On Choreography

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In the preface to Choreutics, Laban defines “choreography” as the “designing or writing of circles.”  While we use the word today to designate composing dances, Laban was obviously familiar with the origins of the term, which come from two Greek words – khoros  and graphein.

Khoros refers both to the Greek chorus and to the circular space in which they danced, while graphein obviously means to write.  Laban extends the “writing of circles” to mean notating dance and movement and uses this as a way to mention his own system of dance notation.… Read More

Chasing Laban

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In Choreutics, Laban mentions in passing a dizzying array of subjects —

Pythagoras, crystals, Lissajous curves, symmetry, semitones and overtones, lemniscates, tetrahedra,  the Golden Mean, range of motion….

Through many years of studying Laban’s published and unpublished writings and drawings, I have often found it necessary to “bone up” on various subjects that he only mentions in passing.  This is not easy, because Laban seldom specifies his sources.  Yet they must have been substantial.

Indeed Walter Sorrell notes, “I only know from hearsay that Rudolf Laban was a voracious reader whose thirst for knowledge embraced everything from religion and philosophy to literature and science.” … Read More

Decoding Laban’s Choreutics III

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One thing many readers have difficulty grappling with in Choreutics is Laban’s geometricizing of the dancer’s space.  Laban’s first career as a visual artist helps to explain this use of geometry.

Visual artists have employed geometrical schemes to capture human proportion and motion since Egyptian times.   These schemes have differed.  The Egyptians used a flat grid; Byzantine artists employed a series of concentric circles; and medieval artists superimposed ornamental shapes like triangles and stars on the human body to set contours and directions of movement, albeit in a highly stylized way.… Read More

Decoding Laban’s Choreutics II

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In the previous blog, I quoted Rudolf Laban’s characterization of choreutics as “the art, or the science” of movement study.  Our postmodern perspective draws a hard line between art and science.  But this was not the case when Laban was coming of age at the turn-of-the-century.

Munich, Laban’s first port-of-call when he began to study visual art, is a case in point.  Artists and scientists happily commingled here, and ideas drawn from science fertilized the theories and practices of artists, and vice versa.… Read More

Decoding Laban’s Choreutics I

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Choreutics is in many ways a straight-forward presentation of Laban’s movement theories.  However, more than any of Laban’s other books in English, Choreutics  is colored by Laban’s worldview.

It is recognized now that there is no such thing as pure objectivity; every theory is colored by its proposer’s experiences and beliefs.  Consequently, Laban’s worldview is not irrelevant to understanding ideas set forth in Choreutics.

In this series of blogs, I sketch aspects of Laban’s life and times and their potential influence on his theories of movement. … Read More

Capturing Movement’s Traces in Written Forms

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Around 1913, Rudolf Laban abandoned his career as a visual artist to enter the field of dance.  At the time, dance was a discipline defined more by what it lacked than by what it offered.  Laban focused his energies on altering such conditions.

He championed the cause of dance:  as a profession, as a recreative lay activity, and as a mode of education. He created a flexible dance notation system that allows works of various genre to be recorded and restaged.  … Read More

More Mysteries of Laban’s Masterpiece, Choreutics

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Laban intended for Choreutics, written in 1938-39, to be his introduction to the English reading public. With the outbreak of World War II, Laban was forced to postpone publication. After the war, however, Laban inexplicably abandoned the manuscript altogether.

Choreutics is not the only book that Laban abandoned, but it is the only manuscript that has vanished without a trace from the Rudolf Laban Archive, a vast collection of Laban’s writings and drawings from the final two decades of his career, now held by the National Resource Centre for Dance at the University of Surrey.… Read More

“Space Harmony” – A Misnomer?

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Rudolf Laban liked to coin new words to designate the movement theories he was developing. During the very fertile period of his career in Germany (1919-1929) he coined two words: “Choreutics” —dealing with the spatial forms of movement, and “Eukinetics” —dealing with qualities of kinetic energy.

Laban spent the final two decades of his career in England (1938-1958). During this period he Anglicized his movement terminology. His Eukinetic theories were presented under the term “Effort,” and Choreutics became known in Laban training programs as “Space Harmony.”… Read More

Movement Is the Life of Space

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The quotation above has always been one of my favorites from Laban’s masterwork, Choreutics. I like Laban’s assertion because it encourages us to think about space in a different way.

“Dead space does not exist,” Laban continues, “for there is neither space without movement nor movement without space.” It’s a little hard to wrap one’s head around this. We are accustomed to thinking of space as a gap between objects that are stable, real, and palpable. Space, on the other hand, is empty and void.… Read More

The Mystery of Laban’s Masterpiece, Choreutics

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Choreutics has always been my favorite book by Rudolf Laban, although it is by no means the most accessible of his writings. The text is prone to sudden jumps, from practical movement description to mystical metaphysics. Moreover, other mysteries surround this work.

For example, Laban wrote Choreutics during 1938-39, as he convalesced at Dartington Hall following his timely escape from continental Europe to England. According to his colleague Lisa Ullmann, Laban intended for the book “to introduce his ideas on movement and dance to an interested reading public in Britain.”… Read More