Ann Hutchinson Guest (Obit.), 'Authority on dance notation ... '
'Although there are many forms of dance notation going back to Pierre Beauchamp's system for Baroque dance in the 1680s, Nijinsky had developed his own cryptic version. Ann Hutchinson Guest first tried to reconstruct his work in 1956 after the choreogapher's widow, Romola, gave her his notes. "I spent years trying to work it out," she said, adding with a laugh: And I'm supposed to be the leading authority on dance notation in the world. She told how Nijinsky had revised his notes many times, often contradicting himself. 'We couldn't get anywhere. Romolo was furious. She said it was taking much too long."Hutchinson Guest studied dozens of different dance notation systems, translating many of them into Labanotation, a system developed in the 1920s by Rudolf von Laban who was a central figure in European modern dance. According to a press report in 1954: "The printed Labanotation page looks like a combination of hieroglyphs, pictographs, Morse dots-and-dashes, đoodles, and a musie score turned on edge"It was not until 1980 that she and Claudia Jeschke, a dance historian, succeeded in cracking Nijinsky's code after finding a copy of his annotated score in the British Library.'Register, The Times.
My source: Ann Hutchinson Guest (Obit.), 'Authority on dance notation known for reconstructing Vaslav Nijinsky's scandalous ballet, L'Après-midi d'un faune'. Register, The Times. 20 April, 2022, p.48.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/article/ann-hutchinson-guest-obituary-hkw8z88ns
INDIVIDUAL
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INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES
HUMANISTIC -------------------------------------- MECHANISTIC
SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL
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GROUP
'Dance has been called moving architecture, a truth which the complexities of contemporary choreography may mask. Not only does the dancer's body form shapes and groups of dancers form moving or static designs, but also group arrangements carve up the stage space, establishing areas of open as well as enclosed space which are significant in their changes and contrasting effects.
While the rccording of movement on paper-dance notation-does not look like movement (disregarding primitive stick figure drawings), there is an "architecture" in the sequence of graphic symbols used to record dance patterns. Over thc centuries many different devices have been used to capture dance steps on paper. What are the elements that have to be represented?
The process of dance notation requires reducing four-dimensional movement (time being the fourth dimension) to a two-dimensional surface. The parts of the body in action have to be defined, as does the form of moverent involved (flexion, extension, rotation, directional placement) and the duration of each in relation to the overall time structure. In group dances the relationship of dancers to one another must be determined and recorded, as well as their location on stage and their paths of travel. In a dance score each performer is like a small orchestra-arms, legs, bead, torso, etc. in motion-this is then multiplied by the number of dancers who are performing individual sequences.'
Previously: 'dance' : 'architecture' : 'movement'
abstraction | body (bodies) |
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| Hutchinson Guest in 1956 Source: The Times. |
While the rccording of movement on paper-dance notation-does not look like movement (disregarding primitive stick figure drawings), there is an "architecture" in the sequence of graphic symbols used to record dance patterns. Over thc centuries many different devices have been used to capture dance steps on paper. What are the elements that have to be represented?
The process of dance notation requires reducing four-dimensional movement (time being the fourth dimension) to a two-dimensional surface. The parts of the body in action have to be defined, as does the form of moverent involved (flexion, extension, rotation, directional placement) and the duration of each in relation to the overall time structure. In group dances the relationship of dancers to one another must be determined and recorded, as well as their location on stage and their paths of travel. In a dance score each performer is like a small orchestra-arms, legs, bead, torso, etc. in motion-this is then multiplied by the number of dancers who are performing individual sequences.'
Guest, A. H. (1990). Dance Notation. Perspecta, 26, 203–214. https://doi.org/10.2307/1567163
Previously: 'dance' : 'architecture' : 'movement'
orcid.org/0000-0002-0192-8965
