One of the things I value about Laban Movement Analysis is its elegance, parsimony, and consequent level of abstraction. Let me explain.
Body movement is concrete, immediate, but at the same time ephemeral. Moving is one thing; thinking about it quite another.
Laban’s efforts to record movement in symbols have provided just enough “fixed points” for movement to be remembered, reconstructed, and analyzed. The elements of his system are limited in number (parsimonious). Because they are limited in number, salient motion factors must be abstracted from movements that do not look alike.
Movement is a common denominator in human endeavors, ranging from functional acts like shoveling to expressive acts like passionate embracing. While it requires time to master use of LMA as an observational tool, this tool also allows the analyst to find common strands across the many seemingly different movements.