Dance Notation Bureau (New York, N.Y.)

The Dance Notation Bureau (a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization) was founded in 1940 by Ann Hutchinson Guest, Helen Priest Rogers, Eve Gentry, and Janey Price. The DNB mission is to advance the art of dance through the use of a system of notation, creating dance scores using the symbol system called Labanotation, named for Rudolf Laban who first published the system in 1928. In 1942, choreographer Eugene Loring requested a notation score of his Billy the Kid, the first ballet recorded in the United States, in order to establish his intellectual property rights to the choreography. Over the years, hundreds of works have been notated, representing choreographers including Doris Humphrey, Hanya Holm (her notated Kiss Me Kate was the first score accepted for copyright registration by the Library of Congress), George Balanchine, Paul Taylor, Antony Tudor, Bill T. Jones, William Forsythe, José Limón, Laura Dean, and many others. Each year DNB assists in notating works and in staging performances from score. In 1968, the DNB Extension for Education and Research was founded as part of the Department of Dance at The Ohio State University with a mission to promote and implement research, develop curriculum, and expand dance notation literature and archival materials. Three software programs, LabanWriter, LabanReader, and Labanlink, have emerged under the umbrella of the Extension, as well as LabanLab, a website for learning Labanotation.

From the guide to the Dance Notation Bureau Collection, 1930-, (The Ohio State University. Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute.)

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