Choreutics Is Bewildering

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While Laban’s book Choreutics can inspire, it can also bewilder the reader.  That is why it is good to study the book with a guide and in the company of others.

In the upcoming hybrid workshop, “Decoding Laban’sChoreutics,” participants read the first 12 chapters across six weeks.  I provide targeted questions for each chapter, along with additional commentary.  The four Zoom sessions provide more opportunities for lecture and discussion.

Here is what previous participants have said about the course:

  • “Your guided study has helped me approach Laban’s work with more patience and enthusiasm than I would have been able to muster on my own.”
… Read More

Choreutics Is Visionary

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Ill and destitute following his departure from Nazi Germany, Rudolf Laban found a safe harbor at Dartington Hall in England, where he wrote Choreutics in the dark days just before the outbreak of World War II.

Despite his dire personal situation, Laban retained his belief in the power of movement to enlighten and unite.

At the individual level he notes that “bodily actions and trace-forms become a means of producing moments of ecstasy or clairvoyant concentration.”

At the global level, he speculates: “It is, perhaps, a fantastic idea that there could be ideographic [movement] notation through which all people of the world could communicate.”… Read More

Choreutics Is Integrative

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Space is generally considered to be the main topic in Laban’s book, Choreutics.  Of the 12 chapters, however, three address the body, three address effort, and one chapter touches on shape.

In short, Choreutics is integrative in perspective.

Laban confirms this when he writes in the Introduction, “The art, or science, dealing with the analysis and synthesis of movement, we call ‘choreutics.’  Through its investigation and various exercises, choreutics attempts to stop the progress of disintegrating into disunity.”

Find out more in “Decoding Laban’sChoreutics,” beginning in May.… Read More

Choreutics Is Systematic

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The inspirational passages in Choreutics can obscure the systematic way in which Laban introduces and develops a rational geography of space.

To help the mover orient in the trackless kinesphere, Laban begins with simple, readily recognizable trajectories and moves by gradual steps to more oblique and nuanced trajectories.

First Laban introduces the cardinal directions (up/down, across/open, back/forward). Next he moves on to the cardinal planes (vertical, horizontal, and sagittal), and then to the pure diagonals.

The pure diagonal lines of motion connect opposite corners of the cube – a familiar shape related to the rectangular rooms we mostly inhabit.… Read More

Choreutics Is Inspirational … and More

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I have always found Rudolf Laban’s book, Choreutics, to be inspiring.

Here are a few of my favorite quotations:

  • “Movement is the life of space.”
  • “Stability and mobility endlessly alternate.”
  • “Although in analysis we look at movement from the standpoint of an outside observer, we should try to feel it sympathetically from within.”

Find your own inspiration in the upcoming hybrid workshop, “Decoding Laban’s Choreutics,” offered in conjunction with the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies.

 … Read More

Effort, Shape, and Decision Making

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Coming from art to dance, Laban had been encouraged to consider static forms in nature as full of expressive forces and movements. Thus, from the beginning, shapes also possessed an effort character for Laban.  This seems to have led to his theory of effort/space affinities.

As Warren Lamb studied natural human movements, he drew on Laban’s theory of effort/space affinities.  He used the theory to integrate the observation of both shape change and effort change.  This was based on his discovery that both facets of movement reflect individual decision-making processes and interaction needs.… Read More

Arabesque, Attitude, and “Fundamental Urges”

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In addition to identifying four formal elements of line in dance tradition, Laban also noted two contrasting forms – the arabesque and the attitude.  While these have become stylized motions in ballet, Laban perceives the arabesque more generally as any direct, scattering shape and the attitude as any flexible, gathering motion.

Both forms reveal something about the mover’s relationship to the surrounding environment.   According to Laban, both represent “fundamental urges.”  The direct scattering or pushing away motion of the arabesque expresses repulsion, while the flexible gathering action of the attitude is a gesture of possession.… Read More

Essential Shape Change

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The formal elements of line – straight, curved, twisted, and rounded – identified by Laban are now called “spoke-like and arc-like directional movements” and “carving.”  Yet beneath these fundamental forms a more essential mode of shape change has been identified by Warren Lamb and Judith Kestenberg – shape flow.

Shape flow, the amoeba like growing and shrinking of the body, is a mode of shape change present at birth.  Shape flow allows the nearly helpless neonate to grow towards what it needs and to shrink away from what is hurtful or noxious.… Read More

Expressive Lines of Motion

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As Laban began to study the expressive lines of dance, he perceived relationships between form and the anatomical structure of human joints.

“The tradition of dance,” Laban writes, “enumerates four fundamental trace-forms which have the following shapes:  straight, curved, twisted, and rounded.”  All more complex shapes “are built up by these four formal elements.”

According to Laban, this limitation to four shapes is governed by the body’s anatomical structure, which permits only certain movements to be made by bending, stretching, twisting, and combinations of these actions.… Read More

From Visual Lines to Dancing Shapes

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In 1913, the painter Rudolf Laban declared he was giving up art to pursue his interest in dance.

He did not really give up art, however.  He continued to sketch and draw, using his graphic skills to study the evanescent shapes traced on space by the moving body.

Coming of age as a European artist during the transition from Art Nouveau to Abstract Expressionism gave Laban some powerful ideas and skills with which to study movement shapes.  For example, Hermann Obrist, with whom Laban studied, admonished his students to understand natural objects as images “full of expressive forces, full of linear, plastic, constructive movements.”… Read More