One thing many readers have difficulty grappling with in Choreutics is Laban’s geometricizing of the dancer’s space. Laban’s first career as a visual artist helps to explain this use of geometry.
Visual artists have employed geometrical schemes to capture human proportion and motion since Egyptian times. These schemes have differed. The Egyptians used a flat grid; Byzantine artists employed a series of concentric circles; and medieval artists superimposed ornamental shapes like triangles and stars on the human body to set contours and directions of movement, albeit in a highly stylized way.
However, as I explain in The Harmonic Structure of Movement, Music, and Dance, the use of geometry to realistically depict a three-dimensional moving body reached its apex in the Renaissance in the work of two artists: Albrecht Durer and Leonardo da Vinci. Both developed geometrical schemes that became part of academic art training and, despite the demise of the great European art academies, are still used today.
In Durer’s approach, simple solid shapes such as cubes, are superimposed on parts of a posed figure. These simple shapes can be tilted, rotated, and redrawn in proper proportion to deal with the visible changes in proportion that occur when the body is posed in various positions.
Leonardo’s scheme focuses more on bodily motion. He reasoned that the circle is the correct pattern of movement of the human body. These circles become visible in the circling of the body around its own center and the limbs around their joints.
Laban draws on both schemes in his theorizing of the dancer’s space. Find out more in the forthcoming Tetra course, “Decoding Laban’s Choreutics.”