Irmgard Bartenieff notes that there are three crystallizations of Laban’s ways of looking at, describing, and notating movement: “(1) space harmony (choreutics), (2) Labanotation/Kinetography, and (3) Effort/Effort notation.”
In addition, Bartenieff explains that the existence of these three systems enables Laban’s “colleagues and students to study and work with some extremely elusive phenomena in tangible ways.”
The “elusive phenomena” to which Bartenieff refers are human movements. In everyday life, the actions of our bodies disappear even as they are occurring. That is, movement exists at a perpetual vanishing point. Consequently, naturally occurring bodily movements have been really hard to study.
Fortunately, each of Laban’s three systems capture different aspects of this elusive phenomenon. Find out more in the next blogs.