Laban, Modernism, and Postmodernism

Posted on October 9, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Rudolf Laban was 21 years old when the 20th century began. For Laban, as well as his fellow artists living in Munich and Paris, the new century seemed to be a time of great promise. The European nations were colonial powers that dominated 85% of the world economically and politically. Europeans saw themselves as the cultural elite, overseeing a future of unparalleled scientific and technical progress.

Nevertheless, the beginning of the new century was also a period of great anxiety. Modern Europeans possessed a greater understanding of the workings of the material world than any previous civilization.… Read More

Laban Movement Analysis in the University Curriculum

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

 

Courses in Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) have become core curriculum, primarily in university dance and dance therapy programs. However, LMA courses are also appearing in other disciplinary areas such as theatre, music composition and conducting, computer animation, and even architecture – disciplines in which some understanding of human movement is relevant. Movement analysis helps future dancers, actors, and conductors move more expressively and creatively while enabling would-be animators, composers, and architects to observe movement more precisely. In all these fields, Laban’s work is appreciated for its utilitarian value.… Read More

Movement Harmony – Fact or Fiction?

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Laban’s assertion that human movement has a harmonic structure analogous to music has vexed scholars ranging from Suzanne Langer to Lincoln Kirstein. In general, the notion of movement harmony has been viewed as an artifact of Laban’s mystical philosophy. In my view, however, harmony is a useful theoretical construct for explaining certain empirical aspects of human movement.

For example, aestheticians have categorized the arts as either spatial or temporal. However, dance is a hybrid art. The dance unfolds in both space and time, both for the dancer and for the observer.… Read More

What is Rudolf Laban’s Choreutics?

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

In the preface to his book, Choreutics, Laban links his modern studies of movement to Pythagorean mathematics, notably musical scales and the “harmonic relations” of geometrical forms such as the right triangle and circle. Laban appears to have coined the term Choreutics from two Greek root words: “khoreia” (dancing in unison) and “eu” (beautiful, harmonious).

Laban goes on to define Choreutics as “the practical study of harmonised movement.” Latter day colleagues of Laban’s, such as Valerie Preston-Dunlop and Vera Maletic, have delineated Choreutics respectively as the “spatial organization for dance” and “the theory and practice of ordering movement in space.”… Read More

Dance – An Art in Space and Time

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

The arts are sometimes divided into spatial arts and temporal arts.

The visual arts – painting, sculpture, and architecture – are space arts. They exist as material objects that occupy two- or three-dimensional space. They are more or less enduring. And much of their appeal has to do with how they portray and/or create shapes of different kinds.

The temporal art forms – music, dance, theatre, and film – have a beginning and an ending. They occupy an instantaneous present and must be recreated afresh.… Read More

Rudolf Laban, Painter and Dancer

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Rudolf Laban is known as a significant figure in 20th century modern dance. Yet he was 40 years old before he began to make a name for himself as a dancer. Prior to this time, Laban had been seriously engaged in the visual arts. And this first career as an artist decisively influenced his second career.

Laban studied art in Munich and Paris at the height of the popularity of the Art Nouveau movement. His surviving art works demonstrate his mastery of artist’s anatomy, proportion, and rendering in perspective – all staples of a traditional art training.… Read More

Humane Effort

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Human effort is rich, complex, and quite variable. Nevetheless, every individual develops effort habits over time. One’s effort “personality” is the product of individual temperament. It is shaped by social circumstances and developed through movement training and the other activities one engages in – whether voluntarily chosen or not. Thus nature, nurture, and movement experience combine to generate an individual’s ingrained effort habits.

While much of our movement behavior is habitual, we are also able to think about how we move.… Read More

Effort and Virtuosity

Posted on August 11, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

It takes a special event to awaken us to the awesome variety and potential perfection of human effort. A virtuoso performance on the musical saw did so for me.

A recent concert by the Colorado Symphony included the “Habanera” from the opera “Carmen,” in which the well-known aria (usually sung by a soprano) was performed by soloist Caroline McCaskey on a saw. By holding the handle of the saw between her knees, bending the blunt metal tip with her left hand, and bowing the straight edge, she was able to replicate the tones of the human voice.… Read More

Effort and Consciousness

Posted on July 28, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

(This excerpt is taken from my book, The Harmonic Structure of Movement, Music, and Dance According to Rudolf Laban.)

As noted earlier, Laban initially perceived two fundamental psychological attitudes: one of resisting or fighting the physical conditions influencing movement, the other of yielding and accepting these conditions. These attitudes were used in the construction of bi-polar qualities for each of the four motion factors. In later years, Laban hypothesized correlations between these four motion factors and the four functions of consciousness theorized by Jung: sensing, thinking, feeling, and intuiting.… Read More

Human Effort and the Four Motion Factors

Posted on July 21, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

(The following passage continues the introduction to Rudolf Laban’s ideas about human effort. It is taken from my forthcoming book, Meaning in Motion: Introducing Laban Movement Analysis.)

Because movement is a psychophysical phenomenon involving the whole person, how someone moves reveals something about how they are feeling. The individual’s inner attitudes become visible through effort. Rudolf Laban characterizes these inner attitudes as “fighting or resisting” and “indulging or yielding.”

Movements are bound to evolve in space as well as in time, and in this evolution of movement the weight of the body is brought into flow.… Read More