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For Schools and Instructors

Keep your choreography. Share the language.

SaberCraft is a shared notation standard for choreographed saber movement.

It was created so schools, performance groups, clubs, instructors, and independent choreographers can document and exchange choreography using a common movement language — without giving up their own identity, curriculum, or creative style.

You do not need to replace your school.

You do not need to adopt SaberCraft’s entire Core Movement library.

You do not need to teach the same choreography as anyone else.

Instead, SaberCraft gives your group a way to:

  • write choreography clearly
  • preserve movement over time
  • teach more consistently
  • share sequences between instructors
  • archive choreography in a readable format
  • collaborate across schools and communities
  • reduce dependence on memory and video alone

Why this is a standard, not just notation

A notation system helps people write movement down.

A standard gives people a public reference they can use, question, review, and build from over time.

That distinction matters for schools. If a movement language is hard to access, unavailable, or dependent on one person’s memory, different groups eventually create their own house rules. SaberCraft is designed to avoid that by making the reference public, maintained, and reviewable.

Read more: Standard vs. Notation System

What SaberCraft actually standardizes

SaberCraft standardizes the language of choreography.

This includes:

  • target zones
  • attack notation
  • parry notation
  • body movement
  • defensive movement
  • flourishes
  • timing structure
  • table formatting
  • movement terminology
  • notation grammar

The standard does not require every group to use the same choreography library.

Your choreography library remains yours

SaberCraft uses the SaberCraft Standard to teach its own choreography library, including CM-A through CM-X.

Another school might create:

  • Academy Forms
  • Temple Drills
  • Stage Combat Exchanges
  • Tournament Sequences
  • Film Performance Sets
  • Original choreography collections

All of these can be written using the same notation language.

That means schools can exchange readable choreography without becoming copies of one another.

Why this matters

Most choreography communities rely heavily on:

  • memory
  • verbal teaching
  • video references
  • instructor interpretation

That works — until choreography is forgotten, altered, lost, or difficult to reproduce consistently.

SaberCraft exists to make choreography portable.

A written sequence can be:

  • preserved
  • reconstructed
  • translated between instructors
  • reviewed years later
  • taught remotely
  • shared internationally
  • cited in manuals or curriculum

The goal is not to replace live teaching.

The goal is to make live teaching easier to preserve, repeat, and communicate.

A shared language, not a franchise

The SaberCraft Standard is intentionally designed to be broader than a single school.

SaberCraft is the founding school and original development community of the system, but the notation standard is meant to support a wider choreography ecosystem.

Schools using the SaberCraft Standard should still feel like themselves.

Your:

  • ranking systems
  • costumes
  • lore
  • traditions
  • class structure
  • choreography style
  • performance philosophy

can remain entirely your own.

Example

Group Their choreography library Shared notation language
SaberCraft CM-A through CM-X SaberCraft Standard
Academy A AA-1 through AA-20 SaberCraft Standard
Temple Group Temple Drills SaberCraft Standard
Stage Team Performance Sets SaberCraft Standard

In this model, the notation language is shared while the choreography libraries remain independent.

The long-term vision

SaberCraft is being developed as:

  • a choreography notation standard
  • a preservation framework
  • a teaching reference language
  • a collaborative movement system
  • a public documentation standard for staged saber combat

The long-term goal is to help choreography communities preserve and exchange movement more clearly across schools, generations, and platforms.

Learn more