A Beginner's Guide to Dance Notation Systems

The Impossible Problem

Music has a writing system. Thanks to staff notation, a composer in Vienna in 1800 could send sheet music to a player in Boston in 2026, and the player would perform almost exactly what the composer imagined.

Dance has no such universal writing system. And not for lack of trying. For the past three and a half centuries, choreographers, scholars, and engineers have invented notation after notation—symbols for every footstep, diagrams for every arm position, grammars for every transfer of weight. Each system was clever. None has ever become universal.

The reason is simple. Music is one-dimensional: it unfolds on the axis of time. Dance is four-dimensional: three spatial axes and time, with a body that moves its limbs asymmetrically and can change weight, shape, direction, and quality simultaneously. Writing that down is genuinely one of the hardest notation problems in human culture.

This post walks through the major dance notation systems you are likely to encounter, how they work at a high level, and how LODance uses them.

Feuillet Notation (1700)

The first serious dance notation system was published in Paris in 1700 by Raoul-Auger Feuillet, a dancing-master at the court of Louis XIV, in a book called Chorégraphie, ou l'art de décrire la danse ("Choreography, or the art of describing dance"). The book was a commercial hit. Within a decade it had been translated into English, German, Spanish, and Dutch.

Feuillet notation reads like a floor plan. The page shows the path the dancer traces across the floor, drawn as a line. Along the line, small symbols indicate:

• Which foot takes each step (right or left)
• The step quality (step, hop, leap, slide, jump)
• Beats of the music (tick marks correspond to musical beats)
• The direction the body faces as it travels

It is, essentially, a map of where your feet go. It is elegant, compact, and well-suited to the figured court dances of the Baroque period, which were themselves built around elegant floor patterns.

Feuillet notation was used extensively between 1700 and 1780. More than 300 surviving Baroque dances were recorded in it—which is why we still know, with surprising precision, how a minuet at Versailles actually looked in 1720.

At LODance, Feuillet notation has a special place: it is our visual language. Its curling lines, tick marks, and decorative borders appear throughout the site as dividers, ornaments, and motifs. The 1700 system is to LODance what Elvish is to Middle-Earth—a historical script used as a living aesthetic.

Beauchamp-Feuillet Limitations (and Why It Faded)

Feuillet notation works beautifully for court dances where:

• Movement is planar (almost all action happens on a flat floor)
• Couples stay mostly apart, connected at the hand
• The arms are decorative rather than structural
• Floor patterns are more important than body shapes

It works terribly for almost everything that came after. Put a waltz into Feuillet notation and you get an unreadable mess, because the waltz's meaning lies in the close partnership frame and the rise and fall of the body—neither of which Feuillet can express.

By the mid-1800s, the system was mostly abandoned. Ballet and social dance needed something that could describe bodies, not just floor paths.

Stepanov Notation (1892)

Vladimir Stepanov, a Russian ballet dancer and theorist, published a notation system in 1892 that tried to solve the body-versus-floor problem by mapping the human body onto a modified musical staff.

Stepanov notation looks startlingly like sheet music. The vertical staff represents the human body: lines for the spine, marks for the limbs. Time flows left-to-right, exactly as in a score. Symbols above and below the staff indicate arm positions, torso rotations, and leg gestures.

Stepanov notation was used to record most of the Imperial Russian Ballet repertoire in the 1890s and 1900s, including the original staging of The Sleeping Beauty. When the Russian Revolution scattered the Mariinsky dancers across Europe, many of them carried Stepanov manuscripts with them—and those manuscripts are why we can still reconstruct much of Petipa's original choreography today, rather than relying on memory alone.

The system is hard to read and has never had a large user base, but the notation that survived in émigré suitcases is one of the reasons classical ballet has the continuous tradition it does.

Labanotation (1928)

The most ambitious attempt to write down *all* human movement was published in 1928 by Rudolf von Laban, a Hungarian-German dance theorist. His system—variously called Kinetography Laban in Europe and Labanotation in the United States—is the most widely used formal dance notation in the modern world.

Labanotation uses a vertical staff that represents the body symmetrically. The center column is the spine. The columns to either side are, progressively outward:

• Support (weight-bearing legs)
• Leg gesture
• Body (torso)
• Arm
• Head

Time flows from bottom to top of the page (not left to right). Symbol shape indicates direction. Symbol shading indicates level (high, middle, low). Symbol length indicates duration.

The result is incredibly precise. A skilled Labanotation reader can reconstruct a piece of modern dance choreography from the score alone, with accuracy comparable to a musician reading sheet music.

Labanotation is maintained today by the Dance Notation Bureau in New York, which has scored hundreds of major 20th-century modern dance works—Balanchine, Graham, Humphrey, Limón, and many others. Without Labanotation, much of the American modern dance repertoire would survive only on grainy video.

Benesh Movement Notation (1955)

Rudolf and Joan Benesh published their notation system in 1955, specifically designed for classical ballet and the needs of the Royal Ballet in London. Where Labanotation aims to describe all movement, Benesh focuses on what a classical dancer needs.

Benesh notation looks even more like music than Stepanov's. The staff has five lines corresponding to the top of the head, shoulders, waist, knees, and floor. A stick figure is implied across the lines, and symbols show where hands, elbows, feet, and knees are at each moment.

The result is remarkably readable. A trained Benesh "choreologist" can follow a score live in rehearsal and cue a ballet from it. The Royal Ballet, the Australian Ballet, and the Royal Academy of Dance all maintain Benesh archives and employ staff choreologists.

Benesh is dominant in the ballet world. Labanotation is dominant in the modern dance world. Both are alive and used professionally in 2026.

Ballroom "Step Charts"

Competitive ballroom has its own informal notation, usually called step charts or figure sheets. These are not a formal system in the Labanotation or Benesh sense. They are a pragmatic teaching shorthand that records, for each figure:

• Step number (1, 2, 3...)
• Foot used (LF = left foot, RF = right foot)
• Position (forward, back, side, diagonal)
• Alignment (the direction you face, relative to the room or the line of dance)
• Amount of turn (eighth, quarter, half)
• Timing (slow or quick, counted in beats)
• Rise/fall and sway
• Footwork (heel, toe, ball)

A single figure like the natural turn in waltz typically fits on half a page of step chart notation. Step charts are what the technique books—Alex Moore's Ballroom Dancing, Walter Laird's Technique of Latin Dancing, the ISTD and IDTA manuals—actually use. They are the de facto ballroom notation.

Step charts are not elegant, not universal, and not designed for anyone who is not already a trained ballroom dancer. But they work. Every competitive ballroom dancer on earth reads them.

How LODance Uses Notation

LODance treats dance notation as three different things:

• A historical record. The LODance library contains figure data mined from Feuillet-era treatises, Stepanov manuscripts, 20th-century ISTD and DVIDA syllabi, and contemporary ballroom step charts—each recorded in whatever notation its source used.
• A visual language. Feuillet's curving lines, tick marks, and decorative flourishes are used throughout the site as a design motif, tying every page back to the earliest written tradition of partner dance.
• A pedagogical tool. For each figure in the LODance library, we show the step chart, a written description, and where appropriate a diagram—so a dancer can learn the figure through whichever channel fits their brain best.

Why None of This Is Solved

No dance notation has become universal because every system is a compromise. Feuillet sacrificed body shape for floor path. Stepanov and Benesh sacrificed universality for readability. Labanotation sacrificed readability for completeness. Step charts sacrificed everything except ballroom.

This is why dance has never had its equivalent of musical staff notation, and it probably never will. The problem is too hard. Every serious attempt trades one quality for another.

What has replaced notation in the modern era is video. A video of a figure is worth pages of Labanotation to most dancers. But video has its own limitations: it captures an instance of a figure, not the idealized form. Two great dancers doing the same feather step will produce two different videos. Notation—at its best—records the figure itself, not a performance of it.

A Surprising Fact

The oldest dance notation we have is not Feuillet. It is a 1445 manuscript called Cervera Manuscript, which records Catalan court dances using tiny textual abbreviations and diagrams. It predates Feuillet by 255 years.

But Cervera notation was never published or standardized. It was a working shorthand for a single dancing-master. Feuillet's 1700 publication is the first universal system, the first one designed to be taught, replicated, and read by anyone who learned the code.

Three and a half centuries later, we are still working on that same problem.

Further Exploration

To see Feuillet notation in action and explore the historical figures in the LODance library, visit lodance.app. For a deeper dive into how LODance connects notation systems across centuries of partner dance, see our Rosetta Stone of dance figures article.

Writing dance down may be impossible. But the attempt to do so is one of the most interesting unsolved problems in the arts—and it has given us some of the most beautiful scripts humans have ever devised.