The dancer Rudolf Laban was asked to improve the loading of a van with small staves at a sawmill. A dozen strong men, who usually unloaded heavy trees, were sometimes assigned the job, which they executed in a clumsy way with much grumbling and many dropped and broken staves.
Confronted by this grotesque spectacle, Laban visualized a different effort rhythm for the flow of material. He replaced the twelve men with five women. One collected the staves from a pile, three stood equally spaced passing the staves from hand to hand with a light swinging action, while the fifth woman arranged them neatly in the van.
With this choreographic intervention, the task was performed in half the time by fewer workers, and the van was filled completely without breakage – a classic example of a dancer’s knowledge being used to solve an entirely different problem.