Movement Harmony – Fact or Fiction?

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Laban’s assertion that human movement has a harmonic structure analogous to music has vexed scholars ranging from Suzanne Langer to Lincoln Kirstein. In general, the notion of movement harmony has been viewed as an artifact of Laban’s mystical philosophy. In my view, however, harmony is a useful theoretical construct for explaining certain empirical aspects of human movement.

For example, aestheticians have categorized the arts as either spatial or temporal. However, dance is a hybrid art. The dance unfolds in both space and time, both for the dancer and for the observer. By extension, the same holds true for all human movement. In reality, space and time combine.

For analytical purposes, Laban divided his theory in two parts – Choreutics addresses the spatial aspects of movement while Eukinetics deals with temporal factors. Yet Laban freely admits this is an artificial division, for in reality spatial form and dynamic stress “are entirely inseparable from each other.” And this is where the notions of harmony comes in.

Harmony brings things that are different into accord by allowing parts to be related to the whole or to one another. In normal human movement, body, effort, and space cohere in meaningful action. Unless disease or injury interrupts this coherence, voluntary body movement occurs automatically, without constant, conscious intervention.

Human movement is a psychophysical phenomenon, an integration of mind and body. This is its most remarkable feature. While we cannot fully explain the mechanisms through which this integration occurs, it is a fact, not a fiction.

“Harmony” is the term Laban chose for describing the seemingly natural coherence of body, space, and effort. He envisioned movement study as an integration of art and science, analysis and synthesis. The study of movement harmony was meant to “stop the process of disintegrating into disunity.” For in Laban’s eyes, movement “with all its significance for the human personality, can have regenerating effect on our individual and social forms of life.”

The forthcoming college text, Meaning in Motion: Introducing Laban Movement Analysis incorporates discussion of Laban’s fundamental notions of movement harmony.

What is Eukinetics?

Posted on September 18, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Dance is a hybrid art form, traversing space and progressing through time. In its temporal aspects, dance has much in common with its sister time art, music. Like music, dance has rhythm, phrasing, and dynamics. Eukinetics is the term Rudolf Laban coined to capture these temporal elements.

Laban created the term Eukinetics from two Greek root words – “eu” meaning beautiful or harmonious and “kinetikos” meaning movement. During the final two decades of his career in England, Laban dropped this exotic word and adopted the more common English term, “effort.” In turn, his interests shifted from dance to a broader concern with human movement in general. As Laban wrote:

“A person’s efforts are visibly expressed in the rhythms of his bodily motion. It thus becomes necessary to study these rhythms, and to extract from them those elements which will help us to compile a systematic survey of the forms effort can take in human action.”

As an analytical study, Laban’s Eukinetic/effort theory delineates the elements of kinetic energy and how these elements are organized in dynamic bodily actions. Moreover, as with Choreutics, Laban’s Eukinetic theory goes beyond mere description of natural movement to designate harmonic effort sequences. Creative explorations of these effort patterns are presented in my forthcoming book, Meaning in Motion: Introducing Laban Movement Analysis.

In fact, Laban insisted that dance, indeed all human movement, has a harmonic structure analogous to musical harmony. This has proven to be one of the most vexing of Laban’s assertions. However, this observation may yet prove to have great heuristic value. Consequently, my next blog explores the notion of movement harmony in more detail.

What is Rudolf Laban’s Choreutics?

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

In the preface to his book, Choreutics, Laban links his modern studies of movement to Pythagorean mathematics, notably musical scales and the “harmonic relations” of geometrical forms such as the right triangle and circle. Laban appears to have coined the term Choreutics from two Greek root words: “khoreia” (dancing in unison) and “eu” (beautiful, harmonious).

Laban goes on to define Choreutics as “the practical study of harmonised movement.” Latter day colleagues of Laban’s, such as Valerie Preston-Dunlop and Vera Maletic, have delineated Choreutics respectively as the “spatial organization for dance” and “the theory and practice of ordering movement in space.”

Choreutics, then, deals with the spatial aspects of movement, with its organization and order. As an analytical study, Choreutics delineates the natural paths that the limbs of the body trace on the space around the body, paths that Laban calls “trace-forms.” However, in keeping with its Pythagorean roots, Laban’s Choreutic theory goes beyond mere description of natural movement to designate harmonic spatial sequences analogous to musical scales.

In creating these harmonic designs, Laban utilizes his artistic understanding of human anatomy, proportion, and range of motion. Moreover, he draws on his Art Nouveau background to generate spatial patterns that are highly symmetrical.

Art Nouveau designers stylized the curves of natural forms such as butterflies, flowers, and leaves to create beautiful two-dimensional patterns. Laban’s space harmony scales are similar. Laban has taken the curves of natural movements and geometricized them, creating “harmonic” three-dimensional patterns.

Space plays a role in movement harmony. But so does time. And this is where Laban’s Eukinetic theories come into play. I address Eukinetics in my next blog.

Dance – An Art in Space and Time

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

The arts are sometimes divided into spatial arts and temporal arts.

The visual arts – painting, sculpture, and architecture – are space arts. They exist as material objects that occupy two- or three-dimensional space. They are more or less enduring. And much of their appeal has to do with how they portray and/or create shapes of different kinds.

The temporal art forms – music, dance, theatre, and film – have a beginning and an ending. They occupy an instantaneous present and must be recreated afresh. A musical melody depends, not only on the notes chosen, but also on the order in which the notes are sounded. Similarly, all temporal arts rely upon a particular sequence — of sounds or actions — to convey whatever the artist intends to express.

This division of art forms is an oversimplification – for there are temporal dimensions in the spatial arts and spatial dimensions in the temporal arts. This is quite clear in dance. The dancer’s actions follow a sequential order while traversing space and creating a series of temporary shapes. Dance is an art that exists in both space and time.

Laban appreciated the dual nature of dance, recognizing its architectural nature as well as its musical aspects. The framework he created for recording dance had to address both aspects. Thus, Choreutic theory illuminates the dancer’s space. Eukinetics addresses temporal aspects such as rhythm, phrasing, and dynamics.

Rudolf Laban, Painter and Dancer

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Rudolf Laban is known as a significant figure in 20th century modern dance. Yet he was 40 years old before he began to make a name for himself as a dancer. Prior to this time, Laban had been seriously engaged in the visual arts. And this first career as an artist decisively influenced his second career.

Laban studied art in Munich and Paris at the height of the popularity of the Art Nouveau movement. His surviving art works demonstrate his mastery of artist’s anatomy, proportion, and rendering in perspective – all staples of a traditional art training. Other works reveal his familiarity with stylistic features of the “new art.”

Art Nouveau promulgated fresh theories of art and original modes of representation. Artists looked at nature as a design source. But the biological and botanical forms they chose were not rendered realistically. Rather they were abstracted and turned into two-dimensional patterns. The resulting Art Nouveau designs played with symmetry and asymmetry, shifted figure and ground, and transformed biomorphic shapes into stylized curves and geometrical motifs.

As Laban struggled to find a way to record dance in symbols, he drew upon his knowledge of human anatomy and proportion and how to render the human figure in three-dimensional perspective. This helped him to understand the relationships between the dancer’s physical capabilities and the shapes and forms of the dance as it unfolded in the space around the dancer’s body.

When Laban turned his painter’s eye to dance, he also saw patterns. And in seeking to render these biomorphic patterns, he drew upon the theories and techniques of Art Nouveau. Through the creative combination of artistic traditions and innovations, Laban generated his unique theories of human movement. These were so unique he had to coin his own names – Choreutics, or space harmony, and Eukinetics, or effort theory. The following blogs discuss these theories in more detail.