As students are grappling with the general concepts and descriptive terms of Laban Movement Analysis, they often ask hypothetical questions. For example, “If I were on board a ship crossing the international dateline while balancing an ice cream cone on my nose, would that be lightness?”
Laban Movement Analysis may be a parsimonious taxonomy of abstract terms, but it was developed to provide an empirical description of concrete physical actions. So whenever I get a hypothetical question like the one above, I always ask the student to demonstrate. It is simply not possible to analyze a hypothetical movement accurately.
Similarly students will describe something they have seen and ask the instructor (who has not seen the event) if it was X or Y? Again, it is not possible to analyze something one has not observed accurately.
So while students need to be out in the world, watching people move and trying on their Laban glasses, this does not suffice. They must be seen seeing. They must have what they have seen confirmed by a more experienced observer.
The Embodiment Project is one assignment I have developed to address this need. Students are assigned to observe a repeated action of some sort, learn to perform it, and write an analytic description of the action. Then in class the student performs the action and discusses his or her analysis. This allows the instructor to see what the student has seen (at least approximately) and confirm or correct the student’s analysis.
Tip #4 – Make movement observation and analysis concrete so that students can be see and be confirmed and/or corrected in what they are seeing.