Dance As Writing

The use of spoken words to accompany dance was the subject of an article on "Worttanz" in Schrifttanz (2/3, August 1929, 52–54) by E. F. Burian, a Czech avant-garde theatre director and advocate of jazz in the theatre. Burian proposed that spoken words possessed the power to move the body uniquely because they were a unique acoustic phenomenon, and anything acoustic was "impossible without space." His thinking derived from the efforts of the Czech composer Leos^[*] Janácek^[*] to notate the melodies of common speech. A polyphonic dance composition, according to Burian, contained three components: word dynamics, body dynamics, and text content. The dancer responded to the acoustic dimension of the word, not to its semantic value; the dance was not a redundant illustration of the text, as too often occurred in pieces involving movement choirs and speech choirs. Group dances accompanied by "group words" introduced the "especially rich" possibility of polyrhythms in the dance, whereby, for example, some dancers within the group move to one tempo or beat (2/4) while others move to another (7/4) or yet another (3/2). Such complexity was extremely rare in ensemble pieces, although Laban, for one, tended to explore polyrhythmic complications without any accompaniment at all. Of course, polyrhythmic music was (and still is) itself extremely rare. Burian did not clarify whether the spoken word should come directly from the dancer or from speakers external to the dance, for the "word dance" was not in any sense sung with a trained voice. Cilli Wang (54) responded to Burian's ideas by suggesting that success in this venture depended on using words and sentences whose intellectual or semantic density did not "destroy the line of movement"; lyric poetry therefore (and rather predictably) provided

the appropriate language for word dancing. Although experiments of this nature remained almost entirely confined to the "choric drama" genre, Burian's article actually indicated that language emerged from peculiar bodily rhythms, rather than the other way around. But for most dancers, language implied text, an inscribed configuration of signs rather than an acoustic spatial phenomenon, and music constituted a text with great power to overdetermine the movement of the body.

For some, this overdetermination could be inhibited by treating bodily movement as a text in itself. Dance notation systems therefore functioned as potent evidence of dance's "textuality," particularly in the courts, which did not consider dances copyrighted, according to a 1901 law, unless they existed in a permanent, verifiable format. Dance notation systems date back at least as far as the fourteenth century, and each succeeding century has produced a plethora of methods for "notating" human movement. Even the advent of film and video documentation has not lessened the zeal for writing down dances. Laban's system first appeared in print in 1926, but he had worked on the problem of notating bodily movement since around 1900. By 1930 the Germans generally accepted Labanotation as the most accurate system for recording movement, and it remains the most widely used system in the world. Yet very few Weimar dances actually got notated (nearly all of those that did were notated by Laban disciples), partly because Labanotation is quite difficult and time-consuming to read and learn and partly because it was so expensive to have anyone do it. In a 1929 article for Schrifttanz, which Universal Edition originally founded to promote Labanotation, Fritz Klingenbeck pointed out that Labanotation recorded only the movement of the dance and ignored significant variables, such as the physiognomy and personality of the dancer, costume, set design, lighting (VP 43–46; see also 24–42).

Laban used music notation as the model for movement notation: the body was a stave upon which the notater inscribed a complex array of symbols for parts of the body, direction, duration, tempo, frequency, weight, and many other dynamics. But unlike music notation, dance notation, contrary to Laban's expectations, showed no creative potential: dancers disclosed no inclination at all to compose dances on paper before entering the performance space, so Labanotation's chief purpose became to record dances which were already composed. Of course, dancers like Mary Wigman and Dorothee Günther shaped movement concepts in their minds by drawing stick figures and using colored pencils and symbols that (especially with Wigman) were virtually unreadable to anyone but themselves. Some dancers worked from vague scenarios, others (Skoronel, Schlemmer) from abstract geometric forms; Terpis did both. Quite simply, the dance imagination, unlike the musical imagination, resists "textualization" as notation defines it: we don't see the dance until we see the body.

Jaap Kool (1891–1959) offered a composer's perspective on the problem when he published his Tanzschrift (1927), in which he introduced a notation system that (in vain) he believed would make it easier to compose dances. Indeed, his system was easier to learn and far easier to read than Laban's. He used a musical stave to inscribe the notation of the movement, but he set it directly above the stave for the musical notation, so that one read the dance concurrently with the music. He ascribed musical note values to steps by creating a stick figure whose head designated the note value for any combination of steps and movements. Direction in space he signified by the placement of the stick figure in relation to spatial values assigned to lines of the stave. Other dynamics entailed further symbols (Figure 67). It was an ingenious method that gave a pretty clear image of the movement (not scenic elements) from measure to measure and even from note to note. But Kool did not demonstrate its practicality in handling more than Grit Hegesa's technically uncomplicated solo dances. Once a dance contained two or more bodies, the space of the stave became inadequate to accommodate all the complexities. Of course, that was always the problem underlying the tension between music and dance: as an image on the page, as a text, musical imagination could always fit into the stave, the measure, the note, a confined space of enormous symbolic density. With dance, however, the body produces signs that refuse to fit into any space other than that in which it actually moves. In that sense, the dancing body is the clearest manifestation of reality, the opposite of an inscribed text, which always refers to something absent.