Ann Hutchinson Guest, one of the world’s foremost authorities on dance notation, the crucial practice of recording dances on paper in the form of a musical score, died on April 9 at her London home. She was 103.
Lynne Weber, executive director of the Dance Notation Bureau, which Mrs. Hutchinson Guest and three other women founded in 1940 to promote what was then an esoteric practice, confirmed the death.
Ms. Hutchinson Guest was knowledgeable about a number of dance notation systems, seeking to keep the choreography as the creators intended, rather than relying on memory or film. But she was especially devoted to the term introduced by Rudolf Laban, now commonly known as Labanotation, a term she is said to have coined.
She studied with Laban, who died in 1958, and she played an important role in spreading knowledge and use of his system, as well as expanding it as the art of dance itself expanded.
Ms. Hutchinson Guest was a Broadway dancer in the 1940s and early 1950s, appearing in such musicals as “One Touch of Venus” (1943), working with Agnes de Mille, and “Billion Dollar Baby” ( 1945), choreographed by Jerome Robbins. By this time, she was already a proponent of notation, and after the long-running Cole Porter musical “Kiss Me, Kate” opened on Broadway in 1948, choreographer Hanya Holm asked her to notate the show’s dances.
As a result of her work, in 1952 the show became the first choreographic work to be registered for a copyright.
“She definitely understood that dance should be copyrighted,” Ms. Weber, who recently worked with JaQuel Knight to choreograph Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” video, said in an interview. “She was a visionary.”
The acceptance of dance notation was stimulated by the Dance Notation Bureau, which Mrs. Hutchinson Guest founded in New York in 1940 with Eve Gentry, Janey Price and Helen Priest Rogers. Lab annotation is essentially “a living language,” as Ms. Weber put it, using symbols to represent dance movements.
“The printed Labanotation page looks like a combination of hieroglyphs, icons, Morse dots and dashes, doodles, and a music score that’s on edge,” wrote The Associated Press in 1954, when the concept was still new.
Once, during World War II, a postal inspector marked notation documents that Mrs. Hutchinson Guest and Mrs. Rogers had sent to Laban in England, assuming it was some sort of espionage written in code. The same thought occurred to the person who headlined a 1951 article about Mrs. Hutchinson Guest in a Sunday insert. “That girl dancer who writes funny symbols is not a Russian spy,” it read, “she uses a strange new invention that could have wide applications.”
Those applications include everything to do with physical movement, from operating heavy machinery to getting the right golf swing.
“At a time when the world of elite dance was almost entirely ruled by men, Guest created a major institution of women committed to preserving movement for posterity, using an advanced technique that few people anywhere under mastered,” Whitney E. Laemmli, a historian of science and technology at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of the 2017 article “Paper Dancers” in Information and Culture magazine, said by email.
“She led the effort to standardize Labanotation,” she continued, “and her promotion of the system allowed Labanotation to be used for nearly a century. The Labanotation guides she wrote are still cited today, not only by choreographers, but also by scientists and engineers interested in studying and simulating human movements through the computer.”
Ms. Hutchinson Guest was often asked, why bother with notation? Can’t dances just be filmed? The long answer was that film could only capture a version of a choreography, including any mistakes the dancers made; on the other hand, the notation was emotionless and specific and true to the choreographer’s intention. It was the difference between hearing a symphony and seeing the individual parts of the score.
In a 1953 interview, she gave a shorter answer.
“Can they film dancers from all body angles?” she said. “And dance clothes get in the way; will they dance naked?”
Ann Hutchinson was born on November 3, 1918 in Manhattan. Her father, Robert, wrote detective stories. Her mother, Delia Dana, was a granddaughter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Richard Henry Dana, author of “Two Years Before the Mast.”
Against the intuition, Ann owed her lifelong interest in dance to illness, as she explained when she opened the Chance to Dance competition at Jacob’s Pillow in Massachusetts in 2019—yes, at age 100—with a short talk and solo dance performance. .
“When I was 8, I had a ruptured appendix,” she said. “I was given five hours to live. I was in bed for a month. A year later I had another major surgery – a month in bed. For two years I could walk alone. I was not allowed to run, jump, swim, climb trees or anything like that. I was very heavy on my feet and my mother said to the doctor, ‘What should we do?’ ‘Give her dance lessons.’”
She spent much of her childhood in England, living with her father and stepmother. While there at a boarding school, she continued to dance and showed an interest in further dance studies. A family friend suggested the Jooss-Leeder School in Dartington Hall, where dance was taught in Laban notation and where Laban, who was Hungarian, arrived in 1938 after fleeing Nazism. She studied there for three years.
“I was always the bottom of the class” in dancing, since she started later than the other students, she said in a short video about her life made in 2020, “but I was good at notation.” The choreographer Kurt Jooss asked her to write down his ballet “The Green Table”.
At 21, she returned to New York to pursue a dance career, and soon met other proponents of the Laban system. They taught others Lab annotation and built up a library of noted dance works, including ballets by George Balanchine. In 1954 Mrs. Hutchinson Guest published ‘Labanotation’, an introduction to the system. Balanchine wrote the foreword. A fourth edition was published in 2005.
Ms. Hutchinson Guest’s other books include “Your Move: A New Approach to the Study of Movement and Dance,” first published in 1983 and updated with Tina Curran in 2007. In 1967, Ms. Hutchinson Guest founded the Language of Dance Center in London to promote dance teaching methods she had developed and to bring physical activity education to children, with a focus on the underprivileged and those with special needs. In 1997, she and Dr. Curran set up a similar organization in the United States.
Mrs. Hutchinson Guest’s marriage in the 1940s to Ricky Trent, a trumpeter she had met while performing in “One Touch of Venus,” ended in divorce. She married Ivor Guest, a noted British dance historian, in 1962. He died in 2018. She leaves no immediate survivors.
Ms. Hutchinson Guest was knowledgeable about other dance notation systems, in addition to Labanotation, including some developed by noted choreographers for personal use only. One of her most satisfying projects, she said, was collaborating with dance historian Claudia Jeschke to decode the notation system Vaslav Nijinsky used to record his 1912 ballet, “L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune” (“Afternoon of a Faun”).
That famous work had been passed down over the years based on dancers’ memories, reviews, and other secondary sources, but the decoding work produced a version that Ms. Hutchinson Guest said was closer to what Nijinsky had intended. It was first performed in the 1980s and played a more active role for the nymphs in the play, among other things.
“So many of the memory-based versions, they lost a lot of what the nymphs did, why they did it,” she said in the film. “I feel like Claudia and I were able to bring Nijinsky’s ballet to life the way he wanted it to, and every time we produce it, it’s a joy.”