Was Laban Seeing Double?

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More than any of his other books in English, Choreutics reveals Laban’s dual vision as a dance artist and movement scientist.  The forthcoming course, “Decoding Choreutics,” examines Laban’s double vision from more than one angle.

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For example, Choreutics and the whole fabric of Laban’s space harmony theory can be seen as a design source for dance.    The various scales and “rhythmic circles” can be mined as abstract patterns for movement creation.  In this sense, Choreutics is analogous to various design sources utilized by Art Nouveau artists at the turn of the 20th century.

 

The fin de siècle was a time when artistic and scientific circles overlapped. In their stylized renderings of natural forms, Art Nouveau artists drew upon scientific illustrations.  A case in point is Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature. Haeckel (1834-1919) was a biologist-philosopher whose beautiful illustrations of biological forms, ranging from microscopic creatures to sea life, plants, and animals, inspired the artists of his day.

 

One of the Art Nouveau artists who drew upon Haeckel’s illustrations was Hermann Obrist, with whom Laban studied in Munich.  Originally trained as a botanist, Obrist the artist moved progressively from realistic depiction of natural forms to increasingly abstract and geometrical designs.  Laban’s own geometricizing of the biomorphic curves of human movement in Choreutics  follows a similar trajectory.

 

Led by the Art Nouveau movement, early 20th century artists were looking beyond the surface appearance of visual objects to reveal underlying patterns and organizing principles.  With the advent of the atomic age, scientists were doing the same.  Thus when Laban, the artist, turned his eyes to dance and human movement, he, too, was seeing double.

 

 

 

Decoding Laban’s Choreutics II

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Untitled design (6)In the previous blog, I quoted Rudolf Laban’s characterization of choreutics as “the art, or the science” of movement study.  Our postmodern perspective draws a hard line between art and science.  But this was not the case when Laban was coming of age at the turn-of-the-century.

Munich, Laban’s first port-of-call when he began to study visual art, is a case in point.  Artists and scientists happily commingled here, and ideas drawn from science fertilized the theories and practices of artists, and vice versa.

Hermann Obrist, with whom both Laban and Kandinsky studied, is a case in point.  One of the most visionary Art Nouveau artists, Obrist started his career as a botanist.  Obrist’s protégé, August Endell, initially pursued a scholarly career, studying philosophy and psychology at the University of Munich.  After turning to art, he became an eloquent advocate for new approaches to design.

Meanwhile, German experimental psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt, Gustav Fechner, and Hermann Helmholtz were studying the psychological and physiological process underlying human perception.   Aesthetic theories put forward by Obrist, Endell, and others drew upon these discoveries.

When Laban moved on to Paris to study art, he would have encountered more confluences between art and science.  For example Eadweard Muybridge’s instantaneous photographs of human and animal motion were meant to be used as references for artists depicting movement.  Muybridge’s photos inspired the French physiologist, Etienne-Jules Marey.  Marey was concerned to chart and measure the movements of the “animal machine.”   To do so, he developed his own photographic approach, known as “chronophotography.”  In turn, Marey’s photographic images  inspired artists ranging from the Italian futurists to Marcel Duchamp.

In keeping with the spirit of early modernism, Laban’s Choreutics does not represent the vision of an artist or a scientist.  It presents the vision of someone who is both an artist and a scientist.   Explore Laban’s dual vision more deeply in the Tetra course, “Decoding Laban’s Choreutics.”  Find out more….

Capturing Movement’s Traces in Written Forms

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Untitled designAround 1913, Rudolf Laban abandoned his career as a visual artist to enter the field of dance.  At the time, dance was a discipline defined more by what it lacked than by what it offered.  Laban focused his energies on altering such conditions.

He championed the cause of dance:  as a profession, as a recreative lay activity, and as a mode of education. He created a flexible dance notation system that allows works of various genre to be recorded and restaged.   He performed; he choreographed.  Above all, he wrote and published.

A century later, dance is no longer a discipline lacking literature, recorded history, scholarship, or theory.  This is due in part to Laban’s vision and Herculean efforts to capture movement’s traces in written forms.   Consequently, I was very happy when two of Laban’s major works, The Mastery of Movement  and Choreutics, which had been out-of-print, became available once more.

Now I want to encourage movement specialists to read these classics.  To that end, MoveScape Center is offering a year of seminars exploring Laban’s Choreutics by reading, reflecting, and moving.

This year of exploration begins in March, with a six week “Great Books” course, “Decoding Laban’s Choreutics.”  Participants can take this correspondence course without leaving the comfort of home.  But not without leaving a comfy chair.

Prior to each reading assignment, participants will receive a set of orienting questions.  Some questions require getting up and moving.  Find out more….

Body Usage – The Japanese Bow

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MS2I have long been fascinated with the ritual of bowing in Japan.  Clerks in a hotel bow when you enter the lobby.   They bow when you finish checking in.  Conductors bow when entering a train car.  They bow again when exiting.  Groups of friends, particularly if they are older, with bow deeply when parting.

I can’t pretend to grasp the ins and outs of the etiquette of bowing.  But bowing seems to serve as a boundary marker, delineating the beginning and ending of many social interactions.  It is a sign of acknowledgement and a sign of respect.

Because I feel inept and somewhat embarrassed about trying to bow, I made a point on this trip to analyze the bow.  It wasn’t easy.  Bows seem to occur unexpectedly and they are often rapidly performed.  Sometimes I caught myself imitating what I saw (when I had no reason for bowing).  In any case, here is my rough analysis.

Arms at the side, cast the eyes down, hinge at the hips and tilt forward, softening slightly through the chest and tipping the head.  All these actions should be performed almost simultaneously, returning immediately to an erect posture.

On this trip I also noticed what I call the “modified bow.”  This is basically a head nod with a little bit of chest involvement.  It is used to acknowledge someone (say, on entering a shop) or to express thanks at the end of a transaction or interaction.

The modified bow has many uses.  For example, our daughter became exasperated when my husband raised his hand to thank a waiting driver as we used the pedestrian crossing.  “They won’t know what that means,” she scolded.  “You should have nodded.”

The Somatic Revolution

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In the previous two blogs I have been contrasting body language and body movement.  Body language tends to isolate still poses and particular gestures from the stream of ongoing bodily action and read fixed meanings into these snapshots.  In so doing, the process of change, which is the essence of movement, disappears, as does the broader context of sequential actions. Body language treatises tend to present a stilted and mechanistic view of movement behavior.  Perhaps this is why much of the study of body language promises to improve an individual’s ability to manage his/her image and manipulate others.

The study of body movement, on the other hand, is much more difficult.  This is because movement is dynamic, changeable, and ephemeral – thus infinitely harder to pin down.  In addition, appreciating movement as a process of change necessitates altering certain habits of the mind.  It requires not only perceiving the beginning and ending positions of an action, but also all the bits in between.  It demands a shifting of focus from what is done to how it is done.  But in so doing, to quote Bergson, “What was immobile and frozen in our perception is warmed and set in motion…. We are more fully alive.”

Increasingly, body language, with its mechanistic view of human behavior, is out.  Body movement is in.  This can be seen, for example, in the rising popularity of various somatic practices.  The term “somatics” was coined by the American philosopher Thomas Hanna.  He defined the term as follows:

“Somatics is the field which studies the soma:  namely the body as perceived from within by first-person perception.  When a human being is observed from the outside – i.e., from the third-person viewpoint – the phenomenon of a human body is perceived.  But, when this same human being is observed from the first person viewpoint of his own proprioceptive senses, a categorically different phenomenon is perceived:  the human soma.”

Hanna understood that this shift in perception is revolutionary.   As I note in Meaning in Motion, the somatic perspective contrasts long-standing scientific views and medical practices that have tended to objectify the body and nullify personal agency.  Somatic practices approach the body from a different angle, acknowledging the intrinsically subjective aspects of corporeal experience and viewing the individual, not as an object to be acted upon, but as an active agent.

Body Language Is Out

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Virtually any time I tell someone that I am a movement analyst, I am met with a puzzled look and the query –“Oh, like body language?”

Warren Lamb hated having Movement Pattern Analysis characterized as body language, and rightly so.  Popular treatises on body language primarily focus on poses and isolated gestures and affix simple meanings to these.

For example, while trawling the internet recently, I came across a “scientific portal on body language” that explained the meaning of various poses and gestures.  For example, one photo showed a man (his head cropped out) seated in a narrow and erect pose.  According to the explanation, this position conveys interest or surprise.

Another headless photo showed the fellow with his arms crossed over his chest.  This gesture was said to indicate being defensive.

Of course, postures and gestures do have meaning.  But poses and gestures come and go in an ongoing stream of human behavior.   Just as the meaning of individual words can change depending upon how they are used in a sentence, so too the meaning of poses and gestures must change in the context of the ongoing movement flow.

As Warren Lamb would say, there are so many ways to fold the arms over the chest.  Surely there are worlds of meaning to be perceived when we stop thinking of bodily action as a set of static punctuation points – arms open, arms crossed – and start to perceive it as a process of change, one that can be done in many ways.

Movement Versus Body Language

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Body language tends to single out isolated gestures and still poses for purposes of study. Then it attaches psychodynamic interpretations to these snapshot. Thus “arms folded over the chest” means a person is closed. Lifting and exposing the palm signals flirtation, rubbing the nose indicates disapproval, and so on.

Body language isolates postures and gestures from the steam of ongoing movement in manner analogous to “instantaneous photographs,” such as those of Eadweard Muybridge. His photos recorded various moments in a series of actions. But because the recording was not continuous, each photographic image appears isolated, lifted out of the context before and after moments.

When these photos first appeared in the late 19th century, they were a revelation. They captured what normal vision could not perceive in rapid motion. But not everyone was impressed. The sculptor Rodin claimed that photography lies, “for in reality time does not stop.” Bergson the philosopher agreed. He admitted that a series of snapshots of an action can be mechanically animated to create an illusion of movement. But real movement is something else.
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According to Bergson, it is not the “single snapshots we have taken once again along the course of change that are real; on the contrary, it is flux, the continuity of transition, it is change itself that is real.”

Real movement involves progressive development and change. Movement study aims to capture this process of change over time, to restore the context of before and after. Body language contents itself with the snapshot of “arms folded over the chest.” But, as Warren Lamb used to point out, there are many different ways to fold the arms – firmly and decisively, gradually, carefully, and so on. Surely meaning depends upon the before and after – not merely on one moment.