Labanotation and Benesh: How Modern Dance Writes Itself Down

The Problem Feuillet Left Behind

For eighty years — roughly 1700 to 1780 — the Western dance world had a workable notation system. Beauchamp-Feuillet notation let a choreography travel across the continent on paper, and a trained reader could reconstruct the dance. We cover it in detail in our piece on Beauchamp-Feuillet notation.

But Feuillet had a fatal limitation: it tracked feet, not bodies. It told you where the dancer's feet went and which direction the torso faced. It said almost nothing about arms, shoulders, head, hands, or the thousand inflections of quality that make dance dance. For the court repertoire of Louis XIV's reign, this was enough — upper-body carriage was standardized by shared tradition. For anything else, it was hopeless.

By the late 19th century, two traditions had outgrown Feuillet entirely. Ballet had evolved a virtuosic vocabulary of arm and torso work that Feuillet could not capture. Modern dance, emerging in the early 20th century, rejected the standardized upper body altogether in favor of expressive individuality. Both traditions needed a notation system that could describe the whole moving body.

The 20th century produced two serious answers: Labanotation and Benesh Movement Notation. They took opposite approaches to the same problem.

Our general notation overview surveys the whole history; this article digs into these two systems specifically.

Labanotation: The Body as a Geometric Field

Rudolf von Laban (1879-1958) was a Hungarian-Austrian choreographer, theorist, and movement analyst. In 1928 he published Kinetographie Laban — what we now call Labanotation in English-speaking countries, Kinetography Laban in Europe.

Laban's approach started from a theoretical claim: any human movement can be described as a trajectory of body parts through space over time, relative to a three-dimensional coordinate system centered on the dancer. The system gives you symbols for every axis, every direction, every degree of effort, every quality. In principle, it can notate anything a human body does.

A page of Labanotation looks nothing like a Feuillet plate. Instead of a floor plan, you see a vertical staff that reads from bottom to top over time. Columns of the staff correspond to body parts:

• Center columns: the two feet
• Next columns out: the legs (hip joint, knee)
• Further out: the torso
• Outer columns: the arms and hands
• Outside the staff: the head

Symbols placed in each column tell you what that body part is doing in that moment: a direction shape (the elongated hexagon) indicates where the body part moves, with shading indicating whether the movement is high, middle, or low in space. Duration is shown by how tall the symbol is — long symbols mean the movement takes a long time, short symbols mean it's quick.

The result is a system that can notate a hand gesture, a full-body leap, a slow torso inflection, and a fast footwork sequence all in the same document with the same vocabulary.

Strengths. Labanotation is extremely general. It can notate any style of dance. It has been used to record modern dance (Graham, Humphrey, Tharp), ballet, folk dances from around the world, ethnographic movement studies, and even non-dance movement — therapeutic gesture, sign language, martial arts. If you need a notation that can describe any movement, Labanotation is the system.

Weaknesses. Labanotation is demanding. A trained Labanotator reads the system the way a trained musician reads a full orchestral score — it takes years of study. The barrier to entry is high. Dancers who learn the system gain deep insight; dancers who don't can't access the archive.

Benesh Movement Notation: The Body as a Snapshot

Rudolf Benesh (1916-1975) and Joan Benesh (1920-2014) were a British couple — he a mathematician and accountant, she a Royal Ballet dancer — who developed their notation system in the 1940s and 1950s, publishing it in 1955 as An Introduction to Benesh Dance Notation.

Their starting intuition was completely different from Laban's. Where Laban built a coordinate-system-first abstraction, the Beneshes built a visual-first system: a Benesh staff looks like what the body actually looks like.

A Benesh staff has five lines, horizontal, like a musical staff. The five lines correspond to:

• Top line: the top of the head
• Second line: the shoulders
• Middle line: the waist
• Fourth line: the knees
• Bottom line: the floor

A "frame" on the staff is essentially a stick-figure silhouette of the dancer at a moment in time. Small symbols indicate where the hands, feet, and limbs are in that snapshot. Reading a Benesh score feels like flipping through still photographs of the dance.

Time moves left to right, and frames are separated by bar lines that align with the music. Between frames, additional symbols indicate the path a limb takes from one frame to the next.

Strengths. Benesh is visually intuitive. A dancer with minimal training can look at a Benesh frame and see what the body position should be, because the notation literally depicts the body. This makes it particularly well-suited for ballet, where positions are codified and the interest is in the specific positions the body passes through.

Weaknesses. Benesh is less theoretically general than Labanotation. Movement qualities (effort, flow, dynamic) are harder to notate in Benesh than in Laban. Complex independent limb action — where the arms are doing one thing while the legs do an unrelated other thing simultaneously — can become cluttered on the Benesh staff in a way that Laban's parallel columns handle more cleanly.

The Institutional Split

Over the past seventy years, the two systems have settled into distinct institutional niches.

Labanotation is the dominant system in:

• American modern dance and the university dance-studies world
• Ethnographic dance studies globally
• Movement analysis outside dance (physical therapy, sports science, occupational therapy)
• Somatic practices that draw on Laban Movement Analysis (LMA)

Benesh is the dominant system in:

• The Royal Ballet and allied British and Commonwealth ballet institutions
• Professional ballet repertoire preservation (the Royal Opera House maintains Benesh scores of its productions)
• Much of the Commonwealth's classical dance documentation

You can generalize — imperfectly — that Labanotation "won" the modern-dance and academic worlds, while Benesh "won" the ballet-institutional world.

Why Neither Became Universal

Music has a single dominant notation. Why not dance?

Several reasons, and they illuminate something important about the dance itself.

The body is multidimensional in a way music isn't. Music at any instant is a handful of pitches at various volumes. A dancing body at any instant has hundreds of simultaneously active degrees of freedom. Any notation either simplifies radically (losing information) or becomes dense and slow to read (losing utility).

Dance is less repertoire-driven than music. A pianist's career might involve re-performing the same hundred pieces that a previous generation played. A choreographer's career typically involves creating new work. The incentive to invest in reading a large archive is weaker when there's no archive you're trying to access.

Video changed the equation. By the 1970s, video recording was good enough to preserve choreography for most practical purposes. A dance company archiving a new ballet will almost always choose to record the performance on video rather than notate it, and the video is fully adequate for revival purposes. This has hollowed out the economic case for notation across the field.

Laban and Benesh compete instead of cooperate. There was never a moment when the dance world collectively endorsed a single system. Dancers who want to learn notation face a choice between two incompatible systems serving overlapping communities, and many simply don't learn either.

Why They Still Matter

Despite all of this, both systems persist.

They persist because video has limits that notation doesn't. A video shows you one performance from one angle. Notation describes a work. A notator thinking through how to write a movement forces analytical clarity about what the movement actually is, separate from how it happened to be performed on any given day. Reviving a ballet from Benesh is reconstructing the work; reviving it from video is imitating a particular cast.

They persist because they're tools for analysis, not just transmission. A Labanotation score of a folk dance reveals structural properties of the movement — symmetries, rhythmic relationships, spatial patterns — that aren't visible in video. The act of notating is an act of understanding.

And they persist because they're part of the profession's literacy. A ballet mistress at the Royal Ballet reads Benesh the way a conductor reads a score. It's part of what it means to be professional in that context.

The LODance Perspective

LODance's vocabulary is historical partner dancing — ballroom, Latin, folk, court. We use Feuillet-derived imagery as [our visual language](/blog/beauchamp-feuillet-notation-explained) and we reference Labanotation and Benesh where they apply. But the majority of our catalog sits in a space that neither system was designed for: syllabus-defined social and competitive partner dances, with their vocabulary of named figures and standardized teaching traditions.

For that repertoire, the effective "notation" is the syllabus itself — a document that names each figure and describes it in prose and diagram. It's not as theoretically rigorous as Laban or Benesh. But it's what the field actually uses.

Our glossary catalogs these figures across systems, and the timeline shows how notations have emerged, competed, and faded across three centuries of Western dance.

What to Read Next

If this article sparked interest, try:

• Ann Hutchinson Guest's Labanotation: The System of Analyzing and Recording Movement (the standard text)
• Rudolf and Joan Benesh's An Introduction to Benesh Dance Notation
• Our beginner's guide to dance notation for the broader history

Notation is an unfashionable subject. It's also one of the quiet intellectual scaffolds that makes dance a teachable tradition rather than a series of unrepeatable performances. Both Labanotation and Benesh are worth understanding, whether or not you'll ever write a note of either.

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