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

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

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