Moving, Writing … and Coloring?

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   I’ve studied hundreds of mostly unpublished sketches in his archives.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

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

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?

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

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

Why Harmony Matters

Today Laban is recognized primarily for two accomplishments. The first is his notation system, which allows dance works of varying genre to be recorded and reconstructed from a symbolic score. The second is his taxonomy of human movement, known as Laban Movement Analysis.

Both notation and Laban’s taxonomy provide the means for breaking a stream of bodily action into component parts, either for purposes of documentation or for study. Consequently, Laban’s name has become synonymous with movement analysis.

However, breaking a movement apart into its various body, effort, shape, and space elements was only part of Laban’s theoretical project.Read More

Movement Harmony – A Very Useful Metaphor

According to Rudolf Laban, “Between the harmonic life of music and that of dance, there is not only a superficial resemblance but a structural congruity.” Laban’s insistence that movement has a harmonic structure is usually interpreted as a wishful by-product of his mystical worldview. But this is a misinterpretation.

Instead, Laban is employing harmony as an analogic metaphor. An analogic metaphor is a controlled comparison in which the analog model (in this case, dance and movement) shares with the original (in this case, musical harmony) the same structure and pattern of relationships.Read More

Testing Shape Flow…and Why This Matters

In order to clarify how we were teaching shape flow, the Columbia College Chicago LMA faculty tested our definition of shape flow by observing duets from the Martha Graham film, “The Dancer’s World.” Graham’s choreography is quite sculptural, with lots of emphasis on shape change. Consequently, the short duets were a good test case for our clarified definition of shape flow:

Shape flow is the growing and shrinking of the actual kinesphere as manifested in growing and shrinking of the body shape.Read More

Potential and Actual Kinespheres

In order to resolve differences between the definitions of Lamb (growing and shrinking of the kinesphere) and Kestenberg (growing and shrinking of the body shape), we elaborated Laban’s concept of  “kinesphere.”

Laban defines the kinesphere as “the sphere around the body whose periphery can be reached by easily extended limbs without stepping away from that place which is the point of support.” This definition makes the kinesphere sound like pre-existing bubble of territory surrounding the body, with boundaries in far reach space.Read More

Respecting the Laban Legacy: A Case Study

Several years ago, colleagues and I found that our Laban Movement Analysis students in the Columbia College Chicago Certificate Program had developed very fuzzy notions about shape flow – an important “mode of shape change.”  As a faculty, we developed the following procedure to address this problem.

First, we reviewed the literature about shape flow. Based on the primary sources, we established a working definition for identifying shape flow. Then we tested the definition, to see if different observers could agree.… Read More