The credibility of movement‐writing

The author first defended the credibility of movement‐writing in Chapter 2, Section 3, of a B.Litt.¹ thesis entitled Social Anthropology and the] Dance, Oxford, U.K., 1972]. Seven theoretical criteria from Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art 1969] were used to illustrate to examiners who knew nothing about movement‐writing in any form that Laban's system was not merely a mnemonic device. The guts of the chapter are revived in the following essay because of long‐standing, still‐existing confusion about the relations between movement‐writing and research and between “notation” and “writing” with regard to human movement studies.