La Méthode graphique: Musical Anatomies and Scientistic Ruptures in Stepanov Dance Notation

How can a performing art form be recorded on paper? In this presentation, Musicology PhD candidate Sophie Benn examines one possible answer to this question, found in a treatise on dance notation from the brink of twentieth-century modernism, Vladimir Ivanovich Stepanov’s Alphabet des mouvements du corps humain (1892). Stepanov suggests that the solution may lay in the latest developments of science, including a turn towards graphical representation championed by Étienne-Jules Marey, experimental psychology’s burgeoning interest in kinesthesia, and problems raised by Jean-Martin Charcot concerning research in neurological pathology.

An informal lunch will be served.