Colleagues’ recollections depict Rudolf Laban as a man possessed by creative energy, proliferating rough ideas and then rushing on without completing a line of thought, leaving the elaboration of his creations to someone else.

Laban’s private papers reveal a different picture. Archival traces show that Laban was steadily developing a grounded theory of human movement and utilizing consistent methods to develop hypothetical models. Moreover, archival materials also show that Laban was concerned to control the sheer number of elements in the systems he was building.

In fact, Laban was a miser, and the system of movement analysis he created is very parsimonious. Being parsimonious is not always viewed as a positive trait, but when it comes to theory building, parsimony is an asset for the following reasons.

A parsimonious theory has few concepts and relationships between them. Consequently, a parsimonious theory is more straightforward, more likely to be internally consistent, and easier to connect to reality than a complex theory.

Laban’s effort theory is a great example. There are only four motion qualities and eight effort qualities. Yes, in various relationships and sequences, these elements suffice to capture a wide variety of types of dynamic movement expressions.

I love the elegance of Laban’s effort theories. And in the upcoming Octa seminar, Discovering the Dynamosphere, I will introduce effort models I found in the Laban Archive and connect these with real movement expression. Click here to learn more.

Rudolf Laban‘s creative genius has given rise to the illusion that he was not systematic. But as I explain in The Harmonic Structure of Movement, Music, and Dance, his personal papers present a different picture.

Initially, Laban’s notes appear disorderly. Fragmentary writings and mysterious geometrical sketches abound, giving witness to Laban’s tendency to rush ahead with ideas without finishing them. Over time, however, themes recur and the thrust of Laban’s fertile mind begins to emerge. Moreover, the mysterious drawings begin to have meaning.

My first “ah ha” moment came when I recognized that Laban used his training as a visual artist to capture his observations of physical movements in space. Classical and Renaissance artists had used geometrical forms – such as circles, squares, grids, and cones – to facilitate realistic representation of bodies in motion. Laban took this a bit further. He used the regular polyhedra to create a longitude and latitude for the space around the body. This use of geometrical forms not only allowed him to map movements in visible space but also to generate highly symmetrical sequences of movement as models. Laban’s application of geometry seemed a logical extension to me. Anyone concerned with recording lines of bodily motion through visible space and looking for patterns might have come up with a similar geometrical device.

Then I began to find additional geometrical drawings among Laban’s writing about the psychological aspect of movement; that is, the dynamic qualities of kinetic energy that suggest the mover’s moods and intentions. Kinetic energy doesn’t manifest as a line in visible space in the same way that, say, the arm traces a line as it reaches upward. What kind of guy models effort phrases on three-dimensional Platonic solids?

A guy like Laban. That was my second “ah ha.” Laban was using three-dimensional geometrical models to represent both the physical and the psychological aspects of movement. His method of theoretical modeling was consistent for both space and effort.

Hidden among his private papers, Laban the naturalist converted his observations into elegant patterns. As Littlewood surmised, Laban had indeed “spent his life on system research,” formally recording his findings in a dense, yet coherent geometrical code.

In recognizing movement as a psychophysical phenomenon, Rudolf Laban also perceived that human movement has two major aspects. One of these is the physical, visible motion of the material body through space. The second aspect is psychological – the thoughts and feelings that motivate the physical action.

The physical motion of the human body is readily perceptible and open to objective study. What motivates physical action is more subtle. We cannot “see” thoughts and feelings. Instead, the psychological aspects of movement must be inferred from how a physical action is performed. Nevertheless, how an action is performed is open to objective description. That is, we can see whether a motion is forceful or gentle, leisurely or abrupt, and so on.

In order to record human movement, Laban had to develop a scheme that captured both the physical and the psychological. Thus the system he built has two parts: one that addresses the visible motion of the body through space and a second that describes how these motions are performed dynamically.

Laban had to call upon all his creative faculties to devise a systematic means of capturing the where and how of human movement. Fortunately, he was working in a time when there was a fertile exchange between art and science. Artists create patterns and scientists look for patterns in nature. Laban literally drew on both art and science to generate models of the physical and psychological domains of human movement. Learn how in my next blog.

According to his colleague Lisa Ullmann, Rudolf Laban’s formulations of the inherent laws of natural movement came to light gradually through his professional activities. Laban’s long and varied career provided ample opportunities to observe people in motion in a variety of settings: dance classes, theatrical rehearsals and performances, factories, schools, clinics, and other venues. If Ullmann’s comments are correct, Laban was a naturalist, studying nonverbal behavior in a number of real-life settings.

Nowadays, naturalistic inquiry is regarded as a legitimate form of research, one suited to the study of human behavior in complex social settings. Unlike experimental research, naturalistic inquiry does not begin with the formulation of a hypothesis. It begins with collecting data through observation in the field. Preliminary explanations are formulated through the analysis of the data. Then new observations are collected, and hypothetical explanation revised accordingly. There is a doubling back and forth between observing and theorizing until field observations no longer reveal anomalies that require modifying explanations. The outcome of such a process is called a “grounded theory.”

Laban is known to have made constant adjustments in his theoretical formulations. When examined chronologically, these changes correspond with shifts in Laban’s sphere of activities, and indicate that he engaged in theoretical sampling of movement behavior at different times and in different settings. While such conceptual modifications gave colleagues the impression that Laban was against any system in his work, this was not the case. Laban was engaged in creating a grounded theory of human movement. For, as associate Joan Littlewood noted, Laban “spent his life on system research.”

I agree with Joan Littlewood. The Laban I know from extensive study of his unpublished theoretical writings reveals a person who was quite systematic in creating movement models and carefully controlling the elements in his analytic framework. I pursue these little known dimensions of Laban’s creativity in my next blogs.

Creativity is composed of four elements: originality, fluency, flexibility, and elaboration. Originality depends upon the novelty of an individual’s ideas. Fluency represents the sheer number of ideas that an individual can fabricate. Flexibility reflects difference in the kind of ideas produced. Finally, elaboration has to do with follow up – working out the details or perhaps seeing additional ways in which new things can be carried to the next level.

Arguably, Rudolf Laban possessed the first three attributes in abundance. His original notation and movement analysis systems provide inventive ways to capture and study the ephemeral phenomenon of human movement. Moreover, Laban believed that movement has meaning and that movement study provides insight into human behavior – two assertions that continue to be unorthodox.

Memoirs of Laban’s colleagues attest to his fluency. As Warren Lamb noted, Laban was endlessly “fashioning some new interpretation, trying out some new arrangement of data.” I can personally attest to Laban’s flexibility. Over two decades after publishing his notation system, Laban was still experimenting with different ways to notate the direction of a movement. In the Laban Archive, I found several additional sets of direction symbols – one drawing upon Roman numerals, one that appeared to incorporate Nordic rune-like symbols, one using letters, one combining letters and numbers, and so on.

As for elaboration, Laban has a reputation for leaving this to students and colleagues. Notation is the classic example. Laban generated the basic format, but it took the painstaking work of Albrecht Knust, Ann Hutchinson Guest, and others to make it a practical recording system. Possessed by a creative energy, Laban developed a reputation for rushing ahead with ideas and leaving the execution to others. His protege Kurt Jooss complained that Laban never gave concrete answers. Associate Valerie Preston-Dunlop observed that Laban preferred to leave “the foundations of his work” in a “state of liquidity.” Geraldine Stephenson concurs, “Laban did not like the words: system, method, or technique.”

Laban’s colleagues seem to agree – he was original, flexible, and fluent. But Laban was not systematic. Yet perhaps there was more method in his pursuit of ideas than his colleagues perceived. Find out more in my next blog.

“All of Rudolf Laban‘s life,” Irmgard Bartenieff writes, “was an unending process of defining the inner and outer manifestations of movement phenomenon in increasingly subtle shades and complex interrelationships.” The result of his relentless observing and categorizing is a grounded theory of human movement.

Grounded theory develops explanations of a phenomenon from an analysis of patterns, themes, and common categories discovered in observational research. Laban’s delineation of elements of human movement and relationships among these elements are the explanatory substance of his grounded theory.

Like all grounded theories, Laban’s ideas should be seen as reverse engineered hypotheses – as explanations that provide a starting point for further investigation. I want to encourage contemporary movement analysts to view Laban’s ideas not as “given wisdoms” but as hypothetical explanations worthy of additional study.

To foster further inquiry, MoveScape Center will offer advanced seminars. The first Octa seminar, Discovering the Dynamosphere, is scheduled for August 7-9 this year. This movement workshop introduces little known theoretical models of effort patterns that Laban developed but did not publish. It is meant to plant a seed for extending his grounded theory.