Rudolf Laban – Symmetry Freak

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Rudolf Laban was crazy about symmetry. His first career as a visual artist spanned the period from 1899 to 1919. During this period, Art Nouveau, with its focus on two-dimensional pattern, was in fashion.   Surviving works show that Laban worked in this style and was familiar with symmetry operations as a means of generating pattern.

When Laban turned his artist’s eyes to dance, he realized the power of symmetry for generating three-dimensional patterns.   Virtually all his Choreutic forms and scales are highly symmetrical.… Read More

Space Games

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I have space toys, but Laban liked to play space games. He played one game over and over and over and over again and again ….

 

His favorite game went something like this: start at one corner of a polyhedron – it can be a cube, octahedron, or icosahedron. Then trace a line touching every corner only once and return to the corner where you began.

 

Unpublished drawings in the Laban Archive in  England show that Laban played this game over and over again.… Read More

Space Toys

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Mel Brooks had Spaceballs (a Star Wars parody); I have Space Toys.

I’m not kidding. One way to bring Choreutics to life is with good geometrical models. Whenever I’m in a toy shop (or the children’s section of a museum shop), I’m always on the lookout for the newest geometrical toys.

To be honest, I’m always on the lookout. At the moment, geometrical forms are fashionable as decorative items. I just went to Hobby Lobby to buy pastel paper and walked out with a stellated icosahedron….… Read More

The Octa Is Coming

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In July, the Octa workshop, “Bringing Choreutics to Life” takes Laban’s space harmony theory into practice. This three-day workshop presents key Choreutic concepts in a way that is accessible for participants new to Laban’s ideas as well as experienced movement analysts.

Laban himself admitted that “our mental functions employ geometrical symbols to express orientation in space, but generally our feeling does not comprehend living movement within geometrical plasticity.” In other words, both understanding and embodying choreutics can be steep learning curve!… Read More

The Tetra Takes Off

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Twenty-one brave readers on four continents began the Tetra seminar, Decoding Laban’s Choreutics on March 26th. This “great books” correspondence course is focused on Laban’s posthumously published masterpiece, also known as The Language of Movement.

Over a six-week period, we are exploring the book two chapters at a time. I use the word “exploring” purposefully, for I see this course as a journey of discovery for all twenty-two of us.

It is certainly proving to be a journey of discovery for me.… Read More

Oscillations and Deflections

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In his masterwork, Choreutics, Laban notes that “oscillations are the means of expression in the two arts, music and dance.”  We found evidence supporting Laban’s observation in the Prototypes project.

Of course, Laban has constructed his prototypic sequences as oscillations, shifting between opposite directions in space.  The simplest pattern, the Dimensional Scale, oscillates between the cardinal directions. So the dancer reaches up, then down; opens the arm sideward, then reaches across the body; finally extends backward, then forward.

For Laban, however, there is more than one way to move up or down, or forward or backward. … Read More

The Geometrical Alphabet of Space Movement

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“We can understand all bodily movement as being a continuous creation of fragments of polyhedral forms,” Laban claimed.  We set out to test this in the Prototypes project.

As I note in The Harmonic Structure of Movement, Music, and Dance, Laban’s polygonal rings are best thought of as “spatial ‘prototypes’ from which dance sequences can be constructed, just as musical scales are ‘model’ tonal sequences from which melodies and harmonies are composed.”  Just as only part of a scale may be found in a musical composition, Laban asserts that fragments of his polygonal prototypes can be found in choreographed movements.… Read More

Laban’s Idealized Kinesphere

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The sphere is Laban’s model for the space adjacent to the mover’s body.  The center of gravity of the body is also the center of the kinesphere, which extends equally in all directions, establishing a boundary based on the areas of space that can be reached without taking a step.

According to Laban, “all points of the kinesphere can be reached by simple movements, such as bending, stretching, and twisting, or by a combination of these.”

Laban’s choreutic prototypes exploit this spherical movement space using symmetrical trace-forms that oscillate up and down, from side to side, and in front and behind the body.… Read More

Misadventures with Motion Capture

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As any performer who has ever worked with technology knows, interfacing human and machine elements is a time-consuming process.  Our experiment with motion capture was no exception.

Fortunately, we had wonderful people to work with – our dancers, Professor Roger Good and his students and staff from the OU School of Digital Media Arts, and Nathan Berger and Rakesh Kashyap from the OU Aesthetic Technology Lab.  The latter two were responsible for the motion capture recording, using a portable MOCAP suit. … Read More

Rehearsing Laban’s Prototypes

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Polar triangles, axis and girdle scales, primary scales, and the A and B scales – these were the Laban prototypes we wanted to study.  Thus the research project began with a crash course in space harmony for three Ohio University dance faculty (Travis Gatling, Tresa Randall, and Marina Walchi).

We only had three days to prepare our performers (all relative newcomers to Laban theory) for the motion capture/videotaping session.   We wanted the dancers not only to remember the prototypic sequences but also to perform them well. … Read More