The Tetra Takes Off

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Twenty-one brave readers on four continents began the Tetra seminar, Decoding Laban’s Choreutics on March 26th. This “great books” correspondence course is focused on Laban’s posthumously published masterpiece, also known as The Language of Movement.

Over a six-week period, we are exploring the book two chapters at a time. I use the word “exploring” purposefully, for I see this course as a journey of discovery for all twenty-two of us.

It is certainly proving to be a journey of discovery for me.… Read More

Oscillations and Deflections

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In his masterwork, Choreutics, Laban notes that “oscillations are the means of expression in the two arts, music and dance.”  We found evidence supporting Laban’s observation in the Prototypes project.

Of course, Laban has constructed his prototypic sequences as oscillations, shifting between opposite directions in space.  The simplest pattern, the Dimensional Scale, oscillates between the cardinal directions. So the dancer reaches up, then down; opens the arm sideward, then reaches across the body; finally extends backward, then forward.

For Laban, however, there is more than one way to move up or down, or forward or backward. … Read More

The Geometrical Alphabet of Space Movement

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“We can understand all bodily movement as being a continuous creation of fragments of polyhedral forms,” Laban claimed.  We set out to test this in the Prototypes project.

As I note in The Harmonic Structure of Movement, Music, and Dance, Laban’s polygonal rings are best thought of as “spatial ‘prototypes’ from which dance sequences can be constructed, just as musical scales are ‘model’ tonal sequences from which melodies and harmonies are composed.”  Just as only part of a scale may be found in a musical composition, Laban asserts that fragments of his polygonal prototypes can be found in choreographed movements.… Read More

Laban’s Idealized Kinesphere

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The sphere is Laban’s model for the space adjacent to the mover’s body.  The center of gravity of the body is also the center of the kinesphere, which extends equally in all directions, establishing a boundary based on the areas of space that can be reached without taking a step.

According to Laban, “all points of the kinesphere can be reached by simple movements, such as bending, stretching, and twisting, or by a combination of these.”

Laban’s choreutic prototypes exploit this spherical movement space using symmetrical trace-forms that oscillate up and down, from side to side, and in front and behind the body.… Read More

Misadventures with Motion Capture

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As any performer who has ever worked with technology knows, interfacing human and machine elements is a time-consuming process.  Our experiment with motion capture was no exception.

Fortunately, we had wonderful people to work with – our dancers, Professor Roger Good and his students and staff from the OU School of Digital Media Arts, and Nathan Berger and Rakesh Kashyap from the OU Aesthetic Technology Lab.  The latter two were responsible for the motion capture recording, using a portable MOCAP suit. … Read More

Rehearsing Laban’s Prototypes

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Polar triangles, axis and girdle scales, primary scales, and the A and B scales – these were the Laban prototypes we wanted to study.  Thus the research project began with a crash course in space harmony for three Ohio University dance faculty (Travis Gatling, Tresa Randall, and Marina Walchi).

We only had three days to prepare our performers (all relative newcomers to Laban theory) for the motion capture/videotaping session.   We wanted the dancers not only to remember the prototypic sequences but also to perform them well. … Read More

The “Laban Prototypes” Project

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In 2008, Professor Madeleine Scott and I ran a choreutics-based research project at Ohio University.  The project examined Laban’s claim that fragments of the choreutic forms (aka spatial scales and rings) compose a fundamental alphabet of human movement.

The examination had two parts.  First, we set out to duplicate some of the choreutic forms that Laban represented as geometrical line drawings.  Motion capture technology is able to produce a similar kind of record, for it captures the dancer’s movement as a linear tracery of light, allowing one to see the trace-forms of the dance without the dancer. … Read More

Decoding Choreutics – Key #2

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As an artist-scientist, Laban is concerned not only with the geometry of movement, but also with its expressive meaning.  This dual vision gives rise to his theory of natural affinities between lines of motion and effort qualities.

Laban’s working out of these correlations, introduced in Choreutics in Chapter 3, is intriguing but not entirely original.  The expressive value of line and form has its roots in theory of empathy propounded by late 19th and early 20th century  psychologists and art theorists.… Read More

Decoding Choreutics – Key #1

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Another example of Laban’s double vision is his concept of the kinesphere and dynamosphere as dual domains of human movement.  To represent both domains, Laban utilizes the cube.

With regard to the kinesphere, Laban uses the cube quite literally.  Its corners, edges, and internal diagonals serve as a kind of longitude and latitude for mapping movement in the space around the dancer’s body.

 

With regard to the dynamosphere, Laban uses the cube formally to represent patterns of effort change.  This shift in how the model should be interpreted is complicated further by Laban’s use of direction symbols to stand for effort qualities and combinations.… Read More

“God Geometricizes….” Said Madame Blavatsky

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Artistic and scientific circles were not the only circles that overlapped in the fin de siècle period.  European artists of the period were also involved in various secret spiritual societies that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

 

For example, the painter Wassily Kandinsky was an ardent follower of Theosophy, one of the occult spiritual movements of the period, and one that was very attractive to artists.  As religious historian Mircea Eliade notes, avant garde European artists “utilized the occult as a powerful weapon in their rebellion against the bourgeois establishment and its ideology.”… Read More