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.
