Imitation and Intuition: More Tools to Enhance Body Knowledge

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According to Laban, human movement can be understood in three different ways.  It can be appreciated simply through the unreflective act of moving itself.  It can be grasped through objective analysis.  And movement can be interpreted by linking concrete actions with abstract ideas and feelings.

adults_leapingDifferent sorts of understanding arise for each perspective.  Movement analysis provides a means for observing with greater definition.  It slows the automatic process of interpreting simply on the basis of body knowledge.  By so doing, analysis supports taking a more objective approach to movement study and helps one transcend body prejudices.

In addition, Laban recognized that there is value in the perspective of the “biological innocents,” those who “swim more or less contentedly in the same never-ceasing stream.”  These individuals grasp movement intuitively;  they know it from within as an indivisible, constantly changing whole.

Intuition contrasts analysis.  According to the French philosopher Henri Bergson, analysis aims to embrace the object but is forced to circle around it, multiplying points of view endlessly “in order to complete the ever incomplete representation.”  Intuition is a “sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object.”  Intuitive understanding is immediate, unique, and inexpressible.

Translating these ruminations to practical terms, imitation becomes a valid way of understanding another person’s movements.  Mimicry provides a foundation for developing movement skills.  But as adults, we seldom apply this as a means of penetrating another’s mode of being in the world.

In reality, imitating another person’s movement involves analysis – one must look objectively at body, effort, space, and shape elements.  But imitation goes beyond this breaking up of movement into component parts, for the imitator must put these elements back together to simulate whole actions.  This embodied synthesis provides another way to enhance body knowledge and the sympathetic understanding of other people.

Movement Analysis: Enhancing Body Knowledge, Transcending Body Prejudice

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Rudolf Laban observed that movement can be perceived from three distinct angles:

  1. the “biological innocent”  — the person enjoying movement inwardly,  as a bodily experience,
  2. the “scheming mechanic” – the person who observes movement analytically and objectively from the outside,
  3. the “emotional dreamer” – the person who seeks the meaning of movement in the intangible world of emotions and ideas

Laban asserts that these three perspectives operate constantly in all of us.  Sometimes we favor one or the other view, and “sometimes we compress them in a synthesized act of perception and function.”eye_perception_world

The synthesis of these three perspectives yields body knowledge.  Body knowledge serves an important function, for it allows us to size up another person’s movement intent and react without undue delay.  If a loitering stranger makes you nervous, it is prudent to get away rather than second guess impressions.

However, how we experience, perceive, and interpret movement also leads to body prejudice.  Sometimes it is essential to separate these processes.  And this is where Laban Movement Analysis becomes useful.

Laban’s analytic framework is value-neutral. It allows the observer to describe and differentiate elements of a movement event without immediately jumping to interpretive conclusions.

Taking the perspective of the “scheming mechanic” does not do away with body prejudice.  But movement analysis can provide significant details that may alter the observer’s initial impression, allowing for more objective and reflective insights to emerge.

In the next blog I explore imitation and intuition as alternative tools for understanding movement.

The Anatomy of Body Knowledge

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Body knowledge develops gradually, as a combination of perception of our own movements and observation of the movements of other people.

Similar to all other forms of knowing and attaching meaning to human actions, body knowledge rests on three processes: categorizing, abstracting, and generalizing.

Categorizing is discerning related and unrelated movements; grouping those that are similar. For example hammering is one kind of movement and stamping is another.

worker_hammering

Abstracting is leaving out particularistic details to generate broader categories. Hammering involves the hands and stamping uses the feet, but both hammering and stamping employ the same effort qualities and can be abstracted as belonging to the broader category of punching movements.

Generalizing is establishing associations with movement that are intellectually or emotionally meaningful. For example, based on the various contexts in which I have observed punching movements, I may come to interpret these as angry actions.

Each individual has unique movement experiences, and every person will sort, abstract, and generalize in a slightly different way to generate a private lexicon of movement meaning. This lexicon of body knowledge is very useful.

As I write in Beyond Words, second edition:

Once the categories and associations in my body knowledge lexicon have been established, I can perceive a type of movement and fabricate a response rapidly, without having to reflect on the matter very much. So, if I am walking down the sidewalk and I see a man and woman punctuating their conversation with abrupt, forceful [punching] gestures, I may cross the street, simply because I do not want to get too close to two angry people.

Of course, the couple might not be angry; they might be simply impatient or excited. Or, they might belong to a cultural group that expresses many different feelings with abrupt, forceful gestures. Like the Roman god Janus, the meaning of any given movement is inherently two-faced. First, there is the “import” (Langer 1957: 129), intended or unawares, of the expressed form of the mover and, second, there is the “ascription,” again conscious or unconscious, on the part of the observer, interacting or just watching. Thus, it is practically inevitable that our body knowledge sometimes leads us to misjudge the meaning of movement behavior of others. When we misinterpret the meaning of a given movement behavior, and start generalizing, body knowledge becomes body prejudice.

In the next blog, I explore the topic of body prejudice further.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

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Years ago during a modern dance class the instructor demonstrated a complicated movement.  When the class attempted to repeat it, he complained.  “No, the arm goes here, not there.”

The class protested, “We just did what you did.”

“Well then,” he countered, “do as I say, not as I do.”

Whether one is trying to dance or determine if a friend is really dependable, actions speak louder than words.  In the long run, what really matters is not what someone says, but what they do.

Doing is the nonverbal part of behavior; it is movement.  And communication research for the past several decades has shown that 70% of judgments about other people rest on how they move.

When we make judgments about other people’s movements, we draw on our own body knowledge.angry_fist_body_perception

Body knowledge is best thought of as a personal lexicon of movement meaning. Body knowledge is personal, because we move ourselves.  We know movement from the inside – how certain actions feel, what we like, what we don’t like.

We also know movement as outside observers, because everyone around us is always moving. Thus our lexicons of body knowledge are also shaped by the social and cultural conditions that surround us.

So the good news is, we are able to read and understand the nonverbal behaviors of other people. The bad news is, we seldom can explain how we are doing so.

In the next blog, I address the secret anatomy of body knowledge – how it develops, how it helps us, and how it also can result in body prejudice.