Attention Labanistas!  It is vital to learn about movement by moving, but reading about Laban concepts also enhances and extends kinesthetic understanding.

Go to the source! Laban devoted his life to ensuring that dance could have a history, a theory, and a literature.  He wrote prolifically.  Fortunately for English readers, three of Laban’s most important works were written in English during the final decades of his career.

Want to know more about movement harmony?  Find out what the inventor of LBMS had to say in Decoding Choreutics, starting at the end of this month.… Read More

Around 1913 the Austro-Hungarian painter Rudolf Laban declared he was giving up art for dance. When a fellow responded with insulting remarks about dancers, Laban became involved in a scuffle, knocking out his opponent. Afterwards he was inwardly tormented, not only for fighting, but also for having set his heart “on the most despised profession in the world.”

In the early years of the 20th century, visual art was a rich field. Masterworks of art dating from previous centuries could be studied.… Read More

In the upcoming hybrid course, jointly sponsored with the Laban/Bartenieff Institute, I guide readers and movers through one of Laban’s most difficult books, Choreutics.  Across six weeks, we read and discuss all twelve chapters written by Laban.

These readings are arranged by themes:  space and body, space and effort, spatial scales and effort sequences, with side discussions on Laban’s philosophy of movement.

Questions are provided for each chapter, to help readers identify key ideas. Movement prompts are also given to link theory with physical practice. … Read More

The inspirational passages in Choreutics can obscure the systematic way in which Laban introduces and develops a rational geography of space.

To help the mover orient in the trackless kinesphere, Laban begins with simple, readily recognizable trajectories and moves by gradual steps to more oblique and nuanced trajectories.

First Laban introduces the cardinal directions (up/down, across/open, back/forward). Next he moves on to the cardinal planes (vertical, horizontal, and sagittal), and then to the pure diagonals.

The pure diagonal lines of motion connect opposite corners of the cube – a familiar shape related to the rectangular rooms we mostly inhabit.… Read More

In addition to identifying four formal elements of line in dance tradition, Laban also noted two contrasting forms – the arabesque and the attitude.  While these have become stylized motions in ballet, Laban perceives the arabesque more generally as any direct, scattering shape and the attitude as any flexible, gathering motion.

Both forms reveal something about the mover’s relationship to the surrounding environment.   According to Laban, both represent “fundamental urges.”  The direct scattering or pushing away motion of the arabesque expresses repulsion, while the flexible gathering action of the attitude is a gesture of possession.… Read More

As Laban began to study the expressive lines of dance, he perceived relationships between form and the anatomical structure of human joints.

“The tradition of dance,” Laban writes, “enumerates four fundamental trace-forms which have the following shapes:  straight, curved, twisted, and rounded.”  All more complex shapes “are built up by these four formal elements.”

According to Laban, this limitation to four shapes is governed by the body’s anatomical structure, which permits only certain movements to be made by bending, stretching, twisting, and combinations of these actions.… Read More

Zweig’s memoir chronicles the descent into dystopia and the multiple displacements triggered by war —  features of the life of his generation that also impacted Rudolf Laban.  Yet there is another side to the history of this period, one captured in Larraine Nicolas’s chronicle, Dancing in Utopia.

The book focuses on Dartington Hall, a rural estate in southwest England purchased by the wealthy Elmhirsts in 1925.  The couple aimed to create a community where industry and agriculture were carried out scientifically and where the arts would be available to all workers.… Read More