“God Geometricizes….” Said Madame Blavatsky

Posted on March 3, 2016 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Artistic and scientific circles were not the only circles that overlapped in the fin de siècle period. European artists of the period were also involved in various secret spiritual societies that flourished in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

For example, the painter Wassily Kandinsky was an ardent follower of Theosophy, one of the occult spiritual movements of the period, and one that was very attractive to artists. As religious historian Mircea Eliade notes, avant garde European artists “utilized the occult as a powerful weapon in their rebellion against the bourgeois establishment and its ideology.”

Novel spiritual practices were not merely a form of rebellion for the European avant garde. The occult revival also gave artists new ways to think about the nature of art as it moved beyond representation and symbolism toward formalism and abstraction. Kandinsky drew upon precepts of Theosophy, such as the quote above by Theosophy guru, Madame Blavatsky, to theorize a spiritual visual art composed of only form and color. By these means alone, Kandinsky wrote, the artist could “cause vibrations in the soul.”

Laban was also attracted to the occult. During his career as a painter (1899- 1919), he supposedly associated with three esoteric groups: the Free Masons, the Ordo Templi Orientis, and the Rosicrucians. The extent of Laban’s involvement is a matter of speculation. Nevertheless, in Choreutics, his treatise on the geometry of human movement, Laban does acknowledge that his subject “necessitates a certain spiritual emphasis.”

What does this mean? Find out more in the correspondence course, “Decoding Choreutics,” beginning March 26.

Beyond the Body

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Carol-Lynne Moore

In the long-standing dichotomy of mind and body, movement specialists tend to value the body more than the mind. From an evolutionary perspective, however, the body is standing still. That is, Homo sapiens have changed very little on the biological level for eons. Instead, as Weston LaBarre notes: “The real evolutionary unit now is not man’s mere body; it is ‘all-mankind’s-brains-together-with-all-the-extrabodily-materials-that-come-under-the-manipulation-of-their-hands.” These “extrabodily” inventions are known as “extension systems.”

Extension systems augment human capabilities of both body and mind and fall into two broad categories: external or material extensions and internal or non-material extensions. Material extensions include the tangible artifacts of human know-how, such as cultivated foodstuff, clothing, shelter, tools, weapons, and art objects.

While these tangible creations are ubiquitous and immense in influence, internal or non-material extensions prove even more dazzling in scope and effect. Non-material inventions extend the human mind and include such things as language, logic, metaphor, myth, social conventions, and political structures. These creations separate man from beast and without these extensions, human life, as we have come to create it, would hardly exist.

The definition of extension systems as inventions separate from our bodies has caused us to overlook movement as one of the primary extension systems of Homo sapiens. As I argue in Beyond Words, “movement was mankind’s first extension.” In the following blog, I discuss this rather surprising assertion further.

Body Prejudice

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Like body knowledge, body prejudice originates from our capacity to categorize and generalize on the basis of personal movement experience. As I write in Beyond Words, second edition:

Over time, a positive or negative meaning comes to be associated with a certain type of movement. If this meaning is automatically projected onto all similar movements, regardless of context and modifying details, an inappropriate and prejudicial reaction may result.

Just because a movement is pre-judged does not mean it is judged wrongly, but this is always a possibility. When making sense of movement, the tendency to make prejudicial judgments is magnified because movement is very easily “tuned out” and handled subliminally. When making sense of movement becomes a subconscious process, it is all too easy to overlook contextual features that qualify the meaning of a given behavior.

The following anecdote illustrates how the easily unexamined movement perceptions can become prejudicial.

Once I was assigned to observe a fellow classmate. She was in the habit of slouching against the studio wall and staring into space — a posture and effort mood that I equated with being “out of it.” In fact, I was surprised that she seemed to be keeping up in class.

Once I examined her movement behavior more closely, however, a different impression emerged. I realized that my classmate’s staring into space, which I perceived as a Remote effort state of bound flow and directness, was actually an Awake state, of sustained time and directness. In other words, she was paying attention to what was going on in class, in a very prolonged and precise manner.

This realization made me aware of my own body prejudice. When I’m engaged in a class, I’m not prone to relax passively against the wall. And when I pay attention with the Awake state, I prefer to combine directing and indirecting with quickness.

Mies van der Rohe, was right – God is in the details. In the next blog I explore how Laban Movement Analysis can be applied to enhance body knowledge and minimize body prejudice.