As the benefits of physical motion are gaining recognition and undergoing further scrutiny, it is interesting to see how Laban characterized movement health.  He wrote, “A healthy human being can have complete control of his kinesphere and dynamosphere….  The essential thing is that we should neither have preference for nor avoid certain movements because of physical or psychical restrictions.”

Clearly, Laban views movement as healthy for both the body and mind.  He prescribes a rich range of motion, noting “we should be able to do every imaginable movement and then select those which seem to be the most suitable and desirable for our own nature.”

When I did my Laban Movement Analysis training in the mid-1970s, the faculty used to give individual “movement prescriptions” in the middle of the year.  These were meant to be fun and usually aimed to encourage exploration of less preferred movement elements.  However, the underlying rationale was not made transparent to students, who were sometimes left guessing as to why they received a certain prescription.

Warren Lamb took a more direct approach in the hundreds of individual movement tutorials he taught in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  First he assessed the individual’s movement patterns.   Then he worked with their effort and shape preferences, gradually building less preferred qualities into a unique movement sequence that the person could continue to practice and refine.

Want to find out more about your own movement patterns?  Join the “Introduction to Movement Pattern Analysis” course,  March 17- 19, 2017.