ABSTRACT
Both the employment of and discourse on dance notation saw a change of perspective over the course of the final decades of the twentieth century. The chapter focuses on the mobile/dynamic structures of dance-relevant (documentation) systems that permit a more flexible engagement with the historiography of dance and its notation. There are two relevant categories of notation: the more frequent stick figure notations and those using music notes. The two categories share the procedure of isolating single movement elements based on and referring back to the aesthetically motivated appearance of dance. Both the stick figures and the music notes search for the conditional relation between corporeality and time, founded on the experience of a spatiality that is now consciously and conceptually conceived as three-dimensional. The notations are concerned with the problem of how to represent complex movement sequences in their dynamic unfolding.
