Introduction

Sometimes you want to say that something is happening, and it doesn't so much matter what, as long as it lasts a certain amount of time, or ends up in a certain position, or involves a certain part of the body. The ad lib line tells the performer, "do what you want here, within whatever constraints I've laid out."

In fact, the ad lib line can have a great variety of meanings, and may appear in a great variety of circumstances. It can even replace part of the inner structure of other movement symbols, in order to cause those movement symbols to mean something a bit more improvisational than the whatever it otherwise would mean.

According to my plan for this text as a whole, something like the ad lib sign, that has such a wide range of uses and interactions with other aspects of Labanotation, could not be considered a core part of the system, and therefore should not appear as early in the text as it does.

But the ad lib line is so useful, especially for anyone trying to explain Labanotation to newcomers, that it is virtually impossible to avoid describing at least part of its usage and behavior as soon as possible, in order to make subsequent explanations of other parts of the system clearer and simpler.

This is a good example of why it is so difficult to organize the ideas of Labanotation in an easy-to-learn way. It is so tempting to explain certain particularly useful aspects of a given symbol, and leave the more complex and interconnected aspects for later. But while that may make it easier to explain other things that I want to explain, the topic I split up becomes more difficult to learn thoroughly on its own.

In this text, I try my utmost to avoid splitting up any given topic; but when I do find it simply unavoidable, my approach is to provide a single centralized location that at the very least links to all the other places that describe various aspects of that topic. It's essentially an index, with the understanding that it's important to minimize the number of topics treated that way.

The Basic Symbol

The ad lib symbol on its own is just a wavy vertical line.

As you'll see when we come to staves, time is read upwards along the Labanotation staff. So an ad lib lasting a longer duration can be written with a longer wavy line.

Moving A Body Part

The most straightforward way to use the ad lib sign is to indicate that you want the performer to move a certain body part for a certain amount of time, but that the precise way they should move that body part is left up to them.

Depending on the time indications on the staff, the above construction would indicate moving the arm for a certain amount of time, any way you want.

OK. Now you know enough to understand all the examples in the staff chapter.

Other Usages

This section links to all the other pages in the text that describe a new usage of the ad lib sign.

• To indicate either hand, in the body parts and props chapter.
• To indicate that a fold or curl could take place in any direction, see the chapter on folding and curling.
• TBD