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

The limbs move through the space around the body, creating lines and shapes that disappear even as the movement is occurring.  But what if the joints of the limbs, like little jet engines, left a vapor trail, allowing the movement trajectories to be seen, recorded, and studied?

This is what Rudolf Laban had in mind when he coined the term “trace-forms”to refer to the imaginary vapor trails inscribed by the moving limbs on the space around the body.  His next challenge was to find a way to record these trace-forms so that they could be reconstructed from a notation score, just as the shape of a melody can be reproduced from a musical score.… Read More

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