October is the month of Halloween, and so it seems appropriate that my blogs this month focus on the transformation drive Laban named the “Spell Drive.”
In these effort combinations, Flow replaces Time, melding with the stabilizing qualities of Weight and Space. Spell is the timeless drive that conjures up an inescapable intensity of concentration or fascination. As Bartenieff describes, “It is comparable to ‘a witch’s spell,’ or the power of an irresistible seduction.”
Spell always seems to me to be the effort drive least suited to contemporary life, in which time is always foreground because everything happens so quickly, or not quickly enough. In other words, we are always aware of variations in pace, of the need to speed up or slow down.
But in Spell-binding mood, time is no longer dynamic. Time stands still in an uncanny way.
Find out more in the next blogs.