Throughout this series of blogs, I have been stressing the importance of finding friends outside the field of movement study. These friends are not movement professionals themselves, nor are they “true believers” in the power and significance of movement. They are not dancers, athletes, or “Labanites.” Instead, they come with a different outlook and skill set and often need to be persuaded that there really is something to this thing called movement analysis.
Professor Timothy Colton, a political scientist at Harvard, is a case in point. We first met in 2009 when I led a colloquium at the Naval War College on discerning leadership style through Movement Pattern Analysis (MPA). Professor Colton, who had been asked to evaluate several different nonverbal approaches to the study of leadership, asked incisive questions and maintained a skeptical position throughout the colloquium. Eventually, however, he flagged Movement Pattern Analysis as being the most promising nonverbal approach, with the caveat that more research was needed.
Professor Colton remained skeptical during subsequent meetings, which included a three-day introductory course I co-taught with Warren Lamb and a gathering to sketch a pilot research project. By the time I began making profiles of research participants in 2011, I was having doubts about the direction of the study. Nevertheless, thanks in part to Colton’s perseverance and connections, the pilot project testing the predictive validity of Movement Pattern Analysis eventually took place, with positive results that have now been published in a refereed journal. Read the results here.
When I last met Professor Colton, the shift in his attitude towards movement analysis was notable. This is not because he has become a movement person or even because having his own MPA profile has been a revelation. It is because MPA stood up to experimental testing.
Being a cognitive minority has made the Laban community insecure. But human movement is significant and it can be studied in a disciplined way. And with friends in the right places, someday what we know will enter the mainstream.
