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
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
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 I’ve studied hundreds of mostly unpublished sketches in his archives.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
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
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
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
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
I would like to draw an analogy between the Buddha and Laban. After Buddha died, it fell to his disciples to carry on his teachings. Buddha did not record his ideas; all his teaching was oral. Moreover, he didn’t necessarily say exactly the same thing to every disciple. Consequently, many schools of Buddhism have sprung up, each claiming “authority by association.”
A similar thing occurred with Laban. As he studied movement in different contexts, he kept modifying his theoretical ideas, which he conveyed to different disciples at different times.… Read More
Around 1913, Rudolf Laban abandoned his career as a visual artist to enter the field of dance. At that time, dance was the perennial “poor relation” of the other arts, a discipline defined more by what it lacked than by what it offered.
Traditional and genre-bound in practice, dance depended for its existence on a body to perform it and faded away the minute the performance was done. It was an ephemeral art, like music or theatre. But unlike these arts, dance was exclusively ephemeral, largely lacking in literature, history, scholarship, and theory.… Read More
The cardinal directions – up and down, right and left, forward and backward – form our most basic cognitive map of the space around the body. But according to Laban, the first fact of space-movement is “innumerable directions radiate from the center of our body and its kinesphere into infinite space.”
In other words, our cognitive map of space is highly simplified. Real movement through space is much more complex, full of deviations and deflections from the cardinal directions.
Laban engaged in a detailed yet patterned study of these innumerable lines of motion. … Read More