Dance Notation

 Those indications were found in a 15th century Brussels manuscript of basses danses(published in 1912 by Ernest Closson) and in notations of similar dances by the dance masters Stribaldi (1517) of Turin, Italy and Arena (1519). They also appeared in Robert Copelande's English translation of a French textbook(1521), in the better known Orchesographie by Thoinot Arbeau (1588) and in John Playford's , The English Dancing Master(1651). Playford added the abstract signs o and ) for men and women. Note: the o has a little dot in it.

BEAUCHAMP -FEUILLET SYSTEM 

In 1666, by an act of the French Parliament, Beauchamp, who is credited with being the first to classify the basic forms and steps of dancing was also recognized as the inventor of a dance notation. This was published in 1700 by Raoul Auger Feulliet under the title of Choreographie ou l'art de decrire la danse. Famous ballet masters of the period: Jean Phillipe Rameau, Louis Fecourt, Sieur Isaac d'Orleans; Kelloun Tomlinson and others, have left an indelible and impressive legacy of sarabands, minuets, rigadoons, passacaglias, chaconnes, louvres, galliards, bources, gigues( jigs) and other dances recorded in the Beauchamp -Feuillet System of notation. They faithfully included an explanation of the system which enables us to study this dances in their original forms.

LATER SYSTEMS

Although, dancing masters in London, Paris, Leipzig and Madrid, used this system, it's use was short-lived. A century later, Arthur Saint-Leon in Paris devised a system based on drawing miniature skeletal figures of dance positions. This system was developed and published in 1887 by Friedrich Albert Zorn, teacher of dancing at the Imperial Russian Richelieu -Gymnesium in Odessa. Benhard Klemm of Leipzig (1885) and V.J Steppanoff of St.Petersburg (1892), contributed to the impractical clutter by adapting music notes to represent movement. 

A number of twentieth century choreographers have attempted to devise a movement notation but even the best known among them- Margaret Morris (1928) and Rudolf and Joan Benesh (1956) all of London, and Eugene Loring of California (1955)- adhered to combinations of symbols based on earlier unsuccessful systems. The astute attempts made by Noah Eshkoal and Abraham Wachmann of London (1958) and Gertrude Kurath of Ann Arbor, Michigan (1950) were valuable contributions to the understanding of the problems of dance movement recording, of an instrument as complex as the human body.