According to his colleague Lisa Ullmann, Rudolf Laban’s formulations of the inherent laws of natural movement came to light gradually through his professional activities. Laban’s long and varied career provided ample opportunities to observe people in motion in a variety of settings: dance classes, theatrical rehearsals and performances, factories, schools, clinics, and other venues. If Ullmann’s comments are correct, Laban was a naturalist, studying nonverbal behavior in a number of real-life settings.
Nowadays, naturalistic inquiry is regarded as a legitimate form of research, one suited to the study of human behavior in complex social settings. Unlike experimental research, naturalistic inquiry does not begin with the formulation of a hypothesis. It begins with collecting data through observation in the field. Preliminary explanations are formulated through the analysis of the data. Then new observations are collected, and hypothetical explanation revised accordingly. There is a doubling back and forth between observing and theorizing until field observations no longer reveal anomalies that require modifying explanations. The outcome of such a process is called a “grounded theory.”
Laban is known to have made constant adjustments in his theoretical formulations. When examined chronologically, these changes correspond with shifts in Laban’s sphere of activities, and indicate that he engaged in theoretical sampling of movement behavior at different times and in different settings. While such conceptual modifications gave colleagues the impression that Laban was against any system in his work, this was not the case. Laban was engaged in creating a grounded theory of human movement. For, as associate Joan Littlewood noted, Laban “spent his life on system research.”
I agree with Joan Littlewood. The Laban I know from extensive study of his unpublished theoretical writings reveals a person who was quite systematic in creating movement models and carefully controlling the elements in his analytic framework. I pursue these little known dimensions of Laban’s creativity in my next blogs.