The Merging of Posture and Gesture

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MoveScape Center, DenverIn his early days as a management consultant, Warren Lamb frequently helped client companies appoint employees. He would be called in to interview a short-list of people being considered for a position. His assessment, based upon the candidates’ movement patterns, would be used, in addition to other measures, to find the right person for the job.

Lamb was aware that some people simply come across better in an interview than others. They are able to manage the image they create adroitly, in part through their nonverbal behaviors. The candidate can assume a self-confident posture and make the firm gestures of a strong leader for the duration of the interview – without actually being a strong and confident leader.

Thus Lamb had to be able to discern artificial movement behaviors, temporarily put on to create a good impression, from actions that were genuine and truly characteristic of the individual.

To do so, he had to shift his analysis beyond static poses and isolated gestures and focus on dynamic actions. In carefully observing the ongoing stream of movement that accompanies speech, Lamb made an important discovery. He began to notice that some gestures merged into action involving the whole body, and vice versa. These phrases of posture-gesture merger occurred spontaneously and naturally as coherent physical expressions. Lamb had found the key to discerning genuine and characteristic actions from “body language” that can be faked.

As he notes, “We can relatively easily change gestures… we can easily work on bad posture. But it seems that if we cannot change the quality of movement at the point where gestures merge into posture, or vice versa, then it has a particular significance.”

In the next blog, I will discuss the particular significance of the merging of posture and gesture.

Movement Versus Body Language

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Body language tends to single out isolated gestures and still poses for purposes of study. Then it attaches psychodynamic interpretations to these snapshot. Thus “arms folded over the chest” means a person is closed. Lifting and exposing the palm signals flirtation, rubbing the nose indicates disapproval, and so on.

Body language isolates postures and gestures from the steam of ongoing movement in manner analogous to “instantaneous photographs,” such as those of Eadweard Muybridge. His photos recorded various moments in a series of actions. But because the recording was not continuous, each photographic image appears isolated, lifted out of the context before and after moments.

When these photos first appeared in the late 19th century, they were a revelation. They captured what normal vision could not perceive in rapid motion. But not everyone was impressed. The sculptor Rodin claimed that photography lies, “for in reality time does not stop.” Bergson the philosopher agreed. He admitted that a series of snapshots of an action can be mechanically animated to create an illusion of movement. But real movement is something else.
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According to Bergson, it is not the “single snapshots we have taken once again along the course of change that are real; on the contrary, it is flux, the continuity of transition, it is change itself that is real.”

Real movement involves progressive development and change. Movement study aims to capture this process of change over time, to restore the context of before and after. Body language contents itself with the snapshot of “arms folded over the chest.” But, as Warren Lamb used to point out, there are many different ways to fold the arms – firmly and decisively, gradually, carefully, and so on. Surely meaning depends upon the before and after – not merely on one moment.

In Praise of Whole Body Movement

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Shakespeare praised man’s “infinite faculties”. But human beings are constantly in danger of coming apart. Whether we bifurcate the individual into body and mind or even greater divisions (ego, ID, superego; thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting, etc.), keeping it together is a uniquely human challenge.

Body movement is one medium through which these divisions can be unified. Laban created physical practices to facilitate the integration of man’s infinite faculties. This part of Laban’s work is known as “choreutics” or space harmony. Laban characterizes his choreutic exercises as “attempts to stop the progress of disintegrating into disunity”.

Laban’s space harmony sequences trace large symmetrical patterns through the kinesphere, or the space around the body. In conventional embodiment, the right or left arm leads, sweeping through three-dimensional space. This limb action must be coordinated with steps and support through the lower body. This necessitates flexion, extension, and rotation of the spine and changing patterns of counter-tension through the whole body. Laban’s choreutic sequences are “harmonic” because they demand coherent coordination among all the different parts of the body.

To the post-modern eye, this coherence appears simplistic. Post-modernity demands specialization and this is reflected in complex use of isolated body parts in post-modern dance forms. The wit and virtuosity of fractionated movement in hip hop is fascinating and fun. Nevertheless, there is virtue in whole body movement.

So if you are reading this while sitting at a computer, stand up. Stretch. Do a lunge. Make a big shape that involves your whole body. Better yet, come to the Tetra and learn some of Laban’s choreutic exercises. There is more to these than meets the eye!

For the early registration discount, register for Tetra by March 1.

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.

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.

Warren Lamb, Creative Pioneer

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Warren Lamb is one of the most creative people I have ever known.  His creativity is likely to escape the casual observer, for Lamb is very much the proper Englishman and his long and successful career as a management consultant has led him to adopt a conventional façade.  Moreover, he is inclined to stand modestly in the shadow of his mentor, Rudolf Laban, who is widely recognized as a creative genius.

However, without Lamb’s contribution to the study of human movement, Laban’s own reputation would be diminished.  The ground-breaking work done by Laban and F.C. Lawrence in British factories in the 1940s would be nothing but a curious footnote in the history of industrial psychology.

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Fortunately, Lamb respected Laban’s ideas and took them seriously.  But he did not just slavishly accept Laban’s notions as givens – he tested them empirically by carefully observing movement behavior and modifying observation and analysis procedures as needed.  Challenged to think outside the box by the collaborative research he did with child psychiatrist Judith Kestenberg and physical therapist Irmgard Bartenieff, Lamb  imaginatively explored links between movement and personality, expanding and confirming connections intuitively outlined by Laban.  Moreover, each creative link had to hold up in the practical context of helping his business clients understand themselves and their fellow workers better.

As Lamb notes, “We all observe movement and form impressions of people from what we see…. But to progress beyond simple impressions there had first to be both a notation system and a language in which it could be discussed.  Laban started this by describing movement in terms of its various component parts… After his death it was for me to complete the process by building on the concepts he had given us and organizing his theories into a purposeful framework.”