For the first two decades of his adult life, Rudolf Laban trained and worked as a visual artist. He did not begin his emergence as a major mover and shaker in the European dance world until he was 40 years old. Nevertheless, his knowledge and skills in visual art served him well in his new career.
For the past few years, I have been studying visual art. My aim is to reverse Laban’s career, switching from dance to art as I become superannuated. Lately, we have been working with live models in my painting class, and it has been a revelation – one that has given me new appreciation for Laban’s artworks.
Figure drawing is a real challenge. Viewed from the front, the parts of the human body are fairly standard and can be objectively measured in relation to one another. But place the body in another pose, and all of a sudden the feet may be larger than the head, and the forearm may appear much shorter than it is.
Many of Laban’s figures are “gesture drawings” – rough sketches done rapidly that merely capture the main lines of the pose without any finished details. Nevertheless, if I try to copy these, I realize how much knowledge of the moving figure Laban had. Often it’s just a detail – the tilt of the head, or the barely indicated arch of the foot. These are all the more fascinating, since many must have been done without a live model.
Laban mastered how to capture the angles of a bodily pose. And this fed right into his theorizing of geometrical trace-forms.
Explore the trace-forms Laban designed in depth in the forthcoming Movement Harmony Project: Part 1.