increase of nationalistic identity France is an example the use of dance writing to exert political control (Louppe 82).

Dance practice is also characterized by constant, intentional change in methods of making, performing and seeing dancing.  Systems of movement notation fit the dance styles they describe (Marion 139 – 147), and thus rapidly adapt or are thrown out for new ones (Hutchinson Guest, Dance Notation 78-116).  Laban notation is a highly comprehensive, rational system of movement notation in which the space, time and body aspects of movement are most aptly recorded (Hutchinson Guest Labanotation 11).   Imagery and process driven choreographic methods are prominent in contemporary dance as exemplified by William Forsythe and the Gaga technique method of Batsheva.  Dances in which the motivations are more determined than their results call for new systems of notation.

Despite the decreasing utility and popularity of Laban dance notation, I am not ready to give up its use.   The system is comprehensive and deterministic, but it is also emergent.  Rudolf Laban left it open to be developed by other users (Hutchinson Guest Dance Notation 87).  In Laban theory classes at the Ohio State University, I have found that working with Laban notation deepens and enriches my understanding of meovement, adding layers of conceptual complexity that I feel, rather than reducing the experience.  In particular, I developed a curiosity about my own attempts to literally read mistakes in written Labanotation.  In a respectful spirit of repurposing and recoupment I decided to explore the ways I could adapt and undermine Labanotation towards my own interests.

Initial research

Brian Ferneyhough is a composer who writes musical scores so intricate as to be impossible for the performer to accomplish.  I wasn’t able to determine what difference this complicated notation made in the sound of his music.  I found it important to look for a specific effect Ferneyhough’s use of notation had on the outcome of the music that set it apart from traditionally notated music.   I looked for critical writing on him to help me make sense of this work.  This led me to contemporary composer and writer Trevor Wishart’s theory of musical gesture (126-129).

To paraphrase this theory, Wishart backgrounds his critical analysis of music and its notation with a short history of the written word in Western thought, beginning with the work of Plato.  He also draws on the Marxist theory of praxis to call for a theory of sound based not on the written symbols of what he describes as the “scribal culture”, but on the “musical gesture” (Wishart 45-70).   He discusses the dialogue between musical notation, instrument technology and Western music common practice, and uses the term “lattice” to describe music notation – it is a system of recording time and abstracted pitch. Wishart discusses Ferneyhough’s scores with ambiguity as to whether Ferneyhough subverts or enhances the performance of musical gesture.

Parallels can be drawn between dance and music and their respective traditions of practice and notation. Labanotation, though it can describe elements of movement such as relationships between body parts, or anatomical motivation, focuses primarily on directional motivation of movement, omitting information about the inner and outer stimulus for movement and the muscular response to that stimulus (Hutchinson Guest, Labanotation, 12) Overall, the impression is of a critique of ossification in Western music and political control through, and the loss of a purpose for the music itself. While dance has not progressed in service of its notation system, analogies can be drawn between instrument technology and dance style.  Style in dance (my own definition) is the result of specific technologies in dance practice, which can place limits on choreographic outcome.

Still unsure of the mechanics of my proposed scores, I began to sketch dance phrases and try to perform them.  I used several approaches; I could write movements that were logically or anatomically incorrect.  I could include symbols for images in my notation to create physical relationships to images.  I could also, like Ferneyhough, write logically sound scores that would be so physically intricate as to create the opportunity for the performer to enter a state of attention that in itself would be a compelling movement expression.   As a way of addressing choreography and techniques driven by specific states of attention, such as that of Meg Stuart or Ohad Naharin, I could use relationship signs and symbols creatively to notate these states of attention.

Challenges

My sketches revealed practical and theoretical problems.  Some had to do with the intricate and comprehensive quality of Laban notation, and other problems arose out of my own conditioning as a dancer.  Conceptual problems arose as to how these dances addressed issues of power and how they would be conveyed to an audience.

The first challenge I came up against was the great amount of detail that can be described using Labanotation.  Almost any physically possible movement I could conceive of is describable using structured movement description.  In addition, motif description already allows for open-ended scores, which can be solved with consideration of individual process.  I was immediately forced to refine my process to focus on highly intricate notation and physically or logically impossible tasks, as well as motif description of poetic images rather than spatial, temporal, and anatomical information.

In the writing of illogical scores I thought of the score as notation poetry – however the comparison to poetry breaks down in that notation symbols do not convey meaning visually as words do, (even when the syntax of the words is illogical).  Movement notation must be reassembled into movement to give access to the meaning of the movement.  Louppe describes Fuillet’s notation system using Rousseau’s terminology: “. . . we can say  that the language of Feuillet is a ‘geometer’s tongue,’ not a ‘poet’s tongue’” (82).  And the dances I was creating, once reassembled, were not necessarily things of beauty, as you can see in this silly video:

In addition, my intent to transgress rules of Labanotation was undermined by my own rudimentary understanding of this amazingly complex system.

My attempts to create scores based on visual beauty brought me to similar challenges.  Was I creating an object or a dance?  I find a well-written, hand-drawn notation score to be a thing of beauty, but even some of the most beautiful notation scores are written on graph paper that shows their utilitarian purpose.   I became interested in repurposing dance notation as visual art and considered whether pencil drawings or Labanwriter symbols, refined in Photoshop, would be more appropriate.  Here I came up against a conflict between formalism and attention to fuction.  The scores I created out of primarily aesthetic concerns left out direction symbols (also the primary unit for describing movement in the Laban system) and were written in motif to give a more spacious, sinewy design.  But they seemed without much content.  The best feature of these “aesthetic scores” is that they address dancers’ complaints about the ugliness of the blocky, modernist direction symbols.

At this point it seemed the illogical and anatomically impossible scores were potentially the most generative of ideas.  Attempts to describe my process led to the question, “aren’t you just writing bad code?”  It seemed that writing something illogical with a system based on logic might just cause the system to fade away, and create a piece of nonsense.  It became apparent that I would need to be judicious in the scores, attempting to break only one or two rules of the system at a time and keeping the scores as tidy as possible outside of that.

I was challenged by my own dancing, which while keeping me generally safe from accidents and injury, also serve to limit possibilities of movement open to me.  I approached the scores with as much determination to accomplish what was written as I could muster, but my body’s self-protective mechanisms took over at times.  I was also concerned not to further the rationality and abstraction of the system of notation that I was attempting to repurpose and undermine.

As I worked I could not quite imagine the purpose of these scores.  While the project called for bodily application to bring it to its completion, nothing that I generated particularly merited stage performance without further development.  I thought the scores had potential to address the story of the power structure in dance, and to further destabilize the idea of notation as a tool for fixing dance, preserving “original” works, and making present the “aura” of individual choreographers through fetishizing of their work through scores (Thomas, Helen 129).  I would have to refine my idea of the final product and audience for these scores or the dances they created.

Generative Experiments

In order to address the challenges, I conceived of two separate ways of packaging and conceiving of the scores, and separated the types of scores I was creating by method.   I rehearsed in order to develop a sense of play within rigorous compliance to the scores.

I found the scores provided parameters that pushed beyond my own techniques.  Fuillet’s notation may have done the same for French dance (loupe 90 – 91).  The most appropriate mode for developing movement based on illogical scores would require a development of a technique of honest and rigorous exploration of what was written.  In this sense I count these scores as useful compositional tools.

The scores were interesting in that they have reliable and repeatable aspects, therefore they retain the structural support to for solving abstract or multi-level choreographic problems.  While improvisation is an extremely useful tool for cultivating awareness and exploring unknown movement, the results can be as unreliable as the situation of the improvisor, which contributes to the exploration.  However, since the scores are not performable in an exactly reliable way in space and time as such, there is an aspect to them which must be created with each performance, a usage of dance notation which Jeschke calls for (Jeschke 4).

The issues of purpose and audience for the scores resulted in several different iterations of the actual documents.  I solved this problem with one project which will move towards a greater sense of refinement in the object of the score itself, and which is not necessarily designed for utilitarian purposes, and one product that is a cheaply reproduced pamphlet designed to emphasize the use of mechanical reproduction and focus on dissemination of the score.

Helen Thomas considers that scores may be a way of cheaply reproducing dance on a mass scale, with the implications of mass distribution discussed by Benjamin (Thomas 130):

One iteration works with the idea of creating an aura for an original handmade art object in the form of a screenprint of handwritten notation on fine paper, presented on the white space of a gallery wall.  This brings the visual aspect of the symbols forward, but sets up a double bind in which the dance becomes identified with the score and loses its embodiment, as well as heightening the sense of the artists’ hand, and thus, aura.  The other iteration is a pamphlet inexpensively Xeroxed on newsprint.  Newsprint uniquely conveys the greytones of the pencil drawing, but the graph paper lines are retained.  This method highlights inexpensive mechanical reproduction as inspired by Benjamin.  This form of reproduction and dissemination are appropriate for my agenda for dance experience and notation.  The irony in this expression is the dearth of actual audience members who could make heads or tails of the scores within.

Next Steps in the Process

The results of the process to this point were rough drafts in terms of both the dance phrases and physical scores.  The next step in the process would be refining the scores themselves with a focus on clarity of grammar for the sections that do hold to the rules of labanotation.  Further iterations might drop the use of notation of imagery through made-up symbols due to the lack of any real need for notation of these movement motivations (words seem to work fine for the practitioners of Gaga, and Forsythe’s improvisation technologies make use of words, video and animation very clearly.)  The aesthetic score could benefit from further development of its visual appeal.  I would also like to explore scores designed around aesthetics but that use structured description.  These concepts could also be further developed in a course integrating composition and Laban theory.  As a whole, the pamphlet of scores would need more detailed notes on performance of the scores, as well as references to direct non-readers of Laban notation to resources for deciphering the scores.

Conclusion

Writing these scores was a cathartic exercise in focused mischief.  The scores were interesting in that they have repeatable aspects.  Therefore, they retain structural support for a process of solving abstract or multi-level choreographic problems.  While improvisation is an extremely useful tool for cultivating awareness and exploring unknown movement, the results can be as unreliable as the situation of the improvisor and extremely fleeting.  However, since the scores are not performable in an exactly reliable way in space and time as such, aspects of them must be created anew with each performance, and become “texts of performative knowledge” (Jeschke 1).  The project allowed me to take aspects of Laban notation that I consider valuable and (at least for a time) throw away the rest.  While the end results were rough, the process of inquiry led to a pragmatic methodology for examining issues of political power in systems of dance notation.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Visual Culture: The Reader. Ed. Evans, Jessica and Hall, Stuart. London: Stuart Hall, 1936. 72–79.

Cohen, Selma Jeanne. Next Week, Swan Lake. Middletown: Wesleyan, 1982.

Hutchinson Guest, Ann. “Historical Development.” Dance Notation: The Process of Recording Movement on Paper. London: Dance Books, 1984.

—. Labanotation: The System of Analyzing and Recording Movement. 4th ed. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Jeschke, Claudia. “Notation Systems as Texts of Performative Knowledge.” Dance Research Journal 31.1 (1999): 4-7.

Louppe, Laurence. “Feuillet’s Thinking.” Traces of Dance: Drawings and Notations of Choreographers. Paris: Editions Dis Voir 1994: 81–90.

Marion, Sheila. “Toward a New Paradigm for Exploring Dance Notation.” International Council of Kinetography Laban Proceedings of the Twentieth Biennial Conference.  Hong Kong: ICKL, 1997.

Thomas, Helen. “Reproducing the Dance: In Search of the Aura?” Preservation Politics: Dance Revived, Reconstructed, Remade. University of Surrey, Roehampton, Nov 8-9, 1997.

Wishart, Trevor. On Sonic Art. New York: Routledge, 1996.