My name is Zack Brown, and you can contact me at zacharyb@gmail.com (include "labanotation.net" in the subject line so I know what you're referring to).

I'm a writer by trade, explaining highly technical materials to people who need to understand them, or who just like reading about the topic. I'm published regularly in computer magazines, and worked for years as a technical writer at Google.

In a way, my whole career has prepared me for the task I've undertaken here. Even the fact that I have never studied dance or choreography weighs as a factor in my favor - who better to ensure that this explanation of Labanotation will be accessible to non-dancers and non-choreographers?

But why am I poking my nose into this business that doesn't seem to concern me? If I haven't trained as a dancer or a choreographer, why have I spent years studying Labanotation, poring over its various texts, and trying to overcome its difficulties?

The answer is simple: I love it! Labanotation is beautiful. Even just as pure notation, without the performance, it is lovely to look at. When I first discovered Labanotation, before I was even a teenager, that was what captivated me first. The idea that these beautiful diagrams somehow expressed people dancing on a stage. I wanted to know more. And the more I learned, the more I wanted to learn.

But the existing texts are hard to learn from. It may not seem friendly to say it so plainly, but it's true. And when explaining the feelings and motivations surrounding why I decided to undertake the arduous task of writing a thorough and straightforward explanation of Labanotation, it's difficult to leave that point out. Although those existing texts represent a tremendous amount of labor, and a tremendous achievement in capturing many ideas that might otherwise have been lost forever, those works were never intended for a layperson like me, and their focus is much broader than to be a clear explanation of how to use the system.

I'm here now, writing this description of Labanotation, because one day I realized that the only way for me to successfully learn it would be to extract everything I could from the available literature, organize it all together, the way I would any technical topic I was called upon to write about, and then describe it in a way that I myself could learn from. I needed to create my own textbook.

My hope is that the present text will make Labanotation accessible to other people like me, who want to develop a thorough understanding of the system, but who find the existing texts difficult to use. My goal with this text is to describe the entire system, from the simplest ideas to the most advanced, so that anyone who shares an interest in the strange and fascinating field of choreography will be able to easily express any performance they can conceive of.

If this text is also useful to dancers and other professionals who are trying to learn Labanotation or who just want to look up the specifics of something they're already familiar with, then I'll be very happy to have made some small contribution to that field.