What I am suggesting is that we should not be satisfied with the status quo. Growth, change and development are crucial to dance and choreography, and I believe that all forms of archiving need to be open to the same processes of innovation and improvement.

A popular video game and three-hour seminars are good starts in learning dance notation: an introduction; a chance to experience the basics. There should be more of these opportunities! At the same time, you note that not all dancers have to read notation for it to be accessible. That may be true but why wouldn’t we want more dancers to be able to read it and read it accurately? These are the artists who may be onstage now, but will likely be choreographing and creating offstage in the future. We should want them to have as much knowledge, skill and education as is possible, including an in-depth understanding of notation.

We can do a better job of archiving by improving and integrating every available system. Clearly, notation has a long tradition and widespread usage. An even vaster scope through an increased access to notation training can only help this important archival practice not hinder it.

There may also be confusion from the article about how dances written in notation are not accessible. One should separatge the ability to write notation from the ability to read notation. While it takes extensive training to skillfully analyze movement and write it in a symbolic language, trained dancers can be taught the basics to read non-complex dances in a familiar technique within hours. A 3-hour class was taught to New York Theater Ballet dancers in December, and they were reading a score. In a 2-week period of training, the “Page-to-stage” classes result in capable Labanotation readers. If you’ve seen children using the video/arcade game “Dance, Dance Revolution,” you’ve seen them reading dance notation, learning the foot patterns as quickly as the music demands. Each step registers on a mat, and missteps end the turn. The basics are intuitive and very easy to learn. There are millions of users.

Accessiblity doesn’t really depend on all dancers reading a score. Most often, when a dance company or school contracts for a score, it hires or has on staff a stager who translates Labanotation on the page onto the body, someone who sets the dance in the same way any other stager comes in and stages a dance. The only difference may be that the stager uses the score, rather than memory, to set the steps. In many of these cases the dancers are unaware that a score has ever been used.

In terms of archiving work, paper can last millenia (acid-free paper, properly stored). The recording media mentioned in the article don’t. The DNB keeps recordings and has had many formats: film (8 mm, 16 mm), videotape (1/2 inch and 1/4 inch reel-to-reel), Beta, VHS, Umatic, and DVDs. The DVDs are the least stable. The cost of conversion can be very high, especially if repairs are needed because of degradation of the medium (stretching, burning, breakage, scratches). This should be considered part of the cost.

More information about Labanotation, scores, training available, and the process is available on the Dance Notation Bureau’s web site: dancenotation.org.