Author Archives: Carol-Lynne Moore

My Roomba and Me

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A Roomba is a robotic vacuum cleaner.  Low to the ground and disk-like in shape, it is self-propelled and has sensors that (mostly) keep it from falling down stairs and getting stuck under things.

I purchased this device during an episode of back trouble.  And while my Roomba has not freed me from conventional vacuuming, it does clean under beds and other places conventional vacuums can’t go.  Moreover, it’s my closest encounter to date with a robotic device.

According to various reports, we will all be having close encounters with robotic devices in the upcoming Fourth Industrial Revolution.  … Read More

Dance Improvisation and Life Skills

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Social dance classes have become exponentially popular since I was at Stanford, with classes filling through online registration in less than a minute.  Lecturer Richard Powers, who launched the program in 1992, estimates that 15,000 Stanford students have taken his classes over the last 27 years.

Students interviewed for the May article in the Stanford Alumni magazine cite many “take aways” from learning ballroom dance that translate to other areas of life.  For example, one mechanical engineering student found that dancing was a way to empty his mind and be with his partner, equating the experience to meditation – only better!… Read More

Stanford University Catches Up

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When I was a student at Stanford in the early 1970s, you could take some dance classes, but these were purely recreational and non-academic.  There was a wonderful modern dance teacher – Inge Weiss, a former Wigman dancer. There was no dance major, however. When I got serious about studying dance, I took a leave of absence, earning degrees through my PhD elsewhere.

Fast forward to 2005, when Stanford alumni who had published were invited to display their books during reunion activities.  … Read More

Reversing Laban’s Career Path

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For the first two decades of his adult life, Rudolf Laban trained and worked as a visual artist.  He did not begin his emergence as a major mover and shaker in the European dance world until he was 40 years old.  Nevertheless, his knowledge and skills in visual art served him well in his new career.

For the past few years, I have been studying visual art.  My aim is to reverse Laban’s career, switching from dance to art as I become superannuated. … Read More

Grappling with a Girdle

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Lately I have been grappling with a girdle – not the underwear kind, the Choreutic kind.  I’ve been trying to create suggestions for how to embody each of the four Girdles that Laban identified.

These spatial sequences are peripheral six-rings that surround a diagonally tilted axis.  The Girdles themselves are tilted circles, part of which lies in front of the mover, and part of which lies behind the mover.

I’m quite fond of two of the Girdles that fall in front of the body and rise behind it. … Read More

Moving, Writing … and Coloring?

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The Movement Harmony Project : Part 1 involves moving, writing, and, yes, coloring.  Part 1, which launches at the very end of this month, focuses on Choreutics.   One of the toughest hurdles of learning Laban’s harmonic spatial sequences is visualizing them.  After all, the space around the body is empty.  What’s with all these “rhythmic circles” and geometrical trace forms?

Visualizing movement space doesn’t seem to have been tough for Laban.   I’ve studied hundreds of mostly unpublished sketches in his archives. … Read More

Harmony – The Tie that Binds

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Laban Movement Analysis enables observers to break a movement apart into its various body, effort, shape, and space components. These elements are distinctive, and Laban was certainly aware of this. Yet, he also recognized that these elements, though each of a different nature, cohere in voluntary human actions.

“Harmony” is the term he chose with which to study the amazing coherence of voluntary movement. Harmony brings different elements into agreement through proportional means. Take the body and the empty space around it.… Read More

Harmony – Not Beauty

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Laban did not choose the term “harmony” in the common sense of something that is euphonious, attractive, or pleasing to the senses. Analogous with music theory, Laban’s notions of harmony incorporate dissonance as well as consonance.

Consequently, for Laban harmonic movement is not necessarily “beautiful movement” according to any kind of social standard. While access to a rich range of movement provides a foundation for movement harmony, Laban affirms that “there are considerations such as individual expressiveness or taste which can influence the personal conception of harmony in movement.”… Read More

Would Dancing Robots Worry Laban?

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As a military cadet, Laban was assigned to the railway workshops to learn to handle machinery. Initially thrilled by the power of the locomotive, his sentiments soon changed – “I saw with growing clarity how man will come under the domination of the machine.” For the rest of his career, he was concerned to differentiate natural human action from mechanical movement.

For example, Laban recognized that human movement is a psychophysical phenomenon – a coming together of intention and action, mind and body.… Read More

Disharmony – A Rupture of the Body/Mind

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In A Leg to Stand On, neurologist Oliver Sacks recounts his uncanny experiences when he severely tore the quadriceps, tendons, and ligaments in his left leg during a hiking accident. Bedridden for weeks following surgery, he lost all sensation and access to voluntary movement in the leg as it was healing. Even when the cast was removed, he confessed that the left leg “looked and felt uncannily alien – a lifeless replica attached to my body.”

While the surgeons had successfully reconnected and repaired the damaged flesh, Sacks found that “what was disconnected was not merely nerve and muscle but, in consequence of this, the natural and innate unity of body and mind.”… Read More