As noted in the previous blog, Laban’s claims that dance and movement have a harmonic structure analogous to music have been criticized as fanciful metaphysical speculations. Nevertheless, harmony remains useful concept for examining how different parts of a work of art are brought into relationship to create an expressive whole.

For artists and musicians, harmony is not a mystical concept – it is a perceptible quality with a rational basis.   This is because light and sound are vibratory phenomena.  Thus each color and each musical tone has a certain number of vibrations.… Read More

Beginning in the late 19^th century, avant-garde European artists began to move away from representational painting.  They wanted to create a new art that was non-representation, yet deeply expressive.   For example, August Endell proposed “an art with forms which signify nothing, represent nothing and remind us of nothing, which arouse our souls as deeply and strongly as music has always been able to do.”

Thus music – expressive, abstract, free from any necessity to refer to the natural world – came to be seen as an exemplar for the new visual arts.… Read More

Laban insisted that “between the harmonic components of music and those of dance there is not only an outward resemblance, but a structural congruity which can be investigated and verified.”  He has taken a lot of heat for this assertion.

The philosopher Suzanne Langer viewed Laban’s notions of movement harmony as “fanciful and sentimental;” dance historian Lincoln Kirstein characterized them as “quasi-mystical attempts to enforce the supremacy of movement;” and the English educator Gordon Curl called them a “Pythagorean dream.”

But is the notion of movement having a harmonic structure really such a ludicrous idea? … Read More

By proximity, I’m not talking about social distancing.  I’m referring to a principle of effort phrasing articulated by Rudolf Laban.  He notes that “extreme contrasts of dynamic actions cannot be performed by the body immediately one after the other.”

For example, “linking a punching movement with a floating movement without a break is quite impossible.  Transitional movements must be introduced.”

So, if you have been performing the Diagonal Scale with Action Drive affinities, you are guilty of breaking the Law of Proximity!… Read More

Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Laban Movement Analysis will have encountered the “eight basic actions” – float, punch, glide, slash, dab, wring, flick, and press.  These are the readily recognizable combinations of the motion factors of space, weight, and time that Laban identified in practical working actions.

Transposed to the dance studio, these basic actions are usually performed in conjunction with diagonal spatial trajectories, as an oscillation between contrasting actions.  So one might float upwards along a diagonal path, then punch backwards in the opposite direction.… Read More

As the COVID crisis continues, bodily health and freedom of motion are ongoing concerns.  Rudolf Laban, who survived the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, thought about health and freedom of expression in movement terms.  He believed that a healthy human being “should be able to do every imaginable movement.”

Laban didn’t stop there, however.  He designed harmonious effort patterns to build health, not just of the body but also of the mind and spirit.

You can explore these effort patterns from the safety of your own home in the forthcoming MoveScape Center correspondence course, “The Movement Harmony Project, Part 2:  Effort Harmonies.”… Read More

Like many sheltering in place, I have aspired to use this “down time” to tidy my office.  And yes, I have read Marie Kondo. But my next reading recommendation, goodbye, things by Fumio Sasaki, out kondos Kondo.

Fumio Sasaki, a writer in his thirties, lives in a tiny studio in Tokyo with three shirts, four pairs of trousers, four pairs of socks and not much else.  He claims there is happiness in having less.

As I look around my office, or my house, I would like to have less. … Read More

One will meet no finer evocation of the uncanny than The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton.  Wharton is an American writer best known for her novels about the upper class society into which she was born in the late 19^th century.  Her ghost stories, however, draw more on her subtle nature as a “ghost-feeler, the person sensible of invisible currents of being in certain places and at certain hours.”

According to Wharton, what a ghost needs is silence and continuity – “for where a ghost has once appeared it seems to hanker to appear again; and it obviously prefers the silent hours.”… Read More

For escapist humor, you cannot go wrong with any novel by P.G. Wodehouse.  Set in the English countryside in the 1920s, his finely-plotted stories gently parody the British upper class, creating a cast of unforgettable characters.

Among these are Jeeves, the butler, and his clueless employer, Bertie Wooster.  Inevitably, Bertie becomes embroiled in a hilarious predicament.  But, as in Right Ho, Jeeves, the highly intelligent butler always finds a way to extricate Bertie.

As Evelyn Waugh rightly notes, “Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. … Read More

Vicarious travel is still possible and my recommendation is Blue Latitudes by Tony Horwitz. Part history, part travelogue, the book recounts Horwitz’s adventures following Captain James Cook’s epic voyages exploring the Pacific Ocean in the late 1700s.

Horwitz begins his own journey by working as a sailor on a replica of Cook’s ship, providing a vivid picture of the hardships encountered by the crew. Drawing on Cook’s journals, he creates a brilliant portrait of the impoverished Yorkshire farmboy who couldn’t swim, yet became the greatest navigator in British history.… Read More