Movement Analysis: Enhancing Body Knowledge, Transcending Body Prejudice

Posted on March 24, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Rudolf Laban observed that movement can be perceived from three distinct angles:

1. the “biological innocent”  — the person enjoying movement inwardly,  as a bodily experience,
2. the “scheming mechanic” – the person who observes movement analytically and objectively from the outside,
3. the “emotional dreamer” – the person who seeks the meaning of movement in the intangible world of emotions and ideas

Laban asserts that these three perspectives operate constantly in all of us.  Sometimes we favor one or the other view, and “sometimes we compress them in a synthesized act of perception and function.”… Read More

Body Prejudice

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Like body knowledge, body prejudice originates from our capacity to categorize and generalize on the basis of personal movement experience.  As I write in Beyond Words, second edition:

Over time, a positive or negative meaning comes to be associated with a certain type of movement.  If this meaning is automatically projected onto all similar movements, regardless of context and modifying details, an inappropriate and prejudicial reaction may result.

Just because a movement is pre-judged does not mean it is judged wrongly, but this is always a possibility.… Read More

The Anatomy of Body Knowledge

Posted on March 9, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Body knowledge develops gradually, as a combination of perception of our own movements and observation of the movements of other people.

Similar to all other forms of knowing and attaching meaning to human actions, body knowledge rests on three processes: categorizing, abstracting, and generalizing.

Categorizing is discerning related and unrelated movements; grouping those that are similar. For example hammering is one kind of movement and stamping is another.

Abstracting is leaving out particularistic details to generate broader categories. Hammering involves the hands and stamping uses the feet, but both hammering and stamping employ the same effort qualities and can be abstracted as belonging to the broader category of punching movements.… Read More

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Years ago during a modern dance class the instructor demonstrated a complicated movement.  When the class attempted to repeat it, he complained.  “No, the arm goes here, not there.”

The class protested, “We just did what you did.”

“Well then,” he countered, “do as I say, not as I do.”

Whether one is trying to dance or determine if a friend is really dependable, actions speak louder than words.  In the long run, what really matters is not what someone says, but what they do.… Read More

Movement Analysis is a Physical Activity

Posted on February 24, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Like other physical activities, observing movement is a process that involves effort and recovery. The following excerpt from my book, Beyond Words, describes movement analysis as a process consisting of four phrases: (1) relaxation, (2) attunement, (3) point of concentration, and (4) recuperation.

Relaxation
The initial preparatory stage involves relaxation as the observer strives to “get in the mood” for whatever will come. This takes the form of letting go in order to achieve a state of mind analogous to the “unfocused focus” of the naturalist who “goes alone into a field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance” (Wilson, 1986, 103).… Read More

In Praise of Whole Body Movement

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Shakespeare praised man’s “infinite faculties”. But human beings are constantly in danger of coming apart. Whether we bifurcate the individual into body and mind or even greater divisions (ego, ID, superego; thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting, etc.), keeping it together is a uniquely human challenge.

Body movement is one medium through which these divisions can be unified. Laban created physical practices to facilitate the integration of man’s infinite faculties. This part of Laban’s work is known as “choreutics” or space harmony. Laban characterizes his choreutic exercises as “attempts to stop the progress of disintegrating into disunity”.… 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

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