Staging language: Milca Mayerova and the Czech book Alphabet

The attempt to systematize the transcription of dance movements brought Laban to his loftiest conviction, namely, that dance constituted an originary form of language. Laban presented dance writing as a means of remedying the poverty of interpersonal communication in modern society. In the current state of civilization, Laban lamented, people mechanically repeat poor imitations of originary gestures:

  Indolence, habit and an inadequate feeling for movement
  elevate this error into a need. This is how the various
  languages originated. The inner relation can be demonstrated
  almost everywhere, however, through comparative
  language study. The visible gesture of the body, the hand
  or facial muscles to express a given concept is far more
  unified in all peoples than the corresponding aural designation. (46)

Operating on the assumption that gesture is a means of universal communication, Laban touted movement notation as a written language that would return humans to the true basis of all existing alphabetic forms: "The shapes of all alphabetic letters are borrowed from movement." (47) Dance writing would logically mirror this originary relation by providing an "alphabet" as universally understandable as the "language" from which it was derived. The "failing" of language in general, to return to Genette's analysis, could ideally be counteracted through a sign system identical in its basis with the bodies that generated it--an ultimate instance of the modernist "principle of equivalence." In the "dancer's world" described by Laban, every movement, every gesture would signify with visceral intensity, and each signifying element would have its exact counterpart in writing. Laban's thinking thus corresponded closely to the themes of Nezval's poem. It is to Mayerova's great credit that she saw these affinities and foresaw the means to distill them within the printed pages of a book as well.

Mayerova had demonstrable familiarity with the actual system of notation that Laban devised; according to the testimony of her student Hana Bouskova, for instance, she used a miniature version of the icosahedral model published in Laban's first book on the subject, Choreography (Choreographie, 1926), in classes for the rest of her life. Laban assembled this icosahedron (Fig. 7) to map body gestures on a set of spatial coordinates--in all three dimensions, despite his apparent preference for planar choreography--noting the positions initially with marks that resembled cuneiform. To record the rapidity, force, breadth, or intensity of movements, Laban required additional notations.

In a more refined version of what he called kinetography (Kinetographie), from 1928, we see multiple layers of information encoded within a single visual symbol. Divided into four main quadrants, body positions have been mapped onto a rectangular box resembling a musical staff (Fig. 8). The upper and lower halves of this box correspond not to waist up and waist down, but to left and right on the dancer's body. Notations inside the box, meanwhile, stand for movements in the lower half of the body, while those above or below the box (for example, the notation placed just after the semicolon in the accompanying illustration) indicate upper body and arm movements. The length of each symbol corresponds to the rapidity of the gesture. Direction is indicated both by diagonal or stepped end marks and also by tone; black denotes a downward movement, gray an upward one, while white with a dot corresponds to gestures in the middle register.