During my doctoral and post-doctoral research at the University of Surrey in England, I spent countless hours in a windowless room trying to decipher Laban’s faded writings and even more enigmatic drawings. These writings and drawings were part of the Rudolf Laban Archive, a treasure trove of material from the final two decades of Laban’s life.
Studying this material was hard work, but I always found Laban to be good company. He seemed to work in obsessive bursts on particular themes, puzzling over a topic again and again until he came to some resolution.
Harmony was one of the most recurrent themes. He truly believed that human movement has a harmonic structure analogous to that of music. Over time I began to understand what he was getting at, and I have written about this in The Harmonic Structure of Movement, Music, and Dance According to Rudolf Laban.
In the forthcoming Harmonize workshop in New York City (Sunday morning, December 7th), I will be sharing some of Laban’s advanced thinking about movement harmony. Laban’s ideas – however abstract or far-fetched – can always be translated into movement experiences and creative exercises. In the Harmonize workshop we will explore harmonic concepts such as modulation and transposition, taking theory forward into practice.
Laban never stopped – he kept developing his ideas in fascinating ways. I’m excited to be able to share this with fellow CMAs as part of the Meaning in Motion weekend of movement.