My third suggestion for summer reading in Jamake Highwater’s Dance: Rituals of Experience.

Originally published in 1978, this dance history treatise remains relevant today for its juxtaposing of indigenous dance practices (notably Native American) with Western European dance.

Ritual serves as the pivot point for Highwater’s discussion.  The book begins by positioning dance as “a separate reality.”  Subsequent chapters address Experience as Ritual, History as Ritual, and Ritual as Art.  Final chapters focus on dance as contemporary rites, drawing on examples from ballet, modern and post-modern dance, and opera. … Read More

Between crowds, weather delays, and baggage snafus, an airport is the last place I want to be this summer.  But it isn’t necessary to travel to take flight – an easy chair and a good book can also be transportive.

In the following blogs I suggest some interesting titles for Labanistas.  Old and new, fictional and not, these books will allow you to stay home and still travel through time and space.  Read on!… Read More

In visual art, combinations of lines create shapes.  In dance, combinations of trace-forms also generate shapes.  Laban’s basic theory of effort/shape affinities simply considered the direction of single lines.  Later he began to consider other more complex shapes and their organic relationships to effort.

Laban never published these later ideas, but a clear record exists in his archival materials.  In the upcoming MoveScape workshop, Harmonies of Effort and Shape, we will consider this more complex model.

Laban’s more complex model has proved intriguing to Miya Sylvester, movement and computational design specialist.  … Read More

The emphasis on two-dimensional stylization of natural forms led Art Nouveau artists to focus on the visual and kinesthetic qualities of different kinds of lines.

In his 1897 article in published in Decorative Kunst, the architect and designer August Endell detailed qualities of straight and curved lines, thin and thick lines, and the direction of these lines in terms of tension (light and heavy) and tempo (slow and quick).

By combining different types of lines to create shapes, Endell made the following claim:

“And because all sensations are only tempo and tension, form is able to awaken all shades of emotion within us.”… Read More

Laban identified 8 “Basic Actions” found in practical physical labor.  He also identified 8 diagonal directions, marked by the internal rays of the cube.  He combined these to conceptualize a cubic model of effort/shape affinities, writing “the eight fundamental dynamic actions evolve in areas of the dynamosphere which correspond approximately to the eight diagonal directions of the kinesphere.”

Laban’s model is a logical extension of his basic notions of relationships between effort qualities and cardinal directions.  And this model, embedded in a stylized physical practice, provides a clear structure for both effort and space.… Read More

Rudolf Laban perceived a logical relationship or “affinity” between the six cardinal directions and the effort qualities of Weight, Space, and Time.

For example, “a feeling of lightness corresponds with reaching upwards,” while a strong movement tends downwards.

Movement across the body “makes for a confined use of space,” which Laban links with straight, direct effort quality.  Opening outwards brings about spatial freedom, and correlates with a roundabout, indirect quality.

Sudden shocks and jerks of fright case the body to contract, consequently Laban relates quickness to movement backward. … Read More

Conceiving bodily motions as lines in space allowed Laban to link his visual art background with his study of dance.

Art Nouveau artists not only had a deep interest in the expressive qualities of line, they also linked this expressivity to the body.  For example, in asking how architectural forms can convey an emotion or a mood, the Swiss aesthetician Heinrich Wolfflin, argued that “Physical forms possess a character only because we ourselves possess a body.”

The architect August Endell went even further in ascribing empathic, body-based reactions to straight and curved lines, thick and thin lines, and the direction of the line. … Read More

In Labanotation, bodily gestures are recorded as linear trace-forms having a definable starting and ending destination.  In contrast, bodily supports in locomotion are written as motion away from a starting location.

In Labanotation, Ann Hutchinson Guest distinguishes destination from motion in the following way.

“In traveling from Rome to London, one is moving between two fixed points in the world.  The direction happens to be a northwesterly one, but the traveler need not be aware of this.’’

“A traveler starting on a northwesterly path from Rome may not know what his goal is; he may only know his direction in relation to his starting point.”  … Read More

Laban found trace-forms could be recorded by visualizing them as lines occurring within a geometricized kinesphere.  He also felt this form of representation was lacking something.

As the French philosopher Henri Bergson noted, one can move one’s hand from point A to point B, inscribing a line which can infinitely divided into a series of stationary points or positions.  This imposes stillnesses on flux.

Instead, the movement creates “the inward feeling of a single act, for in A was rest, in B there is again rest, and between A and B is placed an undivided act, the passage from rest to rest which is movement itself.”… Read More

The imaginary lines of longitude and latitude make it possible to navigate on the open seas.  In a similar way, Laban used the edges and corners of regular polyhedra to provide landmarks for tracking the pathways of moving limbs in the trackless space around the body.

This clever innovation allows for the movement of bodily gestures to be recorded as a line in space having a particular starting and ending point, with reference to a geometrical scaffolding of the kinesphere.… Read More