Labanotation: a Written Language for Dance
February 5th, 2024
To oversimplify, written words, like these I’m writing, are humanity’s way of recording spoken words. Musical notation are how we record a song. But what if we want to record a dance or other movements? Enter Labanotation, a written language for recording human movements developed in the 1920’s.
In Labanotation, movements of different parts of the body are mapped to symbols:
The result is a language that, read from bottom to top, tracks a series of simultaneous motions into one synchronized flow of symbols:
Found via artist Eija Loponen-Stephenson.