How Do You Write Down a Dance?

Imagine trying to describe a pirouette to someone who's never seen one. You could say "spin on one foot," but that barely captures the precision, the lifted chest, the spotted head turn, the exact angle of the supporting leg. Now imagine trying to preserve an entire ballet—every step, gesture, and breath—for dancers who won't be born for another hundred years.

This is the challenge choreographers have faced for centuries. Dance is often called the most ephemeral of the arts. A painting hangs on a wall. A novel sits on a shelf. But a dance? It exists only in the moment bodies move through space.

The Early Attempts: Writing Movement Like Music

People have been trying to write down dances since at least 1705, when court dances were recorded in notation systems that now look quaint and mysterious. But the real breakthrough came in 1892, when Vladimir Ivanovich Stepanov published his "Alphabet des Movements du Corps Humain" in Paris.

Stepanov's system borrowed from music notation, which made sense to dancers who already read music. His method gained traction in Russia, where ballet master Nicolai Sergeev used it to preserve the Imperial Ballet's repertoire. When Sergeev fled Russia after the Revolution, he brought these precious notations with him. They became the basis for reconstructing classics like Swan Lake and The Nutcracker for Western companies. Harvard now houses this collection—a treasure trove of 19th-century choreographic DNA.

But Stepanov notation had limitations. It worked well for ballet's codified vocabulary but struggled with more organic, expressive movement.

The Two Giants: Laban and Benesh

The 20th century brought two systems that still dominate today. They represent different philosophies about what matters most in dance.

Labanotation: The Dancer's Blueprint

In the 1920s, Rudolf von Laban created what would become the most comprehensive movement notation system ever devised. Labanotation doesn't just record what position a body achieves. It captures how that body gets there—the quality, the dynamics, the spatial pathway.

Think of it as the difference between a photograph and a motion study. Labanotation can describe whether a gesture is sharp or smooth, whether weight shifts gradually or suddenly. This makes it invaluable for modern and contemporary dance, where how you move often matters more than what shape you make.

The Dance Notation Bureau, founded to advance Labanotation, now maintains the world's largest collection of notated dance scores. It offers certification programs and has established an extension at Ohio State University. The system has evolved with technology too. Software like LabanWriter and apps like KineScribe let notators work digitally. There's even Labanlens, developed for Microsoft HoloLens, letting users see notation overlaid on actual dancers.

Laban's ideas also spawned Laban Movement Analysis, which draws from anatomy, kinesiology, and psychology. It's become a tool not just for preserving dances but for understanding movement itself.

Benesh Movement Notation: The Ballet Standard

In 1955, Rudolf and Joan Benesh created their own system with a different goal. Benesh Movement Notation looks more like traditional music notation. It maps the body onto a five-line staff, showing positions from the dancer's perspective.

The Royal Academy of Dancing began teaching it in 1956. By 1962, the Beneshs had founded the Institute of Choreology to train professional notators. This institute was eventually absorbed into the Royal Academy, cementing BMN's place in the ballet world.

Today, there's an interesting divide. Labanotation dominates in modern and contemporary dance. Benesh reigns in ballet companies, especially British ones. Each system has its devotees who insist their method captures something the other misses.

The Problem Notation Can't Fully Solve

Here's the uncomfortable truth: even the best notation systems lose something.

George Balanchine, perhaps the 20th century's most influential choreographer, famously worked by demonstrating movements personally to his dancers. He'd show them exactly how he wanted a particular port de bras to unfold, what quality a jump should have. These nuances—the things that made a Balanchine ballet look like a Balanchine ballet—often couldn't be fully captured on paper.

Before film and video, dance preservation was hit-or-miss at best. Very little Western choreography survives from before the 1800s. What does exist is fragmentary and sketchy. Even with notation, transmission required interpretation. Different notators might record the same dance differently. Different dancers might read the same score differently.

This is why historian Nancy Reynolds created the George Balanchine Foundation's Interpreters' Archive. She understood that the memories of dancers who worked directly with Balanchine were as valuable as any notation. Their bodies held knowledge that symbols on paper couldn't fully convey.

Enter Technology: A Mixed Blessing

Film and video seemed like the answer. Finally, you could just record a performance and preserve it exactly as it happened, right?

Not quite. Video captures one performance on one night with one cast. But dances change slightly each time they're performed. Which version is definitive? And video shows you what the movement looks like from one angle, but it doesn't tell you how it feels to perform it or what the choreographer's intent was.

Still, video has revolutionized preservation. Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive offers free access to archival footage from America's longest-running dance festival. Warehouse discoveries have unearthed gems like the earliest footage of Eiko & Koma performing, or documentation of Dance Theatre of Harlem's historic post-Apartheid trip to South Africa.

Digital technology now allows institutions to share these resources globally. A student in Tokyo can study footage that once sat in a Boston archive, accessible to no one.

The Institutional Response

By the early 1990s, the dance world recognized it had a crisis. Too much was being lost. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts commissioned a study that led to the founding of the Dance Heritage Coalition in 1992.

The coalition identified four essential needs: access to materials, continuing documentation, preservation of existing documentation, and education. Their "America's Irreplaceable Dance Treasures: the First 100" project showcases significant works with scholarly articles, photos, and video clips.

They also created "The Artist's Legacy Toolkit," an online resource helping choreographers organize their materials throughout their careers. It's practical advice: how to label video files, where to store choreographic notes, what memorabilia matters.

This matters because dance companies often don't outlive their founders. When a choreographer dies, their work can become orphaned. Some companies, like those founded by Alvin Ailey and José Limón, survived by presenting mixed repertories that included other choreographers' works. Paul Taylor followed a similar model, announcing in 2015 that his company would become a repository preserving the masterworks of modern dance's pioneers.

The Human Element Remains Essential

Despite all our technological advances, person-to-person transmission remains crucial. When a company wants to revive a ballet, they don't just hand dancers a notation score or show them a video. They bring in someone who danced the work, who learned it from someone who learned it from someone who worked with the original choreographer.

This living chain of transmission carries information that no notation system captures. How does this step feel in your body? What were you thinking about during this phrase? What did the choreographer say when they taught it to you?

Dance Theatre of Harlem recently discovered footage and costumes in a warehouse, including a rare Firebird costume. These physical artifacts and recordings are invaluable. But equally valuable are the company members who can contextualize them, who remember what it meant to dance those roles.

The Preservation Puzzle Today

We now have more tools for preserving dance than ever before: two robust notation systems, high-quality video, digital archives, institutional support, and growing awareness of preservation's importance.

Yet challenges remain. Notation requires skilled notators, who take years to train. Digital files require maintenance and migration as formats become obsolete. Institutions need funding. And the fundamental question persists: what exactly are we preserving? The steps? The style? The intention? The experience?

Different choreographers answer differently. Some meticulously document everything. Others believe their work should evolve with each new generation of dancers. Some see preservation as essential. Others view it as futile, arguing that dance's ephemerality is its essence.

Why It Matters

You might wonder why we go to such lengths to preserve dances. After all, choreographers create new work constantly. Why not let old dances fade away naturally?

Because dance is cultural memory embodied. A preserved dance lets us see how people moved, thought, and felt in different eras. George Balanchine's ballets embody mid-century modernism. Martha Graham's works channel psychological depths that defined her generation. Alvin Ailey's "Revelations" carries African American experience in ways words cannot.

When we lose a dance, we lose a way of understanding the world. We lose a vocabulary of movement that might inspire future choreographers. We lose a piece of human expression that exists nowhere else.

The evolution of dance notation systems—from Stepanov's musical approach through Laban's comprehensive framework to Benesh's ballet-focused method, and now to digital tools—represents humanity's stubborn insistence that ephemeral art matters enough to preserve.

These systems aren't perfect. They never will be. Dance resists capture. But the attempt itself is valuable. It forces us to look closely at movement, to articulate what makes one gesture different from another, to respect the knowledge held in dancing bodies.

As technology advances, preservation methods will continue evolving. But the core challenge remains unchanged from those court dance notators in 1705: How do you capture life in motion? How do you preserve what only exists when bodies move?

We're still figuring it out. And that's okay. The effort matters as much as the result.