Exertion and Recuperation

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Untitled design (1)When the dancer Rudolf Laban began to study work movement in British factories, two concerns predominated.  The first was efficiency; the second was fatigue.  By the 1940s, of course, there were laws governing the length of the workday and providing additional protection for the health and safety of workers.  Nevertheless, repetitive activity of any sort is tiring.  Human beings are not machines.  We cannot repeat any motion endlessly without the need for variation.

In turning his dancer’s eyes to repetitive labor, Laban identified a basic rhythm.  He recognized that there is some form of preparation, followed by a more intense phase of effortful exertion, and concluding with some form of recovery and recuperation.  Laban found that the concluding phase of recuperation was often overlooked in the  “efficient” ways of working prescribed by the time and motion specialists.

Laban took a different approach. As I describe in Meaning in Motion, he believed that recuperation did not mean passive rest.  Rather he looked for effective ways for a worker to recover actively through effort variation.  For example, if the job function required downward pressure, Laban introduced an upward movement with released pressure somewhere in the movement phrase.  This allowed him to build recuperative actions into the job function itself.

Fatigue remains a problem in the workplace today, despite the fact that jobs are increasingly sedentary.  Nevertheless, the importance of building active recuperation into the rhythm of the workday remains a concern.  Find out more in the following blog.

Dance – An Art in Space and Time

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MoveScape CenterThe 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.

Body Language and Social Order

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In Body Language and Social Order, Albert Scheflen argues that body language is used for political control, manipulation, and the maintenance of power and class hierarchies. The book reveals how specific bodily behaviors in public places reinforce the status quo. Scheflen utilizes numerous candid photographs of men, women, and children to support his arguments.

When I first read this book many years ago, I found it deeply disturbing. I felt that body movement was a liberating force, not a binding one. Scheflen’s perspective made me reflect.

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While reflecting, I began to look more closely at the behaviors Scheflen had flagged. Most involved still poses or isolated gestures. In other words, Scheflen was not actually looking at movement of the whole body. He was observing what was static, not what was dynamic. No wonder he concluded that body language tends to preserve order and social stability!

As Rudolf Laban observes, stability and mobility alternate in human movement behavior. Continuous movement of the whole body is punctuated by moments of stillness and by instances when only a single part of the body is in motion. These postures and gestures can be singled out, just as camera captures a moment in time and freezes it forever.

However, there is a big difference between looking at snapshots isolated from the stream of bodily movement and observing the stream itself. In the next blog, I examine differences between the study of body language and the analysis of body movement in more detail.

Form and Color in Painting and Dance

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The artist Wassily Kandinsky and the dancer Rudolf Laban were contemporaries and moved in the same bohemian circles in Munich in the early 20th century. Interesting parallels run through their theoretical works.

Kandinsky observed that “painting has two weapons at her disposal: 1) colour, 2) form”. He goes on to note that there is an “essential connection between colour and form”.

An analogous delineation of elements can be found in Laban’s notions of effort and shape. Effort – qualities of dynamic energy – give expressive color to bodily actions. Shape – the imaginary vapor trails traced by moving limbs on the space around the body – give dance its form.

Similarly, there is an essential connection between effort and shape, for as Warren Lamb writes, “We cannot move in making an Effort without an accompanying movement of shaping.”

In painting, both color and shape are fixed in time and limited to a two-dimensional canvas surface. In dancing, effort and shape are constantly changing, appearing and disappearing as the dancer moves through three-dimensional space. In motion capture recording, the dancer disappears but the dance itself becomes visible, leaving a tracery of lines that look as if the dancer has been scribbling on empty space itself.

Nevertheless, Laban observes that this scribble, “can be divided into sections which resemble the Arabic ciphers: 1 2 3”. The forms in dance are produced by the limbs of the body and governed by their anatomical structure. According to Laban, this restricts dance forms to simple shapes from which “innumerable combinations are made”.

In the forthcoming Tetra seminar in March, Cate Deicher and I draw upon Laban’s artistic background for source material to stimulate movement invention and the exploration of shape. Register by March 1 for the early registration discount.

 

Bartenieff Fundamentals and Healing through Movement

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Recent encounters with physical therapy have given me a new appreciation of Irmgard Bartenieff, my first Laban teacher. Bartenieff was a dancer when she studied with Laban in Germany. After immigrating to the U.S. she became a physical therapist, initially working with polio victims. If facing the challenge of helping clients recover from paralysis, she drew on everything she had learned from Laban. The result crystallized in a somatic practice known as Bartenieff Fundamentals, which I studied with Bartenieff in the 1970s.

The physical therapy exercises I was given to do recently were similar to exercises in Bartenieff Fundamentals. Initially I felt comfortable with the prescribed regimen. Over time, however, certain things began to bother me – the emphasis on isolated movement, the mechanical repetition, the limited spatial form. And so I started to rethink my physical therapy, drawing on Laban and Bartenieff.

Bartenieff believed that, “change in any part changes the whole”. So I began to work with my whole body, rather than merely focusing on the part that was injured.

Because Bartenieff didn’t see much value in mechanical repetition, I minimized the number of times I repeated prescribed exercises. Instead, I distributed my practice, doing fewer repetitions at one time, but taking time to exercise a couple of times a day. This helped me find a more healthy rhythm of exertion and recuperation.

I also started to introduce more three-dimensional movement into my therapeutic practice. I used diagonal sequences from Fundamentals and cautiously worked with some of Laban’s transverse and peripheral space harmony scales.

I could enumerate many other changes. However, this is my point – knowledge of Laban and Bartenieff principles allowed me to take charge of my own process of healing. And once I did so, genuine recovery began.

Studying movement is a life-long undertaking. As I have recently learned, re-visiting Laban and Bartenieff’s ideas under changed conditions can yield new insights.

The forthcoming Tetra seminar provides an opportunity for a fresh encounter with these ideas. Click here to take advantage of the early registration discount.

Empty Space Does Not Exist

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According to Rudolf Laban, space is a superabundance of simultaneous movements. He’s right, of course. Empty space is full of air. And air is full of molecules and atoms, each a bundle of energy and particles that orbit and pulse.

Space isn’t empty for artists. It has shape. Artists learn to see this shape through drawing exercises. Rather than sketching the object, they draw the shape of the space around the object.

MoveScape CenterSpace isn’t empty for architects. Like a surgical suture, space connects a building with the other objects in the environment. Without empty space, an architectural design has no context. What isn’t there allows us to see what is there.

Space isn’t empty for dancers, either. As a young student at the American Dance Festival, I spent free time walking patterns in the Connecticut College gym. Sometimes I walked blindfolded. And over the course of the summer, I sensitized myself to space. I began to be able to tell where I was in the gym, how near or far from the wall. And when I took the blindfold off, space had texture and a faint bluish hue. It wasn’t empty anymore.

Space had structure and meaning for Rudolf Laban. And he devised some very clever ways for dancers and movers of all types to think about space, so that what once seemed empty comes alive.

In the forthcoming Tetra seminar, we will explore the structure of space to tap its expressive power. Click here to find out more.

Dancing from Mood to Mood

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According to Rudolf Laban, “The dancer moves, not only from place to place, but also from mood to mood.” His perceptive comment illustrates a point that neuroscientists are beginning to recognize – nothing is purely mental or purely physical. Bodily movements accompany thoughts and feelings; and thoughts and feelings accompany movements.

MoveScape CenterIn his unpublished papers Laban also observed, “inner becomes outer and outer becomes inner.” That is, movement not only reflects what a person is thinking and feeling, it also affects one’s inner psychological state.

I experienced the power of movement to induce an altered psychological state when I was first studying effort. During a class on the Spell Drive, I was literally transformed, transported to an inner landscape I seldom visited. This fascinating experience crystallized in a dance called “Fairytale,” which Irmgard Bartenieff described as follows:

“It is a solo but depicts the transformation from one magic figure to another… What is distinctive is the use of Effort as an abstract theme to stimulate images that become integrated into a cohesive tale. It illustrates how the study of Effort can provide a tool – thinking in identifiable movement quality components – that supports and stimulates the intuitive flow of movement themes and development.” (1980, 197)

Isadora Duncan observed that most people are prisoners of their movement habits. Similarly, their mental activities “respond to set formulas”. This repetition of physical and mental movements limits expression “until they become like actors who each night play the same role. With these few stereotyped gestures, their whole lives are passed without once suspecting the world of dance which they are missing.”

No doubt Laban would agree, for his life work was focused on illuminating the world of dance and encouraging people to move. To me, the wonderful aspect of structured movement study, particularly the study of effort, is how it can awaken the individual to new ways of being in the world.

The forthcoming Tetra seminar provides unique opportunities to explore the inner landscape of mood through effort study. Take advantage of the early registration discount by clicking here.

Seeing Movement More Precisely with Laban

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Laban Movement Analysis allows the observer to see movement more objectively and precisely. But after 35 years of teaching LMA, I can safely say that learning to observe accurately and developing confidence as an observer takes time. And there is a reason for this.

The beauty of Laban’s taxonomy is its parsimony. Laban worked hard to develop a finite number of descriptive terms for movement. Effort is a good example. There are only four motion factors (flow, weight, time, and space) and eight effort qualities with which to capture the enormous variation of motion dynamics.

Laban’s identification of very basic and general elements of movement allows his system to describe a wide variety of movement events. As a result, however, Laban Movement Analysis functions at a high level of abstraction. By this I mean that the same effort quality – take increasing pressure for example – can be present in hammering and passionately hugging someone. That is, increasing pressure can be present in two actions that are nothing alike.

Consequently, learning to analyze movement means not only learning to see; it also involves being seen. Observation skills and confidence develop best when the novice analyst can work with a more experienced observer who can confirm – yes, there is increasing pressure in that hug.

MoveScape Center’s Tetra seminar in March provides a lot of opportunities to see and be seen. Click here to find out more.