When a fire destroyed the Duchess Theatre in London in 1898, it took with it the only complete record of several Victorian ballets—or so everyone thought. The performances themselves had vanished the moment the curtain fell on their final shows. Without notation, dance existed only in the fading memories of aging performers, each retirement erasing another chapter of movement history.

The Problem Dance Has Always Had

Unlike music, which gained standardized notation centuries ago, dance struggled with a unique challenge: how do you write down something that exists in three dimensions, moves through time, and involves the entire human body? A musical score captures pitch and rhythm. A painting freezes a single moment. But dance requires recording simultaneous movements of arms, legs, torso, and head while also showing spatial relationships between dancers and their paths across the stage.

The consequences of this gap were severe. Before reliable notation systems, choreography died with its creators. Entire traditions disappeared. What we know of Renaissance court dances comes mostly from written descriptions—imagine trying to learn a waltz from a paragraph of text. The handful of works that survived did so through the fragile chain of person-to-person teaching, each link introducing new variations and forgetting old details.

The First Breakthrough at Versailles

In the 1680s, at the court of Louis XIV, choreographer Pierre Beauchamp developed something that actually worked. His system—later published (controversially) by Raoul-Auger Feuillet in 1701—used symbols resembling musical notation plotted on track-like paths showing where dancers moved across the stage. The symbols indicated foot positions corresponding to what we now recognize as classical ballet's five positions, along with timing markers synced to the music.

The impact was immediate. Voltaire ranked the invention among the great achievements of his era. Diderot devoted ten pages to it in his Encyclopédie. For roughly a century, the Beauchamp-Feuillet system preserved French court dances, spreading across Europe after John Weaver translated Feuillet's manual into English in 1706. Dance could finally be published, studied, and reconstructed years later by people who had never seen the original.

But the system had limits. It worked beautifully for the stylized, floor-pattern-focused dances of the Baroque period. As ballet evolved into something more athletic and three-dimensional, the notation couldn't keep up. By the 1780s, it had largely fallen out of use.

The Russian Rescue Mission

In 1892, Vladimir Stepanov, a dancer at Russia's Imperial Ballet, published Alphabet des Mouvements du Corps Humain—a system based on anatomical analysis rather than stylized positions. Instead of tracking floor patterns, Stepanov's notation recorded the body's movements in relation to its own structure, using a staff system that could capture complex positions and transitions.

The Imperial Russian Ballet Schools adopted it to record their repertoire. When Nicholas Sergeyev, régisseur of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres, fled Russia after the 1917 Revolution, he brought with him notated scores of Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, and Coppélia—the foundation of classical ballet. Without those scores, now housed at Harvard, our understanding of 19th-century Russian ballet would be vastly different.

Stepanov notation also preserved something more experimental. Vaslav Nijinsky learned the system at the Imperial School, then modified it for his own avant-garde choreography. His 1912 ballet L'Après-midi d'un faune shocked audiences with its angular, profile-based movements—then disappeared from stages. For 76 years, the work existed only in Nijinsky's private notation, which no one could decipher. When researchers finally cracked his code in 1988, they could stage the ballet again in something approaching its original form.

Two Systems, Two Philosophies

The 20th century produced the notation systems still in use today, each reflecting different priorities. Rudolf von Laban's Labanotation, published in 1928, aimed to record all human movement—dance, sports, workplace ergonomics, even animal locomotion. It uses a vertical staff with the center line dividing the body into right and left sides, with symbols indicating direction, level, and timing. The Dance Notation Bureau, founded in New York in 1940, maintains the world's largest collection of Labanotated scores and has become the primary system for modern and contemporary dance.

Benesh Movement Notation, created in 1955 by Rudolf Benesh (a mathematician) and his wife Joan (a dancer with Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet), took a different approach. It records movement as it would appear to someone watching from the audience, using a five-line staff similar to musical notation but representing the body from head to toe. Ballet companies worldwide adopted it because it aligned with how choreographers and dancers already thought about staging.

The split wasn't accidental. Labanotation excels at capturing the quality and dynamics of movement—essential for modern dance, where how you move matters as much as what positions you hit. Benesh notation prioritizes spatial precision and timing—perfect for ballet's geometric formations and synchronized ensemble work.

Why Paper Still Matters in the Video Age

The obvious question: why bother with notation when we have high-definition video? Video captures everything—except what dancers actually need. A video shows one performance with one cast on one night. It doesn't separate individual parts, explain the underlying structure, or indicate what's essential versus what was improvised. Notation does all of that.

More importantly, notation allows choreography to be copyrighted as a fixed work, like a musical composition. A video might show interpretation; a score shows authorship. The Dance Notation Bureau's motto—"Preserving the Past, Enriching the Present, Securing the Future"—reflects this legal dimension alongside the artistic one.

Software has made notation more accessible without replacing its fundamental purpose. Programs like Labanwriter and KineScribe let choreographers notate on computers and tablets, but the underlying systems remain those developed decades ago. The technology changed; the need didn't.

What Remains Unwritten

Despite a century of functional notation systems, most choreography still goes unrecorded. Professional ballet companies employ choreologists to notate major works, but smaller companies and independent choreographers rarely have the resources or training. Modern dance, despite having Labanotation available, relies heavily on video and reconstruction from dancers' memories.

The dance world continues losing works at a rate unthinkable in music or theater. When a composer dies, the scores remain. When a choreographer dies without notation, companies must decide whether to keep works alive through continuous performance—an expensive, drift-prone process—or let them fade. Some choreographers, like Merce Cunningham, planned extensively for posthumous preservation. Others leave nothing behind but footage and memories.

The tools exist. The question is whether the art form values its history enough to use them.