In his first career as a visual artist, Rudolf Laban came of age during the height of the Art Nouveau movement.  This “new art” movement turned flora and fauna into stylized patterns.  Artists drew upon botanical photos and zoological illustrations as inspirational sources for their own designs.

Laban was undoubtedly familiar with these design sources and the pattern making procedures employed by Art Nouveau artists.  When he decided to become a dancer, he must have recognized that dance is also an art based on pattern. … Read More

Because Rudolf Laban had studied visual art in Paris at one of the great European art academies, he knew the body, not only as a dancer, but also as a painter who understood anatomy.

Although Laban gave up art when he became a dancer, he never gave up drawing.  Instead, he used his knowledge of the human figure to paint movement on the canvas of space.

Many of Laban’s surviving figure drawings are “gesture drawings” – rough sketches done rapidly that depict the main lines of a pose without details. … Read More

The dancer brings life to empty space, filling it with rhythmic forms traced by the dancer’s moving limbs.  Thus “spatial harmony,” according to Rudolf Laban, “is our basic experience in dance.”

The human body is solid and full; the surrounding space is insubstantial and empty.  Yet a harmonic relationship exists between the two.

Laban understood that the spatial trace-forms the dancer creates are dependent on bodily proportion, joint structure, and range of motion.  Body and space are different, yet harmonically interrelated.… Read More

This summer and autumn MoveScape Center is offering two advanced correspondence courses that can be completed from the safety of home:  Movement Harmony, Part 1 – “Spatial Harmonies” (July – August) and Movement Harmony, Part 2 – “Effort Harmonies” (October – December).

Laban believed that a healthy human being “should be able to do every imaginable movement and then select those which seem to be the most suitable and desirable for our own nature.”

He was not content, however, to leave exploration of space and effort to individual whim. … Read More

In Mastery of Movement, Rudolf Laban coins the term, “movement-thinking.”

Unlike thinking in words, movement-thinking does not serve orientation in the outer world.  Rather these thought processes reflect the human desire to orient ourselves in the inner world of intention and desire —  the puzzling psychological “maze” of our drives and impulses.

When Laban writes about the “maze of drives,” he is referring to the network of effort states and drives and their labyrinthine interrelationships.  Mastery of Movement provides the most complete discussion of effort in any of Laban’s books, and it is full of interesting observations and associations that provide many angles of approach for readers.… Read More

Rudolf Laban is closely identified with modern dance. Surprisingly, his book, Mastery of Movement, focuses on mime rather than dance.  Laban’s notion of mime, however, does not relate to the highly stylized illusions of contemporary mime. Instead, Laban conceives mime broadly as all physical movement on stage, including speaking and singing.

As Laban notes, “A mime often transmits to the spectator what kind of an inner struggle his character is going through,” introducing the spectator to “the realities of of the inner life and unseen world of values.”… Read More