Like many movement analysts, I’ve always thought that choreutics was synonymous with space harmony. But now I see that choreutics is not just about space. For Laban, choreutics is the whole enchilada. It is body, effort, shape, and space – movement as an integration of the physical, psychological, and spiritual.
I will be incorporating this new perspective in the forthcoming Octa workshop, Bringing Choreutics to Life. The focus will still be on space, but with the aim of using body, effort, and shape to experience more fully the patterned trace-forms that Laban identified as a beneficial physical practice.
Close examination reveals that Laban had two aims in writing Choreutics. The first was to present his descriptive framework of human movement, which he conceived to be a physical and psychological phenomenon. Consequently, Laban’s framework has two domains: the kinesphere and the dynamosphere. The kinesphere encompasses visible motion through space, conceived as “trace-forms.” The dynamosphere contains the thoughts and feelings that give rise to physical actions, conceived as effortful “shadow-forms.”
While these two distinctly different aspects of movement must be separated for analytical purposes, Laban swears that “in reality they are entirely inseparable from each other.” And this gives rise to his second aim, to postulate a harmonic structure in human movement, a means by which things that are different in fundamental nature (such as effort and space) are brought into agreement.
In other words, Choreutics is about differentiation and integration. It is about how body, effort, shape, and space cohere in meaningful human actions. It is meant to be a physical practice, but one with deeper significance. Find out more in the forthcoming Octa workshop, Bringing Choreutics to Life.