Dance Notation Collection

Dance notation scores, pamphlets, newsletters and papers accumulated by the teaching faculty at Laban.

Labanotation was devised by Rudolf Laban in the 1920s and further developed by his students and co-workers including Albrecht Knust, Kurt Jooss, Sigurd Leeder, Dussia Bereska, Ann Hutchinson-Guest, Maria Sentzpal and Valerie Preston-Dunlop. Labanotation continues to be taught at Laban.

The scores and pamphlets had been kept in a filing cabinet and some were rolled up and stored in a cupboard and held in a tutor room at Laban. These have all been transferred into boxes and have come into the archive respository in the Laban Library and Archive. A box list has been compiled. The collection has yet to be sorted into series.

Temporarily closed to the public.

Faculty members at Laban.

Box lists are available to search on the Laban Archive catalogue.

Some items are oversize and are stored off-site. Advance notice is required to consult these.

Description compiled by Jane Fowler, Archivist, Laban.

Photocopies can be made according to copyright law and depending on the condition of the documents. Please consult the Archivist.

No appraisal procedures have been recorded.

A compilation of Labanotation scores, notation exercises and articles compiled by faculty at Laban over the course of several decades.

No further accruals are expected.

Labanotation scores are also held in the Laban Collection, the Sylvia Bodmer Collection and the Els Grelinger Collection, all held in the Laban Library and Archive.

The main centres for collections of Labanotation scores include the Albrecht Knust Archive held at the Centre national de la danse in Paris at http://www.cnd.fr, the Dance Notation Bureau in New York at http://www.dancenotation.org, and the International Council of Kinetography Laban/Labanotation (ICKL) Archive at the National Resource Centre for Dance, University of Surrey at http://www.surrey.ac.uk/library/nrcd/ .