Laban insisted that “between the harmonic components of music and those of dance there is not only an outward resemblance, but a structural congruity which can be investigated and verified.” He has taken a lot of heat for this assertion.
The philosopher Suzanne Langer viewed Laban’s notions of movement harmony as “fanciful and sentimental;” dance historian Lincoln Kirstein characterized them as “quasi-mystical attempts to enforce the supremacy of movement;” and the English educator Gordon Curl called them a “Pythagorean dream.”
But is the notion of movement having a harmonic structure really such a ludicrous idea? I don’t think so. Find out why in the next blogs.