Bartenieff Fundamentals and Healing through Movement

Posted on January 21, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Recent encounters with physical therapy have given me a new appreciation of Irmgard Bartenieff, my first Laban teacher. Bartenieff was a dancer when she studied with Laban in Germany. After immigrating to the U.S. she became a physical therapist, initially working with polio victims. If facing the challenge of helping clients recover from paralysis, she drew on everything she had learned from Laban. The result crystallized in a somatic practice known as Bartenieff Fundamentals, which I studied with Bartenieff in the 1970s.… Read More

Empty Space Does Not Exist

Posted on January 17, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

According to Rudolf Laban, space is a superabundance of simultaneous movements. He’s right, of course. Empty space is full of air. And air is full of molecules and atoms, each a bundle of energy and particles that orbit and pulse.

Space isn’t empty for artists. It has shape. Artists learn to see this shape through drawing exercises. Rather than sketching the object, they draw the shape of the space around the object.

Space isn’t empty for architects. Like a surgical suture, space connects a building with the other objects in the environment.… Read More

Dancing from Mood to Mood

Posted on January 12, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

According to Rudolf Laban, “The dancer moves, not only from place to place, but also from mood to mood.” His perceptive comment illustrates a point that neuroscientists are beginning to recognize – nothing is purely mental or purely physical. Bodily movements accompany thoughts and feelings; and thoughts and feelings accompany movements.

In his unpublished papers Laban also observed, “inner becomes outer and outer becomes inner.” That is, movement not only reflects what a person is thinking and feeling, it also affects one’s inner psychological state.… Read More

Seeing Movement More Precisely with Laban

Posted on January 4, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Laban Movement Analysis allows the observer to see movement more objectively and precisely. But after 35 years of teaching LMA, I can safely say that learning to observe accurately and developing confidence as an observer takes time. And there is a reason for this.

The beauty of Laban’s taxonomy is its parsimony. Laban worked hard to develop a finite number of descriptive terms for movement. Effort is a good example. There are only four motion factors (flow, weight, time, and space) and eight effort qualities with which to capture the enormous variation of motion dynamics.… Read More

The Iconic Irmgard Bartenieff

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Carol-Lynne Moore

When I first studied Laban Movement Analysis with Irmgard Bartenieff, I was in my early 20s and she was in her mid-70s.  Like all of the other young students, I regarded her with a certain amount of awe.

Irmgard had an extraordinary resume.  Not only had she studied with Rudolf Laban in Germany in the fertile and exciting 1920s, she had gone on to work as a movement professional in an amazing array of fields – dance, physical therapy, visual anthropology, child development research, and dance/movement therapy. … Read More

Warren Lamb, Creative Pioneer

Posted on December 12, 2013 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Warren Lamb is one of the most creative people I have ever known.  His creativity is likely to escape the casual observer, for Lamb is very much the proper Englishman and his long and successful career as a management consultant has led him to adopt a conventional façade.  Moreover, he is inclined to stand modestly in the shadow of his mentor, Rudolf Laban, who is widely recognized as a creative genius.

However, without Lamb’s contribution to the study of human movement, Laban’s own reputation would be diminished. … Read More

Rudolf Laban, Revolutionary

Posted on December 5, 2013 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Around 1913, a visual artist named Rudolf Laban gave up painting to pursue a career in dance.  He admitted he seemed to have chosen “the most despised profession.”  At the time, dance was the poor relation of all the other arts.  Laban set out to change that.

Over the next 25 years, he performed, choreographed, and taught – activities familiar to most professional dancers.  But Laban’s efforts went beyond this.  He wrote about dance, he organized a dancers’ union, he initiated dance conferences, and he inspired a populist dance movement for amateur performers.… Read More

Thinking and Moving

Posted on November 22, 2013 by Carol-Lynne Moore

It used to be so simple.  I believed that I thought with my head and moved with, well, the rest of me.  So it came as a surprise when my high school ballet teacher used to admonish the class to “Think!”   And so I would think – about the homework I had to do, about dinner, about weekend plans.  Not surprisingly, these thoughts didn’t do much to enhance my dance technique.

Then one day it dawned on me. I wasn’t just supposed to be doing things with my body. … Read More

I Move, Therefore, I Am

Posted on October 25, 2013 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Movement is the essence of being. Human conception itself depends upon motion, the joining of egg and sperm. The health of the developing fetus is judged in part by its motion. And before the newborn can shape a thought, it expresses its needs by moving.

Descartes was half-right – self-reflective thought is uniquely human. But bodily movement is older than thought.

Movement is decisive. Movement, not thought, separates the quick and the dead, the animate and inanimate.

“Science tells us that motion is an essential of existence,” Rudolf Laban observed.… Read More