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Noise in the System: Recording Technologies in 20th C. American Dance

Thursday Lecture Series

dateNovember 15, 2018 timeThursday, 12:15pm EST location The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room, Columbia University
Notes
  • Audience open exclusively to Columbia faculty, students, and invited guests
  • All others interested in attending, please email SOF/Heyman at [email protected].
B&W photo of seven women sitting around a table covered with complex diagrams

In the early 1940s, a New York City organization known as the Dance Notation Bureau (DNB) began a decades-long effort to promote a system known as “Labanotation.” Using a combination of shapes, shading, dots, and lines on a eleven-column vertical score, Labanotation was designed to capture the ephemeral, three-dimensional complexity of dance on the flat surface of paper. Eschewing notions that dance was too emotional, evanescent, or complicated to be documented, the women who ran the DNB saw the moving body as swarming with potential data points. To them, a dance was information, and—with the right system in place—that information could be “objectively” and “scientifically” recorded. Doing so would catapult dance into the modern era, finally freeing the field from its “primitive” and “illiterate” past. Focusing on the period between 1940 and 1975, this paper catalogues the DNB’s efforts to record and preserve movement, and explores how these efforts contributed to broader transformations in the definitions of creativity, preservation, authorship, and dance itself.