Secret Turns

I don't want to turn this into a Labanotation blog, so I have to really rein myself in. Left unchecked, I could probably blog about Labanotation every single day.

The day before yesterday I had my weekly Labanotation lesson with Ilene Fox, the former Executive Director of the Dance Notation Bureau in New York. When she first started tutoring me we did our lessons in person, but she just lives that far away as to make it too inconvenient, especially lugging all the Labanotation books with me. So we do the lessons by phone. At first we weren't sure if that would even be possible, because we needed to draw diagrams together, and demonstrate movements; but actually it works out pretty well. When we need to draw something, we just share documents online, and that gives us pretty much a real-time view of what each other is drawing.

So, Wednesday we were doing our lesson, and at a certain point I realized that I had completed all the research I needed in order to write up the first major chapter of my Labanotation text. Oh yeah - I'm writing a Labanotation text. Basically a textbook-style explanation of how to use all it's myriad elements. It's an immense task, I've been working on it for years, and I've still only just barely scratched the surface.

So, I recently concluded that I had to make directional gesture one of the first, primary topics covered. I had resisted the idea, because I couldn't see a way to explain directional gesture without getting into all kinds of discussions about locomotion and other topics, which would lead to just a big mess. If I was going to cover directional notation, I wanted to do it clean.

But I'd concluded that I couldn't avoid it, because directional gesture really is central to Labanotation, and it just can't be put off. So I'd been agonizing over how to cover the topic in a clean way, without bringing in tons of extraneous details from all over Labanotation.

I knew that I couldn't do directional gesture without also covering the crosses of axes - at least some of them - because the crosses of axes determined where up, front, left, right, and so on all actually were. Can't do much directional gesturing if you don't know where the directions are. So I knew I had to explain that topic. And even though crosses of axes are also related to locomotion, I figured I would just have to cover the crosses of axes again when it came time to talk about locomotion. There just wasn't going to be a way to avoid that; and for that matter, I'd have to cover directional gesture itself again at that time anyway. So it didn't bother me that much. Locomotion in Labanotation is just a totally special-case topic. A lot of stuff was going to need to be re-explained when it came time to cover it.

So for directional gesture I'd need to cover the crosses of axes, but to cover the crosses of axes I needed to explain the front symbols. Front symbols were needed because they were always used to express where to read the front of the performer. A number of crosses of axes derived their conception of front directly from the most recent front symbols. So I had to drag front symbols in as well.

But there I was stuck, because the only way I knew of to change a performer's front, and thus invoke a front symbol, was to make that performer turn or pivot on stage, or do some other kind of locomotion. So there was locomotion again, sticking it's nose in! Or it's feet, more precisely.

Trying to explain how to notate gesture in Labanotation, without making reference to locomotion, is a really tough nut to crack, it turns out. Though a very important one.

But! I totally won, because I remembered the secret turn symbols. Secret turn symbols exist specifically to allow the notator to express a change of front, without actually moving the performer on stage. They're not used often, but they exist, and they were just what I needed.

It was perfect! I had figured out how to explain directional gesture, and none of my dependencies required any sort of explanation of locomotion. Not only that, but I'd managed to restrict the number of dependencies to just three - crosses of axes, front symbols, and secret turns.

That was all months ago, actually. After that I started organizing the research, which meant going through Ann Hutchinson's Labanotation book, and her nine red books, and gathering together all the information about each of those topics.

Secret turns were actually the easiest of them, followed by front symbols. The thorny one was the crosses of axes, and that's what Ilene and I had been talking about for several lessons before the one on Wednesday, and on Wednesday as well. But finally! We had reached the end of that topic. That's when I realized that there was nothing standing in my way anymore. I could write up what I'd learned, and it would represent the first really significant progress I'd make in creating this larger text.

I'm pretty enthusiastic about it. I'm already almost done with the chapter on secret turns. Like I said, that was always the easiest of the topics; but still. A nice step forward.