Laemmli, Whitney E. (Author)
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences
Volume: 52
Issue: 1
Pages: 132-135
Beginning in the 1940s, a New York City organization called the Dance Notation Bureau promised to bring a new kind of expertise to the moving world. Its leaders—all women with backgrounds in dance performance—had dedicated themselves to perfecting a technique for recording dance on paper, known as Labanotation. First developed by the choreographer Rudolf Laban in the ferment of Weimar Germany, Labanotation employed a complex series of markings on an eleven-columned staff to permanently capture dance’s ephemeral movements. After its initial publication in 1928, Labanotation was hailed for its seemingly unique capacity to preserve dance for the future, creating an indelible record of an art form whose works were often lost to time. But the Bureau’s leaders, including its president, Ann Hutchinson Guest, also saw Labanotation’s widespread use as a crucial step in “modernizing” and professionalizing the field of dance, long relegated to low status because of its association with the fleeting, the feminine, and the bodily. In publicity materials, the Bureau emphasized Labanotation’s ability to store, compare, and analyze dance with the “objective” eye of the scientist, a characterization others quickly echoed. Choreographer George Balanchine compared Labanotation to Euclidian geometry, while New York Times critic John Martin praised the “systematic mentality” of the Bureau’s “free association of laboratory workers,” highlighting their “genius for science and invention, for efficiency and mechanical creativity.”
...MoreArticle Henry M. Cowles; Chitra Ramalingam (2022) Introduction. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (pp. 118-119).
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