Signs for a science: Aleksei Sidorov’s Choreology

The article is an inquiry into the contribution that choreology made to the Russian/State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN) as both an institutional and research project. Choreology was a new discipline that Aleksei Sidorov and Aleksandr Larionov created following up Vassily Kandinsky’s idea that dance and, more widely, the art of movement, should be a subject of scholarly and scientific investigation. In his capacity as the academic secretary of GAKhN, Sidorov founded the Choreological Laboratory (1922–1929), and Larionov served as its head. Both took an active part in movement analyses, made sketches and notes, and used photography to capture dance movements and to create a system of dance notation. Their search was informed by Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft , and especially by Heinrich Wölfflin; at the same time, their interest in dance notation grew from their search for occult signs and symbols. In Sidorov’s notes and sketches from the 1920s, one can see the process of making signs for a language of dance notation. The attempt by the Russians to schematize movement and find an abstract language for dance paralleled an effort by the Central-European choreographer and dance theoretician, Rudolf von Laban. A unique and only half-realized project, choreology was a valuable contribution to the new “artistic sciences.”