Paper Dancers: Art as Information in Twentieth-Century America

Around 1940, a New York City organization known as the Dance Notation Bureau (DNB) began a decades-long effort to promote a system known as “Labanotation.” Designed to capture the ephemeral, three-dimensional complexity of dance on the flat surface of paper, the DNB believed that Labanotation held the key to modernizing the art form. Focusing on the period between 1940 and 1975, this article catalogues the Dance Notation Bureau’s efforts to make dance both “literate” and “scientific” and explores how these efforts contributed to broader transformations in the definitions of creativity, preservation, authorship, and dance itself.