With two million speakers worldwide, Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed (rather than naturally evolving) language. Created by a Polish doctor in the late 1800s, Esperanto was meant to be an international language “to unite nations in common brotherhood.”
Movement is often characterized as a pan-human means of communication, a kind of international language that, like Esperanto, can foster mutual understanding among different peoples. In his more utopian musings, Laban subscribed to this idea – with a slight variation.
Rather than movement itself, Laban’s idea was to create a movement-based symbol system that could be universally understood. In Choreutics he writes, “It is, perhaps, a fantastic idea that there could be ideographic signs in a notation through which all people of the world would communicate.”
Laban didn’t achieve this dream. Nevertheless, his deep understanding of human movement as a psycho-physical phenomenon and the three systems he created for describing, analyzing, and recording movement – space harmony (choreutics), Labanotation/Kinetography, and effort notation – have been helping people around the world understand this ephemeral and omnipresent aspect of human life.
The “Labanese” are a transnational sodality. And now, thanks to post-modern media and technology, we can be in touch with one another to a greater extent than ever before. Find out more in the next blog!