How to Share Choreography With Your Whole Troupe

The most accessible way to teach choreography without losing information is to pair a written reference with a filmed reference video. In practice, you write out each 8-count with a short description of the main movement, its direction, and its level (high, middle, or floor). The video serves as a visual backup, clearing up the ambiguities that text alone can never fully cover.

This written-plus-video pairing works because it combines two registers: the written record locks in the intent and the structure (the sequence of counts, the directions, the levels), while the footage shows the actual movement, its amplitude, and its dynamics. For a troupe, it's an easy format to share: every dancer can rewatch the video as many times as needed and refer back to the notes to find the order of the sequences.

To structure these notes, it helps to lean on the spatial components of choreography: the levels (high, medium, low), the floor patterns (straight lines, diagonals, zigzags, spirals, curves), and the group formations (line, column, diagonal, geometric shapes like the square or the triangle). Naming these elements explicitly, count by count, makes the hand-off far more reliable.

To share spacing without confusion, the whole troupe needs to use the same stage vocabulary. In US theater, the key reference points are stage left and stage right—and the catch is that they're defined from the performer's point of view as they face the audience. So stage right is the performer's right, which is the audience's left, and stage left is the performer's left, the audience's right. This is the opposite of how a spectator would instinctively read the stage, so it's worth stating clearly to avoid any mix-up.

Depth is described with downstage and upstage. Downstage is the front of the stage, the area closest to the audience; upstage, marked by the back wall, is the farthest point from it. Because stages were historically built on a slope—a "rake"—the convention stuck: "downstage" means moving toward the audience, and "upstage" means moving away from it. Beyond the stage floor itself, keep in mind that the full performance space also includes the wings (the offstage areas to the sides) and the area beneath the stage.

A heads-up if you work with French references, where the logic is built around the audience's point of view: French uses côté cour and côté jardin. Côté cour is the right side of the stage as seen by the audience; côté jardin is the audience's left. (The classic French memory trick maps the initials of Jésus-Christ onto the stage: J for Jardin on the left, C for Cour on the right.) Because côté cour is the audience's right while stage right is the performer's right, the two are opposite points of view—best to spell it out to head off misunderstandings. A large stage is commonly divided into nine zones by crossing the four directions (upstage/downstage, stage left/right).

Beyond any reference materials, dancers remember their spacing by understanding their role and relying on one another. To find your place well within a group, you need to know your role (soloist, formation anchor, or support), watch the others' movements to anticipate the timing and the space you'll need, and so avoid collisions. Placing yourself strategically in the corners and using the diagonals creates more visually interesting lines while reducing the risk of blocking other dancers from the audience's view.

Coordination in performance also runs on nonverbal communication: a glance, a smile, or a small hand gesture is often enough to stay in sync. After each rehearsal, it helps to ask your partners for feedback on positioning and timing. On the practical side of rehearsing, marking your reference points and spacing on the floor is a good habit for anchoring spatial memory—just expect to adjust it to each venue.

The vocabulary of compositional devices also aids collective memory, because it names the relationship between dancers at every moment. Unison means doing the same thing at the same time in the same direction (as distinct from simply "moving together"). Canon takes the same movement performed by several dancers but offset, reintroduced at regular intervals. Accumulation adds movements one after another, always starting again from the same starting point (movement's version of the telephone game). On top of that come relationships like mirroring, the cascade, dialogue, contact, and the lift, plus groupings (duet, trio, quartet). A web tool like Stancz lets you place and visualize these formations in 2D, 3D, and an audience view, which helps you prepare and share positions ahead of rehearsal.

For archiving a work over the long haul, there's a specialized body of knowledge: dance notation. It's a symbolic representation of human movement and dance form, drawing on graphic symbols, figures, path traces, numerical systems, or notations in letters and words. It's used above all to record and restage choreographic works; in 1948, Hanya Holm became the first Broadway choreographer to have her dance scores protected by copyright, for Kiss Me, Kate.

The two most widespread systems in Western culture are Labanotation and Benesh Movement Notation. Labanotation (also called Kinetography Laban) was created by the Austro-Hungarian choreographer Rudolf von Laban (1879–1958) in the 1920s and remains the choice of those working in non-classical dance. Benesh Movement Notation was created in 1955 by Rudolf and Joan Benesh; it began to be taught in 1956 at the Royal Academy of Dancing and is used for ballet scores around the world, whereas Labanotation tends to be used for non-classical dance.

One important caveat: dance notation is expert knowledge (the domain of choreologists), not a tool for the general public. Many systems are in fact specialized for a given style and don't effectively describe other kinds of dance, which limits their universal use. For an amateur troupe, then, it's better to rely day to day on video and simple notes, and keep notation in mind as a professional preservation method.