In Choreutics, Laban relates human movement to a dizzying array of subjects – Pythagoras, crystals, Lissajous curves, symmetry, musical semitones, lemniscates, cuboctahedra, the Golden Mean.  Consequently, for each reading assignment in the “Decoding Choreutics” course, I provide a written Commentary to help participants understand the wide-ranging relationships Laban mentions.

Dance historian Walter Sorrell claims that Laban was “a voracious reader whose thirst for knowledge embraced everything from religion and philosophy to literature and science.” This is because artistic and scientific circles overlapped to a much greater extent during Laban’s lifetime than is now the case.… Read More

MoveScape Center has run “Decoding Choreutics” twice – once in 2016 and again in 2017.  Over 40 students on four continents have taken the course.  Here is what they say about the experience.

“This has been a wonderful re-connecting with Laban’s teaching.”

“The questions were the perfect assistant in helping me to form clear understandings of Laban’s writings.”

“The pace was lovely and kept me fully engaged from week to week.”

“When reading Choreutics on my own, I often felt either inspired or frustrated. … Read More

Coming in early March — MoveScape Center again offers a unique opportunity to study Rudolf Laban’s masterpiece, Choreutics ! 

In this inspirational work, Laban articulates his understanding of the physical and metaphysical dimensions of human movement.  And although his presentation is logical, many parts of the book are difficult to grasp.

That is why I have developed this correspondence course.  Together with me over six weeks, participants read the first 12 chapters – though not necessarily in numerical order.  Here’s why.… Read More

While Laban was certainly concerned with how the different movement elements of body, space, effort, and shape cohere in meaningful human actions, he was also interested in exploring disharmony.  To widen his understanding of harmonic and disharmonic movement patterns, Laban reportedly visited a lunatic asylum in Paris in 1902, basing a later personal solo, “Marotte,” on his observations.

Notions of disharmony also served as Laban developed a repertoire for his chamber dance groups.  One type of dance was called a “grotesque.”… Read More

During the summer, fifteen explorers on four continents participated in MoveScape Center’s new offering – the Movement Harmony Project Part 1.  This unique correspondence course combined reading, writing, moving, and coloring as inroads to understanding the harmonic intervals of Laban’s Primary Scales.

Laban identified four Primary Scales.  These are twelve-sided “rhythmic circles” that meander peripherally around kinesphere. They are complex, counter-intuitive sequences that test the mover’s memory.  Yet Laban considered these scales to be foundational.

Part 1 of the Movement Harmony Project demonstrated how each Primary Scale can be partitioned to derive other Choreutic forms. … Read More

While Laban was recuperating at Dartington Hall in 1939, he build a number of
small sculptures that exist now only as photographs. Among these are “tensegrity
structures” – geometrical forms that cantilever in space and achieve stability
through countertension.

Actually, Buckminister Fuller is credited with the discovery of tensegrity years after Laban created his forms. But I believe Laban intuitively grasped the concept and understood that the human body is a tensegrity, or rather, a biotensegrity structure.

Biotensegity has become a buzz word – but it is hard to find a really good explanation of how this mechanical concept is being applied to reshape our understanding of human anatomy.… Read More

My first vacation reading recommendation for Labanistas is Thunder at Twilight:
Vienna 1913-14 by Frederic Morton. In this book, Morton portrays the royalty,
politicians, artists, intellectuals, and, above all, the atmosphere of Vienna just before
the outbreak of the First World War. It’s a fascinating cast of characters that
includes Emperor Franz Josef, Freud, Trotsky, and even Hitler.

The story culminates with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a young Serbian terrorist and the frantic machinations of the Emperor and his advisers to punish Serbia without setting in motion the network of European alliances.… Read More