Vladimir Ivanovich Stepanov (1866 - 1896), dancer at the Imperial Ballet in Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...

. In 1892 he published a dance notation with the title L'Alphabet des Mouvements du Corps Humain. This Alphabet of Movements of the Human Body is a notation that encodes dance movements with musical notes and not with pictographs or newly invented abstract symbols. Stepanov breaks complex movements down to elementary moves which single parts of the body can make.
These basic moves are then enciphered as musical signs.

It was through this method of dance notation, as perfected by Alexander Gorsky, that many of the great choreographer Marius Petipa

Marius Petipa

Victor Marius Alphonse Petipa was a French ballet dancer, teacher and choreographer. Petipa is considered to be the most influential ballet master and choreographer of ballet that has ever lived....

's ballets were notated. Today this method is preserved in the Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 Library Theatre Collection and is known as the Sergeyev Collection

Sergeyev Collection

The Sergeyev Collection is a collection of choreographic notation, music, photos, décor and costume designs, theatre programs and various other materials relating to the repertory of the Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg, Russia at the turn of the 20th century...

.