Dancing Art Nouveau

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In his first career as a visual artist, Laban was closely involved in the Art Nouveau movement.  Literally meaning “new art,” Art Nouveau was a self-consciously modern movement focused on the applied arts rather than the fine arts.  The movement expressed itself in innovations in architecture, furniture, fabric, dishes, lamps, jewelry – redesigning the everyday objects that people use and the spaces they inhabit.  

In short, Art Nouveau aimed to break with tradition and change the shape of the modern world.

As Laban’s career shifted from art to dance, he had to confront the stable formality of traditional ballet.  In keeping with the aims of Art Nouveau, the new dance had to break away from the past and explore modern ways of moving.  For Laban, this involved experimenting with novel lines of motion, ones that challenged the dancer’s balance yet preserved a rhythmic oscillation between stability and mobility.  

By the end of the 1920’s, Laban had designed many new patterns for dancing.  These veered away from static geography of ballet and opened new territories for exploration of the kinesphere by drawing entirely on deflected directions.

Find out more in the upcoming course, “Decoding Choreutics: Part 2.”

Laban’s “Deflected Direction” Hypothesis

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Dimensions = stability and diagonals = mobility. Yet, according to Laban, “neither pure stability nor pure mobility exist.”  Natural human movement “is a composite of stabilizing and mobilizing tendencies.”

What is going on here?  Laban has taken a lot of trouble to delineate the dimensional and diagonal lines of motion.  And every Laban student, whether in a basic or advanced course, practices dimensional and diagonal sequences over and over again.  

Then Laban surprises us with the “deflected direction hypothesis.”  All of a sudden, he observes that “the deflected or mixed inclinations are more apt to reflect trace-forms of living matter.”

Laban’s critical observation of living movement is all-too-easily overlooked.  We know from principles of Gestalt psychology that the mind opts for rapid closure. We may perceive an unfinished circle that is not quite round.  But the mind conceives a perfect circle.

Analogously, Laban went beyond the rapid closure of dimensions and diagonals, delineating a variety of deflected lines of movement that fill the kinesphere.  Exploring these deflected directions offers a host of new bodily experiences in relation to space, gravity, and kinetic energy. Find out more in the upcoming MoveScape seminar, “Decoding Choreutics: Part 2.”

Stability and Mobility

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“Stability and mobility endlessly alternate,” Laban writes in Choreutics. This basic pattern underlies all movement through space. For instance, in a turning leap, spinning while flying through the air leads to a temporary loss of equilibrium. But when the feet touch the floor, there is a return to quietude and relative balance.

According to Laban, “movements containing dimensional tensions give a feeling of stability.” These fundamental lines of motion – up and down, across and open, backwards and forwards – are Laban’s stable prototypes.  They provide the most basic cognitive map of space, along with the conceptual framework underlying the ballet barre.  

As a vehemently “modern” dancer, Laban wanted to break out of the formal stability of ballet.  And this is where the diagonal comes in. “Movements following space diagonals give a feeling of disequilibrium.  The balance is dissolved in the flow, “ writes Laban.

For Laban, dimensions  = stability and diagonals = mobility.   These lines of motion provide contrasting poles for the natural oscillation between stability and mobility.  It’s a great conceptual model. As Laban recognized, however, real living movement is something else again. Find out more in the next blogs.

Lifetimes Spent Studying Movement

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At the closing banquet of the LIMS 40th Anniversary Conference, three Lifetime Achievement Awards were presented to Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Peggy Hackney, and myself.

Lifetime-Spent-Studying

I’m sure I speak for the other two recipients when I say that it is a great honor to have one’s efforts recognized by colleagues. For all of us, the encounter with Rudolf Laban’s ideas and our studies so long ago with the remarkable Irmgard Bartenieff have been truly life-changing. Though our journeys have gone in different directions, they spring from the same roots.

When I first began to study with Bartenieff, she was 75 years old.  Her knowledge was deeply grounded in a lifetime of movement study. But she was not focused on the past; she was always looking forward.  I never knew Laban the man, but I have come to know his way of thinking. His knowledge was also deeply rooted in a lifetime of experience, but he kept moving, exploring, and looking forward. I hope in some small way to continue to grow the work these pioneers started.

A Bird’s Eye View of the LIMS Conference

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A bird flying over Manhattan in early June would have detected several hot spots of movement activity and collegial exchange. Sites for the Laban Institute conference ranged from Hunter College on the upper east side, to midtown near Bryant Park, to Washington Square Park in the West Village.

With as many as four sessions running concurrently and over 200 participants, it is impossible to provide an encyclopedic report on the conference as a whole. Some highlights for me were the following sessions.

Bird's-Eye-View-LIMS-Conference

* Learning about Laban Movement Analysts’ founding role in the creation of “Global Water Dances” – an international biannual event using dance as an international language to raise awareness of local water issues and the impending global water shortage.

* The panel on dance/movement therapy featuring Nancy Beardall, Katya Bloom, Jane Cathcart, and Suzi Tortora – all seasoned movement analysts and therapists. Here was one session that really captured how this field is maturing.

*  The EcoPoetic site-based dance event in Washington Square Park masterfully organized by LIMS Executive and Artistic Director, Regina Miranda.  Seventeen different dance performances were scattered throughout the northeast corner of the park, transforming the area into a sunlit scene in which dancers and strolling passerbys gracefully melded in the mild evening.

* Anastasi Siotas’s workshop on biotensegrity as an emerging model of anatomical structure.

* And, carrying the theme of tensegrity further, Mary Copple gave a super paper on her experiences integrating Laban-Bartenieff work in the Architecture and Design Program at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany.

More conference highlights in the next blog!

There Are No Collisions on the Dance Floor

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The play, “MASTER HAROLD” … and the boys”, takes place on a rainy afternoon in a South African tearoom during the period of apartheid. There are no customers – only the two black waiters, Sam and Willie, and Master Harold, the white adolescent son of the owners.  The “boys” are getting ready to participate in a ballroom dancing competition with their girlfriends.

As the three while away the afternoon, the boys practice dancing and describe the upcoming event for Master Harold.  When Harold imagines two couples bumping into one another on the dance floor, the waiters collapse in laughter.

Sam explains, “There’s no collisions out there, Hally.  Nobody trips or stumbles or bumps into anybody else. To be one of the finalists on that dance floor is like… like being in a dream about a world in which accidents don’t happen.”

As he was beginning to study ballroom dance, Pierre Dulaine recounts a similar experience. “When I stepped into the Garryowen Ballroom … all my troubles were suddenly left behind. What I saw was like a fantasy world.  All the women were in ball gowns; the men, in white ties and tails. I felt as if I was in a dream, except that I never knew such dreams existed.”

Dance, it seems, has the power to awaken utopian dreams.  We may only be able to dream as the music lasts. But as Sam comments to Hally, “It starts with that. Without the dream we won’t know what we’re going for.”

Rapport through Dancing

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Nonverbal research has discovered that rapport is physical. Subliminal signals are sent body to body. In ordinary life, we feel the effect of these bodily signals – of mirroring positions, or echoing actions, or subtle synchronization of small motions – without perceiving them to be the cause of feelings of rapport.  In dance, the cause is much more obvious.

Rapport-Through-Dancing

Dance makes patterns in time and space.  Dancing with others requires coordinating these patterns, keeping together in space and time.  All forms of dance use symmetry and synchrony to create patterns. In other words, dance generates rapport between people.  Far from being a trivial pastime, dance is a critical aspect of community building.

This has led McNeill to conclude that dance “was fundamental in widening and differentiating social bonds among our species.”  In early human history, he believes that festival dances “strengthened and stabilized” small, isolated communities. Rhythmic exertion in work “facilitated the performance of dull, repetitive tasks.”

As human societies became larger and more complex,  “public rituals involving rhythmic movement regularly helped to confirm constituted authorities.”  At the same time, subgroups “availed themselves of the emotional uplift of dancing together to define and strengthen their differing identities as well.”

McNeill closes with the following comments: “The practical efficiency and emotional residues of moving together in time influenced the human past in ways seldom noticed and imperfectly recorded.  Yet defects of surviving records ought not to prevent more careful, critical consideration of this dimension of human sociality.”

Rapport through Movement

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Human movement occurs in space and time.  Nonverbal communication research has shown that rapport is established both spatially and temporally.  Both facets are so ubiquitous as to escape our attention, yet they are nevertheless profound – the very bedrock on which congenial human interaction is based.

The arrangement of body parts in space – the way in which an individual poses and positions himself – holds clues to rapport.  Symmetry is critical. Researchers have found that when two people sit in identical positions or as mirror images of each other’s pose, this shared posture indicates that they share a point of view.  When this phenomenon of posture matching is not simultaneous but sequential, it is called echoing. Echoing another’s posture has also been found to be a way to promote rapport.

Keeping together in time is also essential for satisfying interaction. Synchrony was discovered by William Condon through painstaking analysis of films in slow motion.   He found that when individuals converse, not only does the speaker synchronize his/her movements with speech, but also the listener moves in time with the speech of the speaker. There will not be an exact mirroring of gestures.  For example, the speaker’s head may tilt and exactly as it does so, the listener will lift one hand. “Entrainment” is the term Condon coined for the process that occurs when two or more people become engaged in each other’s rhythms.  

Mirroring, echoing, and entrainment are naturally occurring phenomenon noted when movement is taken seriously as an essential aspect of social behavior.  And this has profound implications for dance. Find out more in the next blogs.

Dance and Conflict

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The Dance Studies Association (DSA) has chosen “Dance and Conflict” as the theme of its conference this summer in Malta. This promises to be a huge international gathering now that the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) and the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS) have merged to form DSA.

I’m quite excited by this conference theme because dance is often considered to be a trivial pastime. The ways in which dance can bring people together and enable them to overcome differences is often overlooked. Both the paper my daughter will be giving at this conference, as well as my own, investigate the power of dance to build social bonds.

 

My daughter has been conducting ethnographic research in Honolulu, looking at the small breakdancing community there.  She has found deep bonds within this community, despite the fact that breakdancing is a competitive dance form in which crews battle for prizes and acclaim.

 

My paper addresses the “Dancing Classrooms” program developed by Pierre Dulaine, a competitive ballroom dancer.  Since 1994, this program has helped middle school children in New York City gain a sense of pride, confidence, and respect for others through learning ballroom dance.

 

Beyond that, Dulaine has taken the program to Jaffa, Israel, to teach Jewish and Palestinian children to dance together, and to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to work with Protestant and Catholic students.  Despite many difficulties, Dulaine has succeeded in overcoming deep animosities through the Dancing Classrooms regimen.

 

What is it about dance, including competitive dance forms, that builds social bonds?  Find out more in the next blogs.

The Icosahedron Revealed

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As my imaginary conversation with Laban progresses, he begins to share more deeply.

CLM:  I always suspected there was more to your choice of the icosahedron as a model of the kinesphere.  Please go on.

R.Laban:  You see, the icosahedron isn’t found in any crystalline forms. That is, it isn’t found in inorganic matter.  But some microscopic organisms have icosahedral shapes – it is one of the shapes nature chooses for living forms.

Icosaheadron-Devealed

CLM: Why is that important?

R. Laban:  Because life curves, and most trace-forms of human movement are curvilinear.

CLM:  Yet in Choreutics you write that “We can understand all bodily movement as being a continuous creation of fragments of polyhedral forms.”  Polyhedra have straight edges and angular corners….

R. Laban:  You mustn’t take everything I write so literally.  Movement is curvilinear, but in order to create a geography for the kinesphere, I had to use geometrical forms.  By conceptualizing trace-forms as rhythmic circles; that is, as polygons, these shapes can be matched to the geometric geography of the kinesphere.

CLM:  I think I’m beginning to understand.

R. Laban:  You see, my polygonal trace-forms are stylizations of the organic curves of human movement.  I’ve simply done what visual artists do when they take the curved shape of a leaf or a flower and geometricize it.  They create a pattern.

CLM:  That’s what you’re doing, then. You are imposing a pattern on the curves of living movement.

R. Laban:  That’s exactly right. Without pattern, the movement just disappears as it is occurring.  By geometricizing trace-forms and the geography of the kinesphere, I’ve provided some “fixed points” so that dance and movement can be objects for contemplation and study.

CLM:  Now I think I really need that cool drink!