Since the movement of a human body is inherently complex, Labanotation has had to be correspondingly complex. Partly as a result of this complexity, there have arisen some misconceptions about it over the years. It is tempting, for example, to imagine Labanotation as a fully rigorous description of body movement, so that the exact movements of a given person might be recorded using Labanotation as the data format, and then reproduced in animation software. But this is not the case. Like music notation, Labanotation doesn't capture the nuances of a particular performance. It does capture the choreographer's creative nuance, just as music notation captures the composer's creative nuance.
A similar misconception is that Labanotation has no real value in a world in which video recorders are easily accessible in everyone's cell phone. Why bother writing down a dance when you can much more easily record it on video? Again, the answer lies in the close analogy that exists between Labanotation and music notation. No one would suggest that musical composers should simply play their compositions into an audio recording, without writing anything down. For anyone who can read music, reading a musical score is much more straightforward than trying to pick out the sounds of all the instruments by ear, and to figure out the composer's intention from an audio recording alone. The same is true for dance notation. For someone who knows how to read Labanotation, it is much more straightforward to read a dance score than to examine a video of a performance, trying to separate intention from error, and to interpret precise body movements through costumes, obscured camera angles, and so on.
The analogy with music notation, in fact, is the best way to conceive of Labanotation. Music notation and dance notation correspond exactly in terms of their value, intention, and abilities. When we make extravagant claims about Labanotation, such as to say it can record "any human movement", we only mislead our listeners. Labanotation can certainly not record any human movement, in exactly the same sense that music notation cannot record the way any human might play the flute. Music notation records certain significant ideas, the notes, durations, and other relevant details that a composer is trying to get at when they compose a piece of music. The musical score doesn't capture what any given performer does in their interpretation of that score. Labanotation is the same. It doesn't record the exact movements of any particular person; but it does record the essential ideas of a movement, so that any particular person might interpret and perform those ideas again. But as with music, each performance of a Labanotation score will be different, and will be influenced in meaningful ways by the interpretations of the performers and the director.
Date accessed; 03/02/2012
http://www.labanotation.net/
Rudolph Laban developed Labanotation in 1928. It is a form of noting down dance just like musicians would write down music when they compose it.
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