How do you capture something as ephemeral as dance on paper? This is the question posed by choreologists, who notate dance. Alison Curtis-Jones is a choreologist at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London. She specializes in the work of Rudolf Laban, a modern dance pioneer, and researches the idea of the human body as a dynamic archive of movement.

How do you put dance on a page?
You can record music using marks on paper, but during Laban’s time there was nothing similar for movement. He looked at how our bodies are organized and devised a system to record movement, later called Labanotation, in 1918.

What does it look like?
It’s a series of bars across paper. The body is the vertical axis, and symbols represent direction, level and duration of movement. These...