Whitney E. Laemmli's "Making Movement Modern"

Whitney E. Laemmli is assistant professor in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Making Movement Modern: Science, Politics, and the Body in Motion, and reported the following:

Much of page 99 is taken up by an image of seven women sitting around a table holding a strip of paper densely covered in geometric symbols. One of the walls behind them displays vertical charts adorned with the same markings, while on the other dozens of paper scrolls sit horizontally on a pegboard, waiting consultation as if in an ancient library. The photograph, however, was taken circa 1955, and the women—of varying ages—are dressed neatly in the clothing of the era and project an aura of happy, ordered competence as they look straight at the camera.

These women were members of a New York City organization known as the Dance Notation Bureau. Founded in 1940, it had the mission of promoting Labanotation—a method of capturing the movements of the human body on paper first developed in Weimar Germany—within the United States and in the world at large. This page comes near the beginning of the book’s second chapter and the text on the rest of the page gives a preview of the chapter’s main concerns:

This chapter is the story of those efforts and of their sometimes unanticipated results. In particular, it explores how the Dance Notation Bureau’s vision of dance as primarily informational raised contentious new questions about the definitions of art and authorship, questions that dancers, choreographers, lawyers, and engineers would all answer differently. It also reveals how these new ideas and practices facilitated movement’s entry into the ‘information age’ in a more literal sense, creating lasting ties between Labanotation, engineering, and computing that would prove important to the system’s future. As the next pages will explore, however, as art became science and dance became data, the meaning of dancers’ thinking, feeling, sweating bodies became increasingly uncertain.

Page 99 provides the reader with a good sense of some—but not all—of the subjects and questions the book explores. It focuses attention on the fundamental act at the heart of movement notation: the transformation of the messy stuff of human movement into static data, ready for deployment by a wide variety of people to an even wider variety of ends. It also speaks to the consequences of this process both for individuals (here, the dancers) and for larger political formations.

It is also fitting that the page contains an image—and not just because issues of representation are central to the work. The photograph suggests some of the aesthetic pleasures and utopian fantasies that made the system so alluring.

Someone who encountered only this passage, however, might get the impression that the book is primarily about notation in dance. In fact, though dance is key to the story, one of the book’s primary interventions is revealing how this system of recording moved across disciplines, geographies, and historical eras, finding purchase everywhere from white-collar human resources departments to psychiatric hospitals to national political spectacles. It leaves out many of the important actors in the story, from Rudolf Laban, the choreographer, movement theorist, and eventual Nazi minister of dance who created the notation, to Alan Lomax, the famous American folklorist who deployed it in an effort to remake the country’s “perceptual apparatus” in support of a multicultural future.

It also only begins to hint at the consequences of this way of thinking about and recording the human body for life today. Indeed, the project sketched here is ongoing, as new kinds of information about human bodies in general—and human movement, in particular—are being gathered at an increasingly rapid rate. Activity trackers gobble up steps in the tens of millions, novel surveillance tools rely on gait analysis, and automated hiring software makes decisions in part based on the movement behavior of the interviewee. Though there is currently little awareness of the history of these practices, a number of these contemporary systems rely on techniques or theories directly derived from Laban’s work. It is my hope that my book speaks both to history and to our current moment, illuminating what was—and continues to be—at stake in efforts to understand, capture, and control human movement on a large scale.

Visit Whitney E. Laemmli's website.

--Marshal Zeringue