Irmgard Bartenieff Archive – A Miracle

Posted on December 12, 2017 by Carol-Lynne Moore

For years after Bartenieff’s death in 1981, the Laban Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies carefully stored her papers but lacked the funds for full preservation and cataloging. The papers remained, untouched and unseen, in a warehouse in Brooklyn. And then there was a fire in the warehouse.

A cry for help went out to the Laban community, and through crowdfunding, enough money was raised to allow Vincent Novarra, Curator of Special Collections from the University of Maryland Performing Arts Library, to rent a truck, drive to Brooklyn, and see if Bartenieff’s papers had survived.… Read More

Dance and the Written Word

Posted on December 7, 2017 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Dance is a nonverbal art. Yet, as practitioners of an evanescent art, writing is often quite important to dancers. Nijinsky kept a diary. Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Agnes DeMille, and Paul Taylor produced autobiographies. Isadora Duncan wrote essays on the dance, as did Merce Cunningham and Murray Louis. Doris Humphrey and Twyla Tharp have addressed creative issues in dance. Katherine Dunham, whose career spans anthropology and performance, has written profusely.

The list goes on and on. Dance may be a nonverbal art, but dancers are hardly silent on this subject.… Read More

Laban Prevails

Posted on November 19, 2017 by Carol-Lynne Moore

At the recent Bartenieff Symposium, Martha Davis lamented the loss of seminal works in nonverbal communication research. During the 1960s, there was lots of money for research. While she assisted Irmgard Bartenieff at Albert Einstein Day Hospital, other researchers such as Ray Birdwhistell, Albert Scheflen, and William Condon would drop by for informal discussions of what they were doing.Today, no one reads their work; current students are advised not to read research it wasn’t done in the last five years.

But Laban prevails.… Read More

On Irmgard Bartenieff

Posted on November 16, 2017 by Carol-Lynne Moore

In the summer of 1975, I left the Nikolai-Louis Studio, walked across Union Square to the Dance Notation Bureau, and declared I was interested in the Effort/Shape Program.

I was ushered in to see Irmgard Bartenieff, a delicate elderly German lady who had worked directly with Rudolf Laban. She was guiding spirit of the Effort/Shape program. I don’t remember exactly what we talked about, but Irmgard was open and encouraging. I became her student, then her assistant, and eventually a fellow faculty member.… Read More

Constant Change…

Posted on November 14, 2017 by Carol-Lynne Moore

As Irmgard Bartenieff used to observe, “Constant change is here to stay.” This is certainly the case in Berlin, where Bartenieff grew up. When I first taught for Eurolab — Rotterdam (1988) and Berlin (1993-1996) – the Laban Certificate Programs were modeled on the American version. And it was an irony of history that these early programs depended heavily on American faculty to teach the Europeans what the Europeans had taught the Americans!

Two decades later, under the able direction of Antja Kennedy, the Laban programs in Germany have developed a unique format, delivered by European faculty in both German and English.… Read More

Choreutics in Berlin

Posted on November 9, 2017 by Carol-Lynne Moore

During a recent master class in Berlin, I introduced the “mixed seven-rings.” These Laban scales are analogous to the major diatonic scales in music. Participants were instructed to use the seven “signal points” of the scale as if they were musical notes and to compose a “spatial melody” in four measures.

Students could use the signal points in any order and make them any duration. Individuals could embody the specified directions in any way they chose. Yet, interestingly, when we watched these solos, the freely constructed spatial melodies retained the fundamental qualities that Laban highlights in his unpublished writings on the mixed seven-rings.… Read More

Laban International

Posted on November 7, 2017 by Carol-Lynne Moore

I’ve just returned from teaching master classes in Berlin for Eurolab, the European Association for Laban Bartenieff Movement Studies. With advanced students from Germany, Czech Republic, Croatia, England, the U.S, and the Netherlands, it is exciting to see how Laban’s ideas are again spreading internationally.

Before the First World War, artistic innovations and new ideas circulated freely in Europe. Two world wars and the Cold War changed all that. When I first taught for Eurolab in the early 1990s, the Berlin Wall had just come down.… Read More

Creating a Language For Movement

Posted on October 24, 2017 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Around 1913, Rudolf Laban contemplated a career change from visual art to dance. But he recognized that unless a means could be found to record movement, dance was condemned to remain an ephemeral and consequently trivial art.

In developing a language and symbol system for dance and movement, Laban thought visually. The theoretical models he developed are geometrical, not linguistic. This is both the beauty and the challenge of Laban Movement Analysis.

In recognizing that human movement is a psychophysical phenomenon, Laban saw that his language of movement had to capture two domains – the physical actions that unfold in the space of the outer environment and the movement of thought and feeling as these evolve in the inner world, coloring physical actions and making them expressive.… Read More

The Mysterious Mobius

Posted on October 12, 2017 by Carol-Lynne Moore

The mobius strip, also known as a lemniscate, is a unique shape having only one side and one edge. The shape was invented almost simultaneously by two German mathematicians in 1858. It became popular as a prop for magical parlor tricks in the late 19th century, and perhaps this is how Laban encountered it.

You can make one yourself by twisting a strip of paper and joining the ends. A normal band (think of a rubber band or a simple bracelet) has an inner surface and an outer surface and two edges. … Read More

Living Fully in Three Dimensions

Posted on October 10, 2017 by Carol-Lynne Moore

As bipeds with mobile shoulder and hip joints, human beings have a wide range of motion available. Yet physical challenges, such as the force of gravity and our heavy heads, limit the extent to which we actively tap fully three-dimensional movement. And mental habits can also limit our access to space.

Rudolf Laban succinctly identified two cognitive maps of space. The first is the dimensional cross and the cardinal directions of up and down, right and left, forward and backward.… Read More