The Noa Eshkol 
Chamber Dance Group

From 1951 to 1956, following her return to Israel on the heels of a five-year course of expressionist-dance studies in England, Eshkol devised Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation along with architect Avraham Wachman. Published in 1958 as the book “Movement Notation,” the pair’s treatise outlined a new, unprecedented system for recording motion by way of an interdisciplinary, universally applicable structure. It was to transcend dance or the human form, moving beyond these boundaries to prioritize the articulation of appendages and extremities regardless of arrangement, composition or intention. Eshkol and Wachman laid the foundations for their notation, defining a schematic for all bodies, standardizing the properties of limbs and dividing all movement into three distinct categories, expounding on each with scientific precision. With these in place, the two detailed the construction of written manuscript pages – grid-like matrices that placed bodies and time in explicit relation – and supplemented them with diagrams by designer, theorist and performer John Harries, illustrating what they dubbed the System of Reference.