Laban wanted readers of Mastery of Movement to engage both mind and body.  Besides physical exercises, he provides observation prompts to engage performers in the study of everyday behavior, along with dramatic scenarios to be enacted.

Most of Laban’s scenarios include multiple characters, and this can be a bit daunting for the person reading the book alone at home.

However, movement imagination can be stimulated through movement observation.  Mastery of Movement discusses mime as well as theatre and dance.  I have found that contemporary mime provides great examples of how a single performer can create multiple characters without saying a word.… Read More

Mastery of Movement extends Laban’s notion of effort beyond functional work activities to notions of “incomplete efforts” and “transformation drives.”  Laban had already explored movement expression in his own choreographies.  But his effort theories were enhanced by the work he did with students at Theatre Workshop and the Northern Theatre School, fertile training grounds for some of England’s finest actors.

“You must not think of dance as steps,” he once told a group of student actors.  “Dance is meaningful movement.  You can dance with your eyebrows. … Read More

In the Preface to Mastery of Movement, Laban states that “every sentence in this exposition is written as an incentive to personal mobility.”  He wants readers to get up out of their arm chairs and MOVE.

Consequently, the second and third chapters contain descriptions of 103 exercises for the reader to perform.  Systematic exploration of bodily movement is valuable, but 103??!

In the forthcoming hybrid course, I have organized the exercises around 8 themes to be used as a basis for improvisational prompts or choreographed sequences. … Read More

Mastery of Movement is for Body and Effort what Choreutics is for Space and Shape – a comprehensive survey of these expressive elements of movement.  Moreover, the book offers tantalizing glimpses of Laban’s aesthetics and philosophy.

The first edition, published in 1950, was focused on movement for the stage, but Laban’s observations go well beyond this, addressing broader functions of movement in human life and evolution.

After the first edition went out-of-print, Laban was planning another edition, but he died before this could be completed. … Read More

T.O.E. stands for Theory Of Everything – a single all-encompassing theoretical framework that is able to explain and link together all the physical aspects of the universe, from the atomic scale to galaxies.

The search for a T.O.E. has been most notable in theoretical physics, which must make do with two different explanatory schemes – general relativity to describe the cosmological structure of the universe and quantum theory to handle subatomic structures.

It would be handy to have one theory that explains the large and the small – and not only for physicists. … Read More

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, avant-garde European artists sought inspiration in esoteric societies and Eastern spiritual practices.  One such artist was a young painter-turned-dancer named Rudolf Laban.

While involvement with “secret societies” represented a rejection of religious and cultural values of the West for artists, occultism was also attractive because it appeared to offer a single key that would solve the mysteries of the universe.

Avant-garde artists and occultists were united by their denial of a world increasingly out-of-control due to the explosion of ideas in the social, political, and natural sciences. … Read More

The psychologist Howard Gardner once proposed a “bodily-kinesthetic intelligence,” characterized as the ability to use one’s body in highly differentiated and skilled ways.  Educator Ruth Foster addresses this intelligence even more directly: “We are in the world through our body, and the basis of knowledge lies in sensori-motor experience, the most intimate way of knowing.”

I’m sure Laban would agree with both statements.  But for him, bodily knowing goes beyond practical concerns to the transcendental realm of “gnosis.”

Gnosis (from the Greek) simply means knowledge.… Read More

Laban noted that “The European has lost the habit and capacity to pray with movement,” contrasting the sedate genuflexions of Christian worshippers with the much richer and more expressive ritual movements of other faiths and cultures.

This observation is based on his visits as a youth to see his father in the Balkans.  There Laban was introduced to rituals of the “howling” Dervish by an Imam under whose protection he traveled. This experience had a lasting influence on his vision of the power of dance.… Read More

Laban recognized that movement is a psychophysical phenomenon involving the whole person.  When Laban’s protégé the dancer Irmgard Bartenieff became a physical therapist, she incorporated this understanding in her work with polio patients.  Activate and motivate became her mantra.

“There is no such thing as pure ‘physical’ therapy or pure ‘mental’ therapy,” Bartenieff wrote.  “They are continuously interrelated.”  Finding ways to keep alive the movement impulse for hospitalized children became central to  her rehabilitative approach.

In his youthful encounter with the “howling” Dervishes, Laban witnessed an even more extreme example of the regenerative power of movement. … Read More

“The dancer moves,” Laban wrote, “not only from place to place, but also from mood to mood.”  Laban recognized that movement is physical and psychological, a phenomenon involving the whole human being.

Beyond this, however, Laban suggests that movement practices can serve as way to unify body, mind, and spirit.  He coined two terms for such practices – “choreutics” (addressing the movement from place to place) and “eukinetics” (delineating the movement from mood to mood).

Laban defines “choreutics” as “the art, or the science, dealing with the analysis and synthesis of movement.” … Read More