Like all of Laban’s writings, Mastery of Movement has a text and a subtext.  Explicitly, the text explores how to use bodily actions and effort rhythms to convey characters and situations on stage.  Implicitly, the book is about much more.

As Irmgard Bartenieff lamented, “We have no major publication that summarizes Laban’s insights into one philosophical-theoretical statement.”  But Mastery of Movement provides glimpses, not only of Laban’s movement theories, but also of his philosophy.

For example, Laban discusses the differences between virtuosity of movement performance and artistry in several chapters. … Read More

Rudolf Laban was no stranger to troubled times.  By the time he published Mastery of Movement in 1950, he had survived the flu pandemic of 1918, the economic depression of 1929, political upheavals, and two world wars.

As a youthful painter and dancer, Laban studied longstanding artistic traditions of Europe, then witnessed and participated in iconoclastic modern movements that upended traditional visual and dance practices.

Through all this tumult, Laban maintained his balance by focusing on the artistic, social, and spiritual values of movement.… Read More

I find Laban’s Mastery of Movement insightful and inspiring – but it is not an easy read.   Chapters 2 and 3 alone can be daunting.  Over the course of 60 pages, Laban introduces the reader to the analysis of simple and complex bodily movements through verbal descriptions and short movement notations (added by Lisa Ullmann).  The reader is meant to get up and perform these movement sequences, which is not an easy task!

That is why having a guide and a correspondent helps. … Read More

Some of the most thought-provoking statements by Laban are found in the first chapter of Mastery of Movement.  Here are several of my favorites….

“Man’s body-mind produces many kinds of qualities.  He can jump like a deer, and, if he wishes, like a cat.”

“Besides the comparative richness of human effort capacity, one can notice an effort speciality which might be called humane effort… effort capable of resisting the influence of inherited or acquired capacities.”

“It is perhaps not too bold to introduce here the idea of thinking in terms of movement. … Read More

Laban’s The Mastery of Movement on the Stage is about meaning.  In the opening sentence of the book, Laban observes that “man moves to satisfy a need,” and he notes that these needs can be tangible or intangible.   Here, in a nutshell, is a whole theory of human motivation and its intrinsic relation to bodily movement.

We cannot directly see another person’s motives, but we can deduce these from the way a person moves.  In the theatre, or in everyday life, we come to know characters and their objectives, not only by what they say, but by how they say it and the bodily actions that accompany those words and tones.… Read More

Laban did some of his most important work during the last two decades of his life.  He extended his study of movement beyond dance – to physical and mental labor,  movement for actors, physical education for children, and even  psychotherapy.

Each time Laban turned his eyes to a different arena of human activity, he developed his ideas.  And he wrote a book – Effort, The Mastery of Movement on the Stage, Modern Educational Dance, and Effort and Recovery (which remains unpublished).… Read More

In Choreutics, Laban relates human movement to a dizzying array of subjects – Pythagoras, crystals, Lissajous curves, symmetry, musical semitones, lemniscates, cuboctahedra, the Golden Mean.  Consequently, for each reading assignment in the “Decoding Choreutics” course, I provide a written Commentary to help participants understand the wide-ranging relationships Laban mentions.

Dance historian Walter Sorrell claims that Laban was “a voracious reader whose thirst for knowledge embraced everything from religion and philosophy to literature and science.” This is because artistic and scientific circles overlapped to a much greater extent during Laban’s lifetime than is now the case.… Read More

MoveScape Center has run “Decoding Choreutics” twice – once in 2016 and again in 2017.  Over 40 students on four continents have taken the course.  Here is what they say about the experience.

“This has been a wonderful re-connecting with Laban’s teaching.”

“The questions were the perfect assistant in helping me to form clear understandings of Laban’s writings.”

“The pace was lovely and kept me fully engaged from week to week.”

“When reading Choreutics on my own, I often felt either inspired or frustrated. … Read More