If you are a lover of ballet dancing, but know that you will never make it as a full time ballerina, there are many other careers available to you within the ballet dancing world.
One of them is a dance notator. Dance notators are employed by most ballet companies and it is the notator’s job to write down ballets as they are created. The notation used in ballet is much like the one used for music and is a great way to reproduce the ballet for other companies without having to rely on memory. By using notation, we can build up a library of information to be stored for the future.
Up to recently, most ballets have just been handed down from generation to generation by the dancers and choreographers that made them. Unfortunately if the ballet was not performed for a long time, or the dancers died or forgot the steps, the ballet was lost forever. There were a great many wonderful ballets done in the past, but all we have now are a few pictures or drawings, and we can only imagine what they must have been like.
Another way of recording ballets nowadays is with a video camera, but it is not easy to learn from it, as you have to turn everything the opposite way around, as if you were looking over your shoulder.
At the start of the eighteenth century, Pierre Beauchamps, who was responsible for the five positions in ballet dancing, had a system, but it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the system was devised that is used today.
Vladimir Stepanov, who was a dancer at the Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg, used his system to write down many ballets by the great choreographer Marius Petipa, including The Sleeping Beauty. A version of his system is still taught to the students of the Royal Ballet School.
In America today they use a system called Labanotation, which was invented in the 1920′s and 30′s by Rudolph von Laban. This system was designed to suit all movement, not only dance.
In Britain and many other places a system known as Choreology is the most popular. Joan Benesh and Rudolph Benesh perfected their idea in the 1950′s and it is the system used to produce the most ballets today. It is widely known today as Benesh Notation. There are now courses offered in Universities to learn the art of Benesh Notation, and this will come in handy for anybody involved in the ballet dancing world.
We all know that the feeling, characterisation and moods really make the performance and the humour in the comical ballets cannot be reproduced on paper in words or symbols. No system in the world can truly convey the art of ballet dancing, but at least we can now be sure that the actual steps are recorded accurately.
Tags: Balet Dance, lord of the dance