Movement Notation

M USIC has a universal notation system, but movement, another form of communication, has had up to now no means of being recorded, although it is a sine qua non of all aspects of living. Movement is one of the least explored of all forms of communication when it comes to making a permanent record of its manifestations. A notation system suitable to record all types of actions, gestures, and motions has been sought, however, since the days of ancient Egypt. Old languages become alive again by having been preserved in tablets, scrolls, or wall inscriptions. Music of olden days can be readily played today since its notation is available in the originals. Motion, however, has been recorded only fragmentarily, mainly in pictorial material. Such material represents but an isolated part of the whole movement scheme, and the few poses depicted on a vase, a fresco, a carved stone do not tell us of the content of a dance as such, but show merely a particular dancer in a specific pose, which may not even have been the pose the other dance participants executed at the same time. Despite glowing accounts of historians, philosophers, and poets we can hardly deduce the actual steps, figure formations, and structure of a dance. Most of the notation systems used between I4551 and the present Labanotation2 stressed in principle only the recording and floortracings of movements for legs and feet; sometimes arm movements were also indicated. Several of the notation systems employed letter symbols for movement interpretation;3 others devised special symbols by which definite step combinations could be identified;4 still others used symbols resembling musical notes and signs.5 These early experimentations in movement notation generally reveal a clear

Aesthetics · Art · Folklore · Folkloristics · Linguistics · Literature · Movement (music) · Notation · Ancient Egypt and Archaeology · Communication · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy · Psychology

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  Gertrude Prokosch Kurath•Current Anthropology•1960

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