Beginning in March, MoveScape Center will offer a series of Red Thread courses centered on Rudolf Laban’s Choreutics. These courses combine body and mind, delving into the physics and metaphysics of human movement through space and time.
The series opens with a Tetra seminar focused on Laban’s posthumously published masterpiece, Choreutics. Out-of-print for many years, Choreutics is once again available in paperback through Princeton/Dance Horizons Books.
In the opening springtime Tetra, MoveScape goes retro with a correspondence course. Based on an easy schedule, participants will read the Preface, Introduction, and first 12 chapters of Choreutics. A set of study questions will be provided for each reading assignment. When each reading assignment has been completed, participants will receive a commentary that I have prepared, providing background context and elaborating on Laban’s themes. Think of this as a “great books” course designed to move participants beyond the surface of Laban’s mysterious masterpiece.
MoveScape follows the Tetra with an Octa workshop in the summer of 2016. The Octa provides a movement review of well-known space harmony forms. Ways to meet the challenges of embodying these demanding sequences, approaches to teaching space harmony, and creative ways to bring this material to life will be explored.
The Choreutics series culminates with the Ico course in the autumn. In this course we move beyond the well-known space harmony forms to embody seldom taught forms such as tilted planes, five and seven rings, and knots.
The Tetra, Octa, and Ico may be taken individually, or, ideally, as a series. Red Thread Certificates of completion will be given to participants at the successful conclusion of each step along this journey.