The Choreography of Everyday Life: Dance Notation and the Politics of Movement

In 1928, the German choreographer Rudolf Laban announced an explosive development in the history of dance: the creation of a byzantine system of lines, tick marks, and boxes intended to capture bodily movement on paper. Eventually known as “Labanotation,” this tool is best-known for its role in dance, credited with making the ephemeral art ostensibly permanent. In fact, however, Labanotation quickly moved beyond the world of art, finding applications in the clinics, boardrooms, factories, and laboratories of post-World War II Britain and the United States as well as in the state-making apparatus of Nazi Germany.

This paper tracks Labanotation’s travels, using the system’s path as a guide to understanding how and why human movement came to be a central object of scientific, political, and popular concern over the course of the twentieth century. In doing so, it opens up a window into new facets of modern culture, uncovering a world in which human movement was conceived of as the seat of an enormous power—one that could, among other things, reveal the innermost self, stabilize shaky economic systems, and reshape human political communities. In particular, the paper uses Labanotation to highlight the unexpected material and philosophical connections between two seemingly disparate settings: Weimar-era art and science and the work of human resources in mid-century American and British white-collar offices. More broadly, it also suggests new methodologies for making connections between the history of dance, the history of science and technology, and political and cultural history writ large.