Last fall, a dozen brave explorers and I delved into Part 2 of Laban’s masterwork on spatial aspects of movement – Choreutics. We needed to be brave, because this part of the work presents many transverse and peripheral space harmony forms that are seldom taught today. But that is not the only, or most daunting, challenge.
Part 2 is based on a compilation of forms that Gertrud Snell Friedburg prepared as a birthday present for Laban in 1929. By this date, Laban had published the rudiments of his dance notation system. Yet Friedburg’s compilation relies upon an arcane letter and number code for representing the transverse and peripheral sequences. This makes Part 2 almost impossible to read until one “breaks the code.”
Fortunately, there is a key to the code buried in Part 2. So, I decoded many of these little-known Choreutic forms, and with my brave correspondents, we embodied them.
I see this as preliminary research expanding the scope of what is generally considered to comprise Laban’s space harmony material. In the following blogs, I will briefly share some of our initial findings and explain why these efforts matter in the greater scheme of understanding Laban’s contributions to the study of human movement.