Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm

How is dance notated?

Tracing the line from German dance notator and theorist Rudolf von Laban to the digital dance scores released in 2013 by Frankfurt-based research platform Motion Bank, this talk will address more philosophically the need to remember, consider, and think through movement. How does dance develop and or escape its own inscription? Showing examples of Laban notation, I will decode how notators use symbols to write dance down. I will also consider with the audience, what is and is not notateable in Laban’s system. From this, I will spring to a general introduction to contemporary work in dance archiving in Frankfurt, namely the Motion Bank score projects. How are methods of digitally documenting and publishing dance research impacting the field? With the audience, I would like to consider how recent digital projects diverge from Laban’s work, in particular the difference between the handwritten versus digital trace.