Human Hands, Handedness, and Chirality

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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

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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”

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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

Reversing Laban’s Career Path

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For the first two decades of his adult life, Rudolf Laban trained and worked as a visual artist.  He did not begin his emergence as a major mover and shaker in the European dance world until he was 40 years old.  Nevertheless, his knowledge and skills in visual art served him well in his new career.

For the past few years, I have been studying visual art.  My aim is to reverse Laban’s career, switching from dance to art as I become superannuated. … Read More

Grappling with a Girdle

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Lately I have been grappling with a girdle – not the underwear kind, the Choreutic kind.  I’ve been trying to create suggestions for how to embody each of the four Girdles that Laban identified.

These spatial sequences are peripheral six-rings that surround a diagonally tilted axis.  The Girdles themselves are tilted circles, part of which lies in front of the mover, and part of which lies behind the mover.

I’m quite fond of two of the Girdles that fall in front of the body and rise behind it. … Read More

Moving, Writing … and Coloring?

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The Movement Harmony Project : Part 1 involves moving, writing, and, yes, coloring.  Part 1, which launches at the very end of this month, focuses on Choreutics.   One of the toughest hurdles of learning Laban’s harmonic spatial sequences is visualizing them.  After all, the space around the body is empty.  What’s with all these “rhythmic circles” and geometrical trace forms?

Visualizing movement space doesn’t seem to have been tough for Laban.   I’ve studied hundreds of mostly unpublished sketches in his archives. … Read More

Harmony – The Tie that Binds

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Laban Movement Analysis enables observers to break a movement apart into its various body, effort, shape, and space components. These elements are distinctive, and Laban was certainly aware of this. Yet, he also recognized that these elements, though each of a different nature, cohere in voluntary human actions.

“Harmony” is the term he chose with which to study the amazing coherence of voluntary movement. Harmony brings different elements into agreement through proportional means. Take the body and the empty space around it.… Read More

Testing Shape Flow…and Why This Matters

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In order to clarify how we were teaching shape flow, the Columbia College Chicago LMA faculty tested our definition of shape flow by observing duets from the Martha Graham film, “The Dancer’s World.” Graham’s choreography is quite sculptural, with lots of emphasis on shape change. Consequently, the short duets were a good test case for our clarified definition of shape flow:

Shape flow is the growing and shrinking of the actual kinesphere as manifested in growing and shrinking of the body shape.… Read More

Potential and Actual Kinespheres

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In order to resolve differences between the definitions of Lamb (growing and shrinking of the kinesphere) and Kestenberg (growing and shrinking of the body shape), we elaborated Laban’s concept of  “kinesphere.”

Laban defines the kinesphere as “the sphere around the body whose periphery can be reached by easily extended limbs without stepping away from that place which is the point of support.” This definition makes the kinesphere sound like pre-existing bubble of territory surrounding the body, with boundaries in far reach space.… Read More

Respecting the Laban Legacy: A Case Study

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Several years ago, colleagues and I found that our Laban Movement Analysis students in the Columbia College Chicago Certificate Program had developed very fuzzy notions about shape flow – an important “mode of shape change.”  As a faculty, we developed the following procedure to address this problem.

First, we reviewed the literature about shape flow. Based on the primary sources, we established a working definition for identifying shape flow. Then we tested the definition, to see if different observers could agree.… Read More