Movement Harmony – Fact or Fiction?

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Laban’s assertion that human movement has a harmonic structure analogous to music has vexed scholars ranging from Suzanne Langer to Lincoln Kirstein. In general, the notion of movement harmony has been viewed as an artifact of Laban’s mystical philosophy. In my view, however, harmony is a useful theoretical construct for explaining certain empirical aspects of human movement.

For example, aestheticians have categorized the arts as either spatial or temporal. However, dance is a hybrid art. The dance unfolds in both space and time, both for the dancer and for the observer.… Read More

What is Eukinetics?

Posted on September 18, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Dance is a hybrid art form, traversing space and progressing through time. In its temporal aspects, dance has much in common with its sister time art, music. Like music, dance has rhythm, phrasing, and dynamics. Eukinetics is the term Rudolf Laban coined to capture these temporal elements.

Laban created the term Eukinetics from two Greek root words – “eu” meaning beautiful or harmonious and “kinetikos” meaning movement. During the final two decades of his career in England, Laban dropped this exotic word and adopted the more common English term, “effort.”… Read More

What is Rudolf Laban’s Choreutics?

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

In the preface to his book, Choreutics, Laban links his modern studies of movement to Pythagorean mathematics, notably musical scales and the “harmonic relations” of geometrical forms such as the right triangle and circle. Laban appears to have coined the term Choreutics from two Greek root words: “khoreia” (dancing in unison) and “eu” (beautiful, harmonious).

Laban goes on to define Choreutics as “the practical study of harmonised movement.” Latter day colleagues of Laban’s, such as Valerie Preston-Dunlop and Vera Maletic, have delineated Choreutics respectively as the “spatial organization for dance” and “the theory and practice of ordering movement in space.”… Read More

Dance – An Art in Space and Time

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

The arts are sometimes divided into spatial arts and temporal arts.

The visual arts – painting, sculpture, and architecture – are space arts. They exist as material objects that occupy two- or three-dimensional space. They are more or less enduring. And much of their appeal has to do with how they portray and/or create shapes of different kinds.

The temporal art forms – music, dance, theatre, and film – have a beginning and an ending. They occupy an instantaneous present and must be recreated afresh.… Read More

Rudolf Laban, Painter and Dancer

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Rudolf Laban is known as a significant figure in 20th century modern dance. Yet he was 40 years old before he began to make a name for himself as a dancer. Prior to this time, Laban had been seriously engaged in the visual arts. And this first career as an artist decisively influenced his second career.

Laban studied art in Munich and Paris at the height of the popularity of the Art Nouveau movement. His surviving art works demonstrate his mastery of artist’s anatomy, proportion, and rendering in perspective – all staples of a traditional art training.… Read More

Humane Effort

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Human effort is rich, complex, and quite variable. Nevetheless, every individual develops effort habits over time. One’s effort “personality” is the product of individual temperament. It is shaped by social circumstances and developed through movement training and the other activities one engages in – whether voluntarily chosen or not. Thus nature, nurture, and movement experience combine to generate an individual’s ingrained effort habits.

While much of our movement behavior is habitual, we are also able to think about how we move.… Read More

Movement Habits and Effort Awareness

Posted on August 18, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Human effort is ubiquitous. From the time we rise in the morning until we retire at night, we engage in diverse endeavors – all of which require effort and skilled bodily motion.

Fortunately, many of these skilled motions have become habitual and require little conscious thought or reflection. Indeed, there are only a few occasions when we have to think about how we move. If a situation makes us self-conscious, we may become painfully aware of bodily movements. If injured, we may have to adjust the way we do things.… Read More

Effort and Virtuosity

Posted on August 11, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

It takes a special event to awaken us to the awesome variety and potential perfection of human effort. A virtuoso performance on the musical saw did so for me.

A recent concert by the Colorado Symphony included the “Habanera” from the opera “Carmen,” in which the well-known aria (usually sung by a soprano) was performed by soloist Caroline McCaskey on a saw. By holding the handle of the saw between her knees, bending the blunt metal tip with her left hand, and bowing the straight edge, she was able to replicate the tones of the human voice.… Read More

Human Effort is Omnipresent

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

In preparation for the MoveScape Octa seminar later this week, I have been thinking a lot about human effort. As Rudolf Laban perceived, “the animal world is rich in effort manifestations, but each animal genus is restricted to a relatively small range of typical qualities.” Human beings manifest a much richer range of motion and “can establish complicated networks of changing effort qualities.”

The results of human effort are all around us, for increasingly we spend our time in man-made environments, in homes, in office buildings, in vehicles that transport us from one to the other.… Read More

Effort and Consciousness

Posted on July 28, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

(This excerpt is taken from my book, The Harmonic Structure of Movement, Music, and Dance According to Rudolf Laban.)

As noted earlier, Laban initially perceived two fundamental psychological attitudes: one of resisting or fighting the physical conditions influencing movement, the other of yielding and accepting these conditions. These attitudes were used in the construction of bi-polar qualities for each of the four motion factors. In later years, Laban hypothesized correlations between these four motion factors and the four functions of consciousness theorized by Jung: sensing, thinking, feeling, and intuiting.… Read More