Selma Jeanne Cohen and Eugene Loring's Kinesiography

Shortly after Selma Jeanne Cohen came to live in New York she came to the Dance Notation Bureau. Having studied the Eugene Loring system in California, becoming proficient enough to be teaching it for him in his school, she wanted to find out how the Laban system worked. I remember her first visit to our office at 430 Sixth Avenue in an abandoned elevator shaft. Not fazed by our modest surroundings, she enrolled in our course and showed quiet determination to learn enough to be knowledgeable, if not a practitioner. It was not long before she declared that Labanotation was much easier to learn and more logical than the rather idiosyncratic Loring system. She became a member of the Bureau and over the years kept in touch while continuing to pursue her own work: teaching, writing, and research in dance history. Her greatest involvement with the Bureau came in 1952-53, when I had been awarded a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to prepare a Labanotation textbook. Having been threatened by possible copyright infringement by the Associate Press, which had taken over Universal Editions, the publisher in Vienna of Laban's original 1928 and 1930 books, we had been hamstrung in preparing a textbook on the system. By 1952 this situation had been resolved and we were

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