Observation is the most demanding of all the skills involved in mastering Laban Movement Analysis (LMA). I must confess to being a slow learner. While I have been teaching observation for over 35 years, it has taken me a long time to grasp why so many students struggle and emerge, even after a year of Certificate Program training, still feeling very insecure about using LMA as an observer.
In the following blogs I share 5 tips for teaching movement observation and analysis.… Read More
Throughout this series of blogs, I have been stressing the importance of finding friends outside the field of movement study. These friends are not movement professionals themselves, nor are they “true believers” in the power and significance of movement. They are not dancers, athletes, or “Labanites.” Instead, they come with a different outlook and skill set and often need to be persuaded that there really is something to this thing called movement analysis.
Professor Timothy Colton, a political scientist at Harvard, is a case in point.… Read More
F.C. Lawrence became a friend of movement study through his devotion to Laban and his visionary capacity to see the potential of this field. Daniel Ellis, a member of Lawrence’s staff, became a friend of movement study only grudgingly, and for very different reasons. Here is his story.
Daniel Ellis, an industrial engineer brought up on stop-watch studies, aggressively pursued increased productivity from the workers of client companies. Hard-driving and unrelenting to the core, Ellis was outspoken in his skepticism of everything to do with Laban.… Read More
Within the Laban community, F.C. Lawrence has been regarded merely as Rudolf Laban’s “groupie.” Indeed, Warren Lamb, who worked closely with both men, observed in his unpublished autobiography that “Lawrence became so attached to Laban as to hang on his every word, promoting him (often much to my embarrassment) in guru-like terms.”
Lamb goes on to note that Lawrence “was not the most obvious candidate to partner Laban.” Lawrence was not a movement person. He was, however, one of the first management consultants in England, professionally qualified as both an engineer and an accountant.… Read More
Eden Davies’s introduction to movement study began in 1965 when she started to work for Warren Lamb’s English consulting firm. Lamb appeared to her to be a successful young businessman with a remarkable method of assessing aptitude. Davies’s job was to sit in while Lamb interviewed clients, discuss the notes Lamb had taken (“neat hieroglyphics with verbal notes like ‘raised left arm’”), then write a report for the client. She only caught glimpses of another side of the businessman – through photos of him as a dancer and references to summer movement schools.… Read More
While developing ideas for the book on movement observation and analysis that became Beyond Words, I knew that I did not want the text to be narrowly focused for a movement audience of dancers and athletes. I wanted Beyond Words to be a book for anyone whose professional activities involved face-to-face interactions with people, a text that could help professionals of all sorts understand the nonverbal dimensions of human interactions.
If the book were to succeed, I needed a collaborator, someone who was sensitive to movement and, at the same time, able to contribute other professional skills and perspectives.… Read More
Laban-based movement professionals belong to a “cognitive minority,” a term coined by sociologist Peter Berger. Berger points out that all human societies are based on knowledge. However, most of what we “know” has been taken on the authority of others. For example, I’ve never personally attempted to verify that the earth travels around the sun, but I accept this view as genuine knowledge of how our solar system functions. Such socially-shared concepts define our world and allow us to move through life confident that we know what is real and meaningful, and what is not.… Read More
One of the little known facts of Warren Lamb’s career was his close involvement with Judith Kestenberg and the synergy of ideas generated by their long association. In the early 1950s each had begun to study movement independently. Kestenberg was observing infants in maternity wards, recording their movements with EMG-like tracings. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Lamb was observing adults and recording their movements with Laban’s effort and space notation.
The two were introduced by Irmgard Bartenieff in the late 1950s.… Read More
One of the things I have appreciated most about Warren Lamb’s work is how faithfully it adheres to the basic principles of movement set out by Rudolf Laban.
For example, Laban’s taxonomy has two broad categories: effort and space. Effort consists of four motion factors: Space, Weight, Time, and Flow. Qualities of these factors can be combined, to produce a wide variety of dynamic expressions.
Laban’s spatial scheme starts from a simple delineation of the cardinal directions – vertical, horizontal, and sagittal.… Read More
Martha Graham claimed that “movements never lie.” I’d like to believe this. However, contemporary research shows that bodily actions can be used purposefully to mislead the observer.
Thus human movement is both genuine and artificial. If one wishes to understand the nonverbal dimensions of an individual’s behavior, it becomes necessary to distinguish between authentic expressions and actions that are meant to create a certain impression.
Warren Lamb grappled with this problem. As a business consultant, he was often asked to make hiring recommendations among short-listed candidates.… Read More