One challenging aspect of Laban’s Mastery of Movement is his description of many dramatic scenes meant to be embodied by the reader. These scenes involve multiple characters, various dramatic conflicts, and several changes in mood on the part of all the characters involved.
Laban wants the reader to get up and mime these scenes, thinking about how the body would be used, where movement would go in the space around the body, and what kind of efforts would appear and change. It’s a tall order, one requiring a rich imagination.
I’ve written elsewhere about the necessity of using imagination to bring Choreutic forms to life. But it is equally clear that using effort to embody various characters and dramatic situations requires imagination. Laban’s scenes demand great effort variation, but can easily stray into stereotypic or melodramatic choices. To avoid such regrettable diversion, Laban wants the reader to “think in terms of movement.”
Just as Laban was concerned to identify organic movements from place to place in the kinesphere, he was equally concerned to find natural sequences of effort change in the dynamosphere. His guidelines on effort patterning in Mastery are a bit sketchy, so I intend to integrate more detailed approaches for “thinking in terms of movement” in the forthcoming Octa seminar. To do so I’ll be drawing on several models of effort relationships that I uncovered during my research on unpublished theoretical materials in the Rudolf Laban Archive in England.
To find out more, participate in the spring correspondence course, “Mastering Rudolf Laban’s Mastery of Movement.”