Several years ago, while I was teaching Laban Movement Analysis at the University of Surrey, I encountered one of our Korean students outside the library. She approached me, cradling something in her hand. When she opened her hand, I saw it was a small leaf.
“Look,” she cried with delight. “Doesn’t this have a beautiful shape!”
We had, earlier in the day, been doing a class on shape. I had to agree, the leaf did have a lovely shape. But what was even more beautiful to me was the student’s delight. Somehow, the movement class on shape had opened her awareness to all kinds of shapes around her. She was seeing the world with new eyes.
Movement is omnipresent, yet slippery. It disappears even as it is occurring. It requires some effort to bring movement into awareness, to keep it in focus, to think about it. Rudolf Laban’s great contribution was to provide ways of seeing and thinking about movement. As his protégé, the English choreographer Geraldine Stephenson recalls, Laban “taught us that movement was fundamental to living. As students our senses were opened to movement in nature – trees, clouds, sea – and we saw movement in paintings, sculpture, sound and music.”
Movement study is a way of seeing, a way of making connections. And this is the strongest and best argument for making it a part of general education.