Author Archives: Carol-Lynne Moore

Have a Vicarious Adventure

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My last recommendation is The Lunatic Express by journalist Carl Hoffmann.  In the midst of a mid-life crisis, he decided to take a long journey.  But rather than opting for a pleasure trip, he wanted to “travel around the world as most of the people in the world did, putting their lives at risk every time they took off on overcrowded and poorly maintained conveyances because that was all they could afford or there were no other options.”

His personal “lunatic express” took him on passenger buses along the treacherous mountain roads of the Andes, on overcrowded ferries among the islands of Indonesia, on minibuses in Africa and trains in Mumbai and China  — to name a few of his adventures and misadventures.… Read More

Stir Your Creative Juices

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My third recommendation is The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp. It’s marketed as a “how-to book” with 32 practical exercises that anyone can use. “Exercises” sound like work, and heck, you’re on holiday.

So you don’t actually have to do any of the exercises. Instead dip into this book forthe pleasure of reading how a successful artist creates dances. While this is interesting in itself, Tharp’s book incorporates creative practices and quotations from other types of artists and professionals.… Read More

Stimulate Your Grey Cells

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While Laban was recuperating at Dartington Hall in 1939, he build a number of
small sculptures that exist now only as photographs. Among these are “tensegrity
structures” – geometrical forms that cantilever in space and achieve stability
through countertension.

Actually, Buckminister Fuller is credited with the discovery of tensegrity years after Laban created his forms. But I believe Laban intuitively grasped the concept and understood that the human body is a tensegrity, or rather, a biotensegrity structure.

Biotensegity has become a buzz word – but it is hard to find a really good explanation of how this mechanical concept is being applied to reshape our understanding of human anatomy.… Read More

Travel Back in Time

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My first vacation reading recommendation for Labanistas is Thunder at Twilight:
Vienna 1913-14 by Frederic Morton. In this book, Morton portrays the royalty,
politicians, artists, intellectuals, and, above all, the atmosphere of Vienna just before
the outbreak of the First World War. It’s a fascinating cast of characters that
includes Emperor Franz Josef, Freud, Trotsky, and even Hitler.

The story culminates with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a young Serbian terrorist and the frantic machinations of the Emperor and his advisers to punish Serbia without setting in motion the network of European alliances.… Read More

Dog Days of Summer

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Those lazy, hazy days of August have arrived! I bet you’re ready to head for the
mountains, hit the beach, or just relax under a shady tree. Want to throw a book or
two in that suitcase? Here are some suggestions.


For a great review of LMA, there’s always Meaning in Motion. Otherwise, my
vacation reading list for Laban Movement Analysts includes history that reads like
fiction, titles to stimulate the mind and imagination, and even a crazy travelogue for
those who prefer for their thrills to be vicarious.… Read More

On Laban’s Choreutics and Chirality

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In the current Movement Harmony Project my correspondents and I are investigating  handedness – or which arm should lead when embodying different Choreutic scales.  As it turns out, handedness, or chirality, is of interest to scientists as well as dancers.

Chirality is a kind of chemical handedness first discovered by Louis Pasteur.  He was puzzled by the fact that crystals derived from the dregs of wine twisted light in a specific direction, but the same crystal synthesized in the lab did not.… Read More

Human Hands, Handedness, and Chirality

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Handedness, or a preference for using either the right or left hand, occurs in nearly 96% of the population, according to scientific studies.  Moreover, the phenomenon extends beyond hand movements to a preference for using one side of the body over the other.  Dancers have to contend with this bias, which is why turns, jumps, gestures, and locomotion sequences are practiced leading with both the right and left.

Dance practice can ameliorate but not eliminate handedness.  This is because all organic nature seems to share a bias towards handedness.  … Read More

Laban: Artist and Scientist

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The division between science and art was much less marked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and this made it possible for a polymath like Laban to know something about what was going on in each of these two intellectual cultures.

Here are a few examples.  In his first career as a visual artist, Laban studied with Hermann Obrist in Munich.  Before turning to art, Obrist had been a botanist.  He drew on his scientific knowledge to generate stylized Art Nouveau designs of flora and fauna that moved increasingly towards abstraction, serving not only as a mentor to Laban but also to Vassily Kandinsky.… Read More

Science and Art: The “Two Cultures”

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In a famous lecture delivered 60 years ago, the English scientist and writer C.P. Snow claimed that intellectual specialization has created “two cultures” – the scientific and the artistic.  Snow found that scientists and artists could no longer communicate with one another because those in one discipline lacked the knowledge possessed by those in the other.  He worried that this mutual incomprehension prevented solutions to social problems.

His observations continue to stimulate heated debate, perhaps for a good reason.

According to John O.… Read More

From Time and Motion Study to Dancing with Robots

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In the first three Industrial Revolutions new sources of power and mechanical inventions necessitated careful study and training of human workers so that labor was safe, effective, and productive.  For example, the dancer and choreographer Rudolf Laban drew on his movement knowledge to address problems arising from the repetitive assembly line labor that characterized the second Industrial Revolution.

New concerns are voiced about upcoming technological changes.  Klaus Schwab, Chairman of the World Economic Forum, worries that the “Fourth Industrial Revolution may indeed have the potential to “robotize humanity.”… Read More