Recently the question has arisen as to what the body of Rudolf Laban’s work should be called. The most commonly used moniker – Laban Movement Analysis – omits the integrative aspects of Laban’s ideas. This is where harmony comes in.
Harmony brings things that are different into relationship with one another. In music, harmony is heard as a relationship of different tones. In painting, harmony is seen as a relationship among different colors.
In movement, harmony unites the distinctive human faculties of thinking, feeling, willing, and doing. In normal movement, each aspect of the action does not have to be painstakingly planned and consciously guided, as if operating a robotic device.
Instead the inner impulse to move fuses seamlessly with the execution of the movement.
Laban recognized that the most common yet miraculous aspect of human movement is the seamless blending of mind and body in the medium of physical action. He wondered, how are the different elements of body, space, time, and energy harmoniously united in voluntary motions?
I’m not sure that Laban completely answered this question, but he did identify various elements of movement harmony. Find out more in the following blogs.