Popular “Decoding Choreutics” Course Returns

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

The Movement Observation Phrase

Rudolf Laban noted that movement occurs in patterned phrases of preparation, exertion, and recuperation.  When I was learning to analyze movement, I found applying this structure helped me see movement events more clearly.

We all have movement habits; that is, there is a pattern to each individual’s movement behavior in which certain facets of movement occur more frequently than others.  The pattern is real, but it takes time to see it.  And this is where phrasing is helpful.

Preparation in observing actually has two parts: relaxation and attunement. … Read More

Harmony and Disharmony

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

Elements of Movement Harmony II

In addition to proportion, balance, and symmetry, Laban identified order, kinship, and unity of form as elements of movement harmony.  

Order is particularly important in spatial sequences.  For example, if a series of continuous movements were to be filmed, then cut apart and randomly spliced back together, a dream-like sequence would result, full of unexpected jumps, overlaps, and repetitions.  According to Laban, a movement makes sense only if “it progresses organically,” with phases following in a natural order of directional change.Read More

The Movement Harmony Project Blasts Off

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

Stimulate Your Grey Cells

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

Travel Back in Time

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

Human Hands, Handedness, and Chirality

Handedness, or a preference for using either the right or left hand, occurs in nearly 96% of the population, according to scientific studies.  Moreover, the phenomenon extends beyond hand movements to a preference for using one side of the body over the other.  Dancers have to contend with this bias, which is why turns, jumps, gestures, and locomotion sequences are practiced leading with both the right and left.

Dance practice can ameliorate but not eliminate handedness.  This is because all organic nature seems to share a bias towards handedness.  … Read More

Laban: Artist and Scientist

The division between science and art was much less marked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and this made it possible for a polymath like Laban to know something about what was going on in each of these two intellectual cultures.

Here are a few examples.  In his first career as a visual artist, Laban studied with Hermann Obrist in Munich.  Before turning to art, Obrist had been a botanist.  He drew on his scientific knowledge to generate stylized Art Nouveau designs of flora and fauna that moved increasingly towards abstraction, serving not only as a mentor to Laban but also to Vassily Kandinsky.… Read More

Science and Art: The “Two Cultures”

In a famous lecture delivered 60 years ago, the English scientist and writer C.P. Snow claimed that intellectual specialization has created “two cultures” – the scientific and the artistic.  Snow found that scientists and artists could no longer communicate with one another because those in one discipline lacked the knowledge possessed by those in the other.  He worried that this mutual incomprehension prevented solutions to social problems.

His observations continue to stimulate heated debate, perhaps for a good reason.

According to John O.… Read More