By the mid-1970s, the Effort/Shape program was recruiting lots of students and had become the “cash cow,” supporting the Labanotation Department at the Dance Notation Bureau. This led the Effort/Shape faculty to break away and start a new organization, the Laban Institute of Movement Studies.
By 1978, we had premises, a Board, and a non-profit organization dedicated to the vision of Irmgard Bartenieff – the first person in the U.S. to recognize the potential of Laban’s movement analysis as a means of studying human behavior.
For this reason, as I recall, we decided to rebrand “Effort/Shape” as Laban Movement Analysis. As Bartenieff famously observed, “Constant change is here to stay.”
And so the story continues….