AUTHORITY ON RECORDING DANCES ON PAPER
Ann Hutchinson Guest, one of the world’s foremost authorities on dance notation, the crucial practice of recording dances on paper in the manner of a musical score, died April 9 at her home in London. She was 103.
Lynne Weber, executive director of the Dance Notation Bureau, which Hutchinson Guest and three other women founded in 1940 to promote what was then an esoteric practice, confirmed the death.
Hutchinson Guest was knowledgeable about a number of dance notation systems, which seek to preserve choreography as its creators intended rather than relying on memory or film. But she was particularly devoted to the one introduced by Rudolf Laban, which is now widely known as Labanotation, a term she is said to have coined.
She studied under Laban,
who died in 1958, and she was instrumental in spreading knowledge and use of his system, as well as expanding it as the art of dance itself expanded.
Hutchinson Guest was a dancer on Broadway in the 1940s and early ’50s, appearing in musicals like “One Touch of Venus” (1943), in which she worked with Agnes de Mille, and “Billion Dollar Baby” (1945), choreographed by Jerome Robbins. By then she was already an advocate of notation, and after the long-running Cole Porter musical “Kiss Me, Kate” opened on Broadway in 1948, its choreographer, Hanya Holm, asked her to notate the show’s dances.
As a result of her work, the show became, in 1952, the first choreographic work to be registered for a copyright.
“She absolutely saw that dances should be copyrighted,” said Weber, who recently worked with
JaQuel Knight on notating his choreography for Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” video. “She was a visionary.”
The acceptance of dance notation had been spurred by the Dance Notation Bureau, which Hutchinson Guest founded in New York in 1940 with Eve Gentry, Janey Price and Helen Priest Rogers. Labanotation is essentially “a living language,” as Weber put it, using symbols to represent dance movements.
“The printed Labanotation page looks like a combination of hieroglyphs, pictographs, Morse dots-anddashes, doodles, and a music score turned on edge,” The Associated Press wrote in 1954, when the concept was still something of a novelty.
Once, during World War II, a postal inspector flagged notation documents that Hutchinson Guest and Rogers had sent to Laban in England, suspecting that they were some sort of espionage written in code.
“At a time when the world of elite dance was run almost entirely by men, Guest created an important institution of women dedicated to preserving movement for posterity, using a sophisticated technique that few people anywhere had mastered,” Whitney E. Laemmli, a historian of science and technology at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of the 2017 article “Paper Dancers” in the journal Information and Culture, said by email.
“She led the effort to standardize Labanotation,” she continued, “and her promotion of the system ensured Labanotation’s continued use for nearly a century. The Labanotation guidebooks she authored are still cited today, not only by choreographers but by scientists and engineers interested in studying and simulating human movement via computer.”