Dive Deeper into Laban

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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

Harmonious Movement Is Healthy

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Bodily health and being able to move about freely is on everyone’s mind right now.
Rudolf Laban thought about this, too. He believed that a healthy human being “should be able to do every imaginable movement.”

Laban didn’t stop there, however. He designed harmonious movement patterns to build health, not just of the body but also of the mind and spirit. These patterns foster physical balance and range of motion, while allowing scope for freely exploring subtle moods and emotional expression through whole-bodied actions.… Read More

Improve Your Movement-Thinking

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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

Reviving Mime

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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

Awaken Your Movement-Imagination

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Exploring expressive movement requires imagination.  In Mastery of Movement, Rudolf Laban provides a variety of suggestions for stimulating movement imagination.  These involve both personal movement explorations as well as observation exercises.

You can read Laban’s book and do these exercises on your own. But having a structured class and an instructor providing guidance makes awakening your movement imagination much easier.  That is why I have developed the online course, “Mastering Laban’s Mastery of Movement.”  Across six weeks we read the first six chapters together, with structured movement composition and live and YouTube observations assignments.… Read More

Why Read Mastery of Movement?

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Like all of Laban’s writings, Mastery of Movement has a text and a subtext.  Explicitly, the text explores how to use bodily actions and effort rhythms to convey characters and situations on stage.  Implicitly, the book is about much more.

As Irmgard Bartenieff lamented, “We have no major publication that summarizes Laban’s insights into one philosophical-theoretical statement.”  But Mastery of Movement provides glimpses, not only of Laban’s movement theories, but also of his philosophy.

For example, Laban discusses the differences between virtuosity of movement performance and artistry in several chapters. … Read More

Movement Values in Stormy Times

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Rudolf Laban was no stranger to troubled times.  By the time he published Mastery of Movement in 1950, he had survived the flu pandemic of 1918, the economic depression of 1929, political upheavals, and two world wars.

As a youthful painter and dancer, Laban studied longstanding artistic traditions of Europe, then witnessed and participated in iconoclastic modern movements that upended traditional visual and dance practices.

Through all this tumult, Laban maintained his balance by focusing on the artistic, social, and spiritual values of movement.… Read More

The Chemistry of Effort

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One of the most significant chapters in Mastery of Movement is Chapter 5, “The Roots of Mime.”  This chapter reveals Laban’s vision of what theatre should be.  It also provides rich discussion of effort and the way Laban has come to conceive of its links to thought and feeling.  As Laban writes, “The chain of happenings which is the very stuff of dramatic actions, and therefore also of mime, has its roots in the chemistry of effort.”

The “chemistry of effort” is better known as Laban’s theory of states and drives. … Read More

Mastering Mastery – A Guide Helps

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I find Laban’s Mastery of Movement insightful and inspiring – but it is not an easy read.   Chapters 2 and 3 alone can be daunting.  Over the course of 60 pages, Laban introduces the reader to the analysis of simple and complex bodily movements through verbal descriptions and short movement notations (added by Lisa Ullmann).  The reader is meant to get up and perform these movement sequences, which is not an easy task!

That is why having a guide and a correspondent helps. … Read More

Effort in Human Life – Laban’s Vision

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Some of the most thought-provoking statements by Laban are found in the first chapter of Mastery of Movement.  Here are several of my favorites….

“Man’s body-mind produces many kinds of qualities.  He can jump like a deer, and, if he wishes, like a cat.”

“Besides the comparative richness of human effort capacity, one can notice an effort speciality which might be called humane effort… effort capable of resisting the influence of inherited or acquired capacities.”

“It is perhaps not too bold to introduce here the idea of thinking in terms of movement. … Read More