o lu m e

There is an annotated bibliography: in addition to selected references to choreographers mentioned and to appropriate theoretical and critical writing, there is a broader selection of references encompassing text books and study guides for notation, professional scores of choreographies, articles on the teaching, development and use of Labanotation, scholarly articles including Labanotation as illustrative tool, writing on dance and sport. In terms of how we have approached the devising of the studies, each study has begun from a particular choreographer – so each is, in its most complex manifestation, a kind of choreographic style study (a short dance ‘in the style of ’ Jonathan Burrows, Lucinda Childs or whoever). However, having notated the ‘full ’ version, what I have begun to do is to pare this down to a skeleton version – taking out characteristic details and thus, I hope, opening up the possibilities for students to engage with it in different ways and with different choreographers in mind. So the first version of the dance that the student sees is like a sketch. S/he can manipulate it, colour it, inflect it as s/he will, as a choreographer or as a performer; as a way of investigating different stylistic possibilities and relating these to professional choreographers, and so on. The advanced version of the score offers, as it were, one way of developing that original material, one that captures something of an individual choreographer’s approach. By engaging with the material in these different ways, drawing on the range of skills the student is developing – in performance, choreography, critical analysis, understanding of different choreographers ’ work – s/he will, we hope, gain a better sense of the inter-relatedness of all those strands, as well as a more confident grasp of notation itself and recognition of its potential