Moving with Words, 1950s–1980s: Language, Notation, Choreography

My thesis concerns the use of language to notate movement from the 1950s to 1980s. During this period, traditional forms of pictographic movement notation get replaced in avant-garde communities by experimental language scores. These emerge within the context of a widespread and international turn towards notation that leaves its mark on philosophy, theory, and architecture as well as performance. My first chapter traces the development of language scores in New York in the 1950s–60s as exemplary of this wider notational turn. These scores, as privileged instances of language being made to do something, ask for new interpretative frameworks and procedures, and for reconstructions of language-use. My thesis brings together archival research, interviews with dancers, and close readings of published materials to reconstruct these lines of notational use between language and movement. Chapters Two to Seven are centred on three artists who both write for the page and notate movement for the stage: Hijikata Tatsumi, Samuel Beckett, and Yvonne Rainer. In Chapter Two, I read Hijikata’s notational language of the 1970s as producing a resistance to quotable gesture, in that it refuses the interruption that would make discrete movements visible. In Chapter Three, I ask whether the quality of Hijikata’s dance, characterized as a dissolving of figures into grounds, is a result of the proximity between his notational language and his poetic-prose text, Ailing Dancer. In Chapter Four, I treat Beckett’s language notation for Footfalls as a reflection on the betweenness of choreographic or directorial voice—a voice that writes into itself the imagination of another. In Chapter Five, I take the language notation of Quad to articulate a concern of contemporaneous choreographic works by Lucinda Childs and Anne Theresa de Keersmaeker. In Chapter Six, I look at works by Rainer and Childs to theorise the emergence of recording-as-notation from the 1960s–70s—first with recording as writing or note- taking, and then with recording using video and audio. In Chapter Seven, I consider Rainer’s juxtaposition of language and movement in film in terms of a politics of attention, that draws on Rainer’s own reading of feminist and poststructuralist theory.I was funded by Emmanuel College and a GB Sasakawa Foundation Fund. My research was additionally supported by an Aoi Global Research Fund, a JSPS Pre-doctoral Fellowship, and a Getty Research Institute Library Grant