There is a well-known marketing adage – no one wants a bar of soap. Customers want to be clean, have soft skin, or smell nice. By extension, no one wants a Laban Movement Analysis. Instead, our customers want to dance better, find a way to stop back pain, or gain insight into self and other.
Rudolf Laban called movement “man’s magic mirror.” He saw that movement reflects motivations, thoughts, and feelings. He drew analogies between the mastery of movement and the mastery of self.… Read More
“Groupthink” is a characteristic of overly cohesive groups. Symptoms of groupthink include overconfidence and risk taking, suppression of dissent, and collective rationalization. The old adage that “like hires like” has some truth in it. Unfortunately, any group composed of like-minded individuals is in danger of succumbing to groupthink.
Long before “diversity” became politically correct, Warren Lamb was encouraging diversity in working teams. His model of diversity was not based on age, race, creed, or gender. Rather it was based on decision-making style.… Read More
In Ambition, Gilbert Brim observes that “we look for the challenges that are right for us, for what we can just manage, and in this way form and shape our lives.” For most of us, however, identifying the “right challenges” is a matter of trial and error. It involves not only assessing the situation, but also assessing our own capabilities.
The latter assessment is the more difficult, for as the novelist Thomas Mann notes, “Our consciousness is feeble; only in moments of unusual clarity and vision do we really know about ourselves.”… Read More
Movement is a process of change. This seems self-evident. And yet, when the analytical brain is focused on motion and change, understanding breaks up the flowing continuity into successive and distinct positions and states. What was dynamic becomes static, what was becoming becomes an invariable being.
One of the things I most appreciated about Warren Lamb was his insistence that movement is a process of change. The dynamic qualities of effort and shape must be observed to vary. A movement is never simply strong – it is becoming stronger.… Read More
A wise man once observed that prayers are always answered. But what comes to you is not what you think you want, but what you embody.
Movement Pattern Analysis developed by Warren Lamb provides an objective picture of what an individual embodies and how individual patterns of movement are linked to decision-making processes.
Lamb found that all of us have a preferred pattern of taking action, and we will act in accordance with those preferences whenever we can. Power comes from understanding your preferred pattern and how to use it most effectively.… Read More
In Warren Lamb’s schema, the individual can use effort and/or shape to give Attention, form an Intention, and make a Commitment. By observing a person’s movement patterns, it is possible to discern whether the individual tends to be Assertive, that is, to apply effort to get results, or whether the person is more concerned to gain Perspective by using shaping.
For example, individuals high in Assertion tend to feel that “nothing happens unless I make it happen.” Their embodied actions incorporate focusing to probe for information, applying pressure to support determination, and pacing time to implement a decision at the opportune moment.… Read More
Thirty-five individuals from across the nation and around the world gathered in Golden, Colorado over Memorial Day weekend to celebrate the life and work of movement analysis pioneer, Warren Lamb (1923-2014) at a seminar sponsored by Motus Humanus.
Warren Lamb began his career under the tutelage of movement theorist Rudolf Laban and management consultant F.C. Lawrence. Their ground-breaking work provided a basis for matching the movement traits of manual laborers to the motion factors of various factory jobs. Lamb took this work much further, to relate movement patterns to cognitive processes used in decision making at the managerial level.… Read More
As students are grappling with the general concepts and descriptive terms of Laban Movement Analysis, they often ask hypothetical questions. For example, “If I were on board a ship crossing the international dateline while balancing an ice cream cone on my nose, would that be lightness?”
Laban Movement Analysis may be a parsimonious taxonomy of abstract terms, but it was developed to provide an empirical description of concrete physical actions. So whenever I get a hypothetical question like the one above, I always ask the student to demonstrate.… Read More
It has taken me years to realize that Laban’s movement analysis system is abstract. The descriptive terms are quite general. Take effort – there are only four motion factors and eight effort qualities for describing any movement a human being can do. This means that the same effort quality can be in movements that look nothing alike, occur in different contexts, and are performed for different reasons.
A student can do strong movements in the studio and concretely experience the physical sensation of increasing pressure.… Read More
Human movement exists at a perpetual vanishing point, disappearing even as it is occurring. With no fixed points, movement is devilishly difficult to observe, let alone to pin down and analyze.
Thank goodness for video recording. The rewind button makes it possible for students to see the same event repeated exactly as many times as they need. Live observation, of course, is richer. It is life size, genuinely three-dimensional, and many fine details blurred on a video recording are clearer in the flesh.… Read More