Laban’s “Deflected Direction” Hypothesis

Posted on by

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.”

Lifetimes Spent Studying Movement

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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!

LIMS Turns 40!

Posted on by

The Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS) celebrated its 40th anniversary with a fabulous conference in New York City in early June. This international gathering was an embarrassment of riches, with fascinating workshops, panels, papers, and dance events.  

LIMS-Turns-40

Forty years ago, I was part of the Founding Board of the Institute, and I remember clearly our first conference in 1979 (celebrating the centennial of Laban’s 1879 birth). We were a young group of founders, enthusiastic and somewhat inexperienced.   But in 1979, many of Laban’s colleagues were still active. We managed to bring many of these “big names” in movement study over from Europe – Lisa Ullmann, Sylvia Bodmer, Warren Lamb, Geraldine Stephenson, Anna Markard (Kurt Jooss’s daughter), Martin Gleisner, and, of course, our inspiration-in-residence, Irmgard Bartenieff.

We looked up to these pioneers, as many of us were just beginning careers.

Forty years later, not only have the LIMS founders matured, the whole field has matured.  It is nice to find that, while we retain a youthful enthusiasm about the study of human movement, we are now a group of maturing professionals, with years of experience applying Laban Movement Analysis in many ways. Find out more about how Laban movement studies are growing up in the next blogs.

There Are No Collisions on the Dance Floor

Posted on by

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 Movement

Posted on by

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.

World of Movement, World of Wonder

Posted on by

Guest blog by Juliet Chambers-Coe

Laban characterized the dynamic yet ephemeral world of movement as “a jungle of sudden appearances and disappearances, a glistening and colorful wonder-world which awaits exploration.”

Girl-in-Flowers

The www.Labanarium.com  is a part of this ‘jungle’ and ‘wonder-world’ of which Laban speaks.  Members from across the globe meet through the network to share practice, ideas, research and inspirations from the world of movement, and it awaits your exploration!

In the spirit of movement and dance theorist Rudolf Laban, the Labanarium seeks to foster an exchange between members of the movement community and is open to the breadth and diversity of practices that explore all human movement.

Anyone can become a Member of the Labanarium – it’s free to join https://www.labanarium.com/register/

Benefits of membership:

  • connect to others in the movement community
  • have access to resource pages including Podcasts
  • create your own Group and invite others to join
  • get your activities featured on ‘Featured Contributors’ page
  • promote your events
  • increase your visibility in the field
  • engage in Laban theory with expert, established practitioner members
  • receive newsletters, articles, event invitations via the free mailing list subscription
  • participate in forum discussions

Check out some of our community’s expert contributions so far: https://www.labanarium.com/featured-contributors/

Laban reminds us that “dance is never the end of a development, it much rather seems to indicate the beginning of an unfolding…it is the spring-time of a new period….”

 

So, come to ‘jungle’ and have a look around, and join us in the unfolding of new beginnings in movement and dance!

Esperanto and the Pan-human Language of Movement

Posted on by

With two million speakers worldwide, Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed (rather than naturally evolving) language. Created by a Polish doctor in the late 1800s, Esperanto was meant to be an international language “to unite nations in common brotherhood.”

 

Movement is often characterized as a pan-human means of communication, a kind of international language that, like Esperanto, can foster mutual understanding among different peoples. In his more utopian musings, Laban subscribed to this idea – with a slight variation.

 

Rather than movement itself, Laban’s idea was to create a movement-based symbol system that could be universally understood. In Choreutics he writes, “It is, perhaps, a fantastic idea that there could be ideographic signs in a notation through which all people of the world would communicate.”

 

Laban didn’t achieve this dream.  Nevertheless, his deep understanding of human movement as a psycho-physical phenomenon and the three systems he created for describing, analyzing, and recording movement – space harmony (choreutics), Labanotation/Kinetography, and effort notation – have been helping people around the world understand this ephemeral and omnipresent aspect of human life.

 

The “Labanese” are a transnational sodality.  And now, thanks to post-modern media and technology, we can be in touch with one another to a greater extent than ever before.  Find out more in the next blog!

Dancing Across Borders

Posted on by

Once upon a time, dance was a local phenomenon.  Because dance was rooted in the community, Rudolf Laban hypothesized that “an observer of tribal and national dances can gain information about the states of mind or traits of character cherished and desired within the particular community.”  This is because “these dances show the effort range cultivated by social groups living in a definite milieu.”

Tow-People-Dancing

 

Globalization is changing this. Popular dance forms in particular move across borders with remarkable speed. Tango, salsa, competitive ballroom dance, and hip-hop – to name just a few – are now performed around the world, often by social groups different in class, race, and temperament from the milieu in which the dance originated.

 

Nowadays, dancers form transnational sodalities.  Sodalities are non-kin groups organized for a specific purpose. This has led Jonathan Marion to argue that competitive ballroom dancers, for example, are quite literally – “a ‘tribe’ of dancers with a collective identity, the shared experience of a translocal ballroom culture of practice and competition, which exists side-by-side with members’ own national culture.”

 

Culture, of course, is deeply embedded in bodily practices absorbed from birth and often buried below conscious awareness.  Dance is a conscious bodily practice, however. It must be learned. Learning dances that originated elsewhere expands not only movement repertoire but movement identity.  

 

In a world where many would strengthen the divisions between nations and peoples, let’s keep dancing!

The Magic of Play

Posted on by

As I reflect on the seductive appeal of Olympic sports, I’m drawn to the notion that sport is play. It may be a livelihood and an obsession for the athletes themselves, but for spectators, a sport is still a game. But what makes an activity playful?

Children-Playing-Hopscotch-Outside

In his seminal book, Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga identifies key features of play as the following:

* All play is a voluntary activity; it is free; it is never imposed as a duty or a practical task.

* Play is not ordinary or real life – it is a “stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all its own.”

* Play is distinct from ordinary life in location and duration – it is played out “within certain limits of time and place.”

* Play creates order – “into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary but limited perfection.”

* Playing creates community – “a feeling of being ‘apart together’ in an exceptional situation, of sharing something important.”  Consequently, play “retains its magic beyond the duration of the individual game.”

Finally, play has a tendency to be beautiful.  More about beauty and grace in the next blog.