Choreutics Decoded – Deflected Directions Rule!

Everyone who has ever studied Laban Movement Analysis will have encountered the dimensions (prototype of stability) and the cubic diagonals (prototype of mobility). Yet Laban emphasizes that most movements are neither purely stable nor completely mobile, but some mixture of the two qualities.

Consequently, it is the “deflected directions” – the transverse and peripheral lines of motion – that predominate in organic movement.

The material in Part 2 shows that Laban systematically explored transverse and peripheral forms to a much greater extent than contemporary renderings of his work indicate.

Here is a list of transverse and peripheral forms we embodied: snakes, diminished 3-rings, 4 kinds of shears, augmented 3-rings, and transverse and peripheral 5-rings.

Laban also combined transverse and peripheral lines of motion in the following forms we embodied:  mixed 7-rings, mixed 2-rings, and mixed 4-rings.

What reactions did these new forms elicit? Find out more in the next blogs.