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

Learning to analyze movement takes time. Because at least 60% of human communication is estimated to be nonverbal and behavioral, everyone has developed his or her own way of seeing and coding movement. That is, everyone possesses body knowledge and body prejudices. Learning to observe movement objectively using Laban’s taxonomy of effort and space necessitates setting aside pre-existing approaches.

In my own development as a movement analyst, I found I “went blank” for a while when first attempting to observe a movement event.… Read More