“We live only part of the life we are given,” writes Michael Murphy in The Future of the Body. “Growing acquaintance with once-foreign cultures, new discoveries about our subliminal depths, and the dawning recognition that each social group reinforces just some human attributes while neglecting or suppressing others … suggests that we harbor a range of capacities that no single philosophy or psychology has fully embraced.”
Rudolf Laban would certainly agree. “Preference for a few effort combinations only results in a lack of effort balance,” Laban notes. “New dances and new ideas of behavior arise by a process of compensation in which a more or less conscious attempt is made to regain the use of lost or neglected effort patterns.”
If we live only a part of the life we are given, it is because we habitually use only a few effort combinations. To me, the great benefit of effort study is to experience, if only fleetingly, other ways of being in the world.
While I was first studying Laban Movement Analysis, I had a profound experience embodying an effort combination of the Spell Drive. I momentarily became someone else and glimpsed an unfamiliar inner landscape. This was not a part of the world that I normally inhabit. Maybe I didn’t really want to live here. But it was wonderful to discover a new realm of experience and to realize that I could consciously choose to enter this new world simply by moving in a certain way.
To me, the study of effort is the study of human potential, a chance to access a greater range of capacities that are not just physical in nature, but personal, psychological, and perhaps even spiritual.