Decoding Laban’s Choreutics III

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Untitled design (9)One thing many readers have difficulty grappling with in Choreutics is Laban’s geometricizing of the dancer’s space.  Laban’s first career as a visual artist helps to explain this use of geometry.

Visual artists have employed geometrical schemes to capture human proportion and motion since Egyptian times.   These schemes have differed.  The Egyptians used a flat grid; Byzantine artists employed a series of concentric circles; and medieval artists superimposed ornamental shapes like triangles and stars on the human body to set contours and directions of movement, albeit in a highly stylized way.

However, as I explain in The Harmonic Structure of Movement, Music, and Dance, the use of geometry to realistically depict a three-dimensional moving body reached its apex in the Renaissance in the work of two artists:  Albrecht Durer and Leonardo da Vinci.  Both developed geometrical schemes that became part of academic art training and, despite the demise of the great European art academies, are still used today.

In Durer’s approach, simple solid shapes such as cubes, are superimposed on parts of a posed figure.  These simple shapes can be tilted, rotated, and redrawn in proper proportion to deal with the visible changes in proportion that occur when the body is posed in various positions.

Leonardo’s scheme focuses more on bodily motion.  He reasoned that the circle is the correct pattern of movement of the human body.  These circles become visible in the circling of the body around its own center and the limbs around their joints.

Laban draws on both schemes in his theorizing of the dancer’s space. Find out more in the forthcoming Tetra course, “Decoding Laban’s Choreutics.”

Decoding Laban’s Choreutics II

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Untitled design (6)In the previous blog, I quoted Rudolf Laban’s characterization of choreutics as “the art, or the science” of movement study.  Our postmodern perspective draws a hard line between art and science.  But this was not the case when Laban was coming of age at the turn-of-the-century.

Munich, Laban’s first port-of-call when he began to study visual art, is a case in point.  Artists and scientists happily commingled here, and ideas drawn from science fertilized the theories and practices of artists, and vice versa.

Hermann Obrist, with whom both Laban and Kandinsky studied, is a case in point.  One of the most visionary Art Nouveau artists, Obrist started his career as a botanist.  Obrist’s protégé, August Endell, initially pursued a scholarly career, studying philosophy and psychology at the University of Munich.  After turning to art, he became an eloquent advocate for new approaches to design.

Meanwhile, German experimental psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt, Gustav Fechner, and Hermann Helmholtz were studying the psychological and physiological process underlying human perception.   Aesthetic theories put forward by Obrist, Endell, and others drew upon these discoveries.

When Laban moved on to Paris to study art, he would have encountered more confluences between art and science.  For example Eadweard Muybridge’s instantaneous photographs of human and animal motion were meant to be used as references for artists depicting movement.  Muybridge’s photos inspired the French physiologist, Etienne-Jules Marey.  Marey was concerned to chart and measure the movements of the “animal machine.”   To do so, he developed his own photographic approach, known as “chronophotography.”  In turn, Marey’s photographic images  inspired artists ranging from the Italian futurists to Marcel Duchamp.

In keeping with the spirit of early modernism, Laban’s Choreutics does not represent the vision of an artist or a scientist.  It presents the vision of someone who is both an artist and a scientist.   Explore Laban’s dual vision more deeply in the Tetra course, “Decoding Laban’s Choreutics.”  Find out more….

Decoding Laban’s Choreutics I

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Untitled design (4)Choreutics is in many ways a straight-forward presentation of Laban’s movement theories.  However, more than any of Laban’s other books in English, Choreutics  is colored by Laban’s worldview.

It is recognized now that there is no such thing as pure objectivity; every theory is colored by its proposer’s experiences and beliefs.  Consequently, Laban’s worldview is not irrelevant to understanding ideas set forth in Choreutics.

In this series of blogs, I sketch aspects of Laban’s life and times and their potential influence on his theories of movement.  This requires a creative reconstruction, for Laban made no effort to articulate his worldview, and the modern world in which he came of age is in many regards foreign to our post-modern world.

Laban turned 20 in 1899, as Europe teetered on the edge of a new century.  This turn of the century period was pervaded by an atmosphere of optimistic rationality.  The world, largely controlled by colonial European nations, was at peace.  New discoveries in science sustained a conviction that human beings possess the potential to alter any conditions that might threaten civilization.  Ongoing waves of industrialization increased material prosperity, while Enlightenment values and the rule by law vouchsafed greater civil rights for individuals.

Growing up in Bratislava in eastern Europe, Laban was on the edge of these changes. The multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire was not a democracy.  Industrialization came later here, and Laban was able to observe its negative impact on work life and folk traditions.  Through holidays spent in the Balkans with his father, the military governor of Herzegovina, Laban was also introduced to religious traditions and rituals beyond Christianity.  This exotic background seems to have sensitized Laban to tensions beneath the seeming triumphs of European culture.  Perhaps this is what led him to write:

“The art, or the science, dealing with the analysis and synthesis of movement, we call ‘choreutics.’  Through its investigation and various exercises, choreutics attempts to stop the progress of disintegrating into disunity.”

What message does Laban’s “choreutics” have for us today?  Discover for yourself in the forthcoming Tetra correspondence course, “Decoding Laban’s Choreutics.”

Capturing Movement’s Traces in Written Forms

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Untitled designAround 1913, Rudolf Laban abandoned his career as a visual artist to enter the field of dance.  At the time, dance was a discipline defined more by what it lacked than by what it offered.  Laban focused his energies on altering such conditions.

He championed the cause of dance:  as a profession, as a recreative lay activity, and as a mode of education. He created a flexible dance notation system that allows works of various genre to be recorded and restaged.   He performed; he choreographed.  Above all, he wrote and published.

A century later, dance is no longer a discipline lacking literature, recorded history, scholarship, or theory.  This is due in part to Laban’s vision and Herculean efforts to capture movement’s traces in written forms.   Consequently, I was very happy when two of Laban’s major works, The Mastery of Movement  and Choreutics, which had been out-of-print, became available once more.

Now I want to encourage movement specialists to read these classics.  To that end, MoveScape Center is offering a year of seminars exploring Laban’s Choreutics by reading, reflecting, and moving.

This year of exploration begins in March, with a six week “Great Books” course, “Decoding Laban’s Choreutics.”  Participants can take this correspondence course without leaving the comfort of home.  But not without leaving a comfy chair.

Prior to each reading assignment, participants will receive a set of orienting questions.  Some questions require getting up and moving.  Find out more….

More Mysteries of Laban’s Masterpiece, Choreutics

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Laban intended for Choreutics, written in 1938-39, to be his introduction to the English reading public. With the outbreak of World War II, Laban was forced to postpone publication. After the war, however, Laban inexplicably abandoned the manuscript altogether.

Choreutics is not the only book that Laban abandoned, but it is the only manuscript that has vanished without a trace from the Rudolf Laban Archive, a vast collection of Laban’s writings and drawings from the final two decades of his career, now held by the National Resource Centre for Dance at the University of Surrey.iStock_000004329872_Medium

The Archive holds other book-length manuscripts. For example, I read Motion Study, a much longer first draft of the work that became Effort. I found multiple drafts of Effort and Recovery, which was slated for publication by MacDonald & Evans near the end of Laban’s life, but never published. I also read a partial typescript of Conflict and Harmony between Man and Woman, a collaborative work by William Carpenter and Laban integrating Jungian typology and effort theory.

However, though the Archivist and I searched, there were no manuscripts of Choreutics, hand written or typewritten, partial or complete. Perhaps they were lost, or sent to the publisher. Perhaps there is a good explanation. But the absence of Laban’s original work makes it impossible to discern how much Lisa Ullmann, as the editor, may have changed the work.

For example, each of the first 10 chapters concludes with a “Fact of Space- Movement.” To me, many of these concluding paragraphs seem more like philosophical speculations than facts. Did Laban see these as facts? Or is this something Lisa Ullmann added?

These are the types of questions to be considered in “Decoding Laban’s Choreutics.” Find out more…..

Movement Is the Life of Space

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Young beautiful dancer jumping into blue powder cloud

The quotation above has always been one of my favorites from Laban’s masterwork, Choreutics. I like Laban’s assertion because it encourages us to think about space in a different way.

“Dead space does not exist,” Laban continues, “for there is neither space without movement nor movement without space.” It’s a little hard to wrap one’s head around this. We are accustomed to thinking of space as a gap between objects that are stable, real, and palpable. Space, on the other hand, is empty and void. It cannot be touched, and consequently lacks discernible qualities. And yet philosophers from Pythagoras to Henri Bergson have characterized space much differently.

For example, in his lectures on Pythagoras, Manly Hall notes that objects are known by the space between them rather than by their own nature. This is because space implies motion. No one knows what a cat or a dog is, until they begin to move. Through movement in space, says Hall, “each thing writes a name for itself by what it does.”

Similarly, Henri Bergson contends that space is not a fixed, homogeneous ground onto which movement is posited, “rather it is real motion that deposits space beneath itself.”

Laban also argues for an interdependent relationship between space and movement. He notes that the concept of space as a locality in which movement takes place can be helpful.

“However, we must not look at the locality simply as an empty room, separated from movement, nor at movement as an occasional happening only, for movement is a continuous flux within the locality itself…. Space is a hidden feature of movement and movement is a visible aspect of space.”

The Mystery of Laban’s Masterpiece, Choreutics

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labanChoreutics has always been my favorite book by Rudolf Laban, although it is by no means the most accessible of his writings. The text is prone to sudden jumps, from practical movement description to mystical metaphysics. Moreover, other mysteries surround this work.

For example, Laban wrote Choreutics during 1938-39, as he convalesced at Dartington Hall following his timely escape from continental Europe to England. According to his colleague Lisa Ullmann, Laban intended for the book “to introduce his ideas on movement and dance to an interested reading public in Britain.” Laban must have had the ideas in mind for some time, for the subject matter builds on his earlier German book, Choreographie, published in 1926.

Laban worked fervently on the book, and Louise Soelberg, a member of the Jooss Ballet also in residence at Dartington, worked equally hard to make Laban’s English sound English. The work was nearing completion in June 1940, when the onset of the war forced the closing of Dartington Hall and the dispersal of resident artists, including Laban. He gave the manuscript to his Dartington benefactors, Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, for safe keeping.

The post-war years brought Laban better health and more opportunities for work and development of his ideas. According to Lisa Ullmann, Laban no longer felt the need for a book introducing basic concepts, and so, he abandoned the manuscript for Choreutics.

Ullmann’s explanation is no explanation, because Choreutics is not a basic treatise. It is an important theoretical work that carries forward Laban’s ideas about movement in space, ideas that are not fully expounded in any other of his subsequent publications in English. Why he abandoned any attempt to publish remains a mystery.

Fortunately, Dorothy Elmhirst did not abandon Choreutics. Several years after Laban’s death, she returned the manuscript to Lisa Ullmann and encouraged her to have it published. And in 1966, this masterwork finally became appeared, filling a vital gap in Laban literature.

Decoding Rudolf Laban’s Choreutics: A Year of Guided Study

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CaptureBeginning in March, MoveScape Center will offer a series of Red Thread courses centered on Rudolf Laban’s Choreutics. These courses combine body and mind, delving into the physics and metaphysics of human movement through space and time.

The series opens with a Tetra seminar focused on Laban’s posthumously published masterpiece, Choreutics. Out-of-print for many years, Choreutics is once again available in paperback through Princeton/Dance Horizons Books.

In the opening springtime Tetra, MoveScape goes retro with a correspondence course. Based on an easy schedule, participants will read the Preface, Introduction, and first 12 chapters of Choreutics. A set of study questions will be provided for each reading assignment. When each reading assignment has been completed, participants will receive a commentary that I have prepared, providing background context and elaborating on Laban’s themes. Think of this as a “great books” course designed to move participants beyond the surface of Laban’s mysterious masterpiece.

MoveScape follows the Tetra with an Octa workshop in the summer of 2016. The Octa provides a movement review of well-known space harmony forms. Ways to meet the challenges of embodying these demanding sequences, approaches to teaching space harmony, and creative ways to bring this material to life will be explored.

The Choreutics series culminates with the Ico course in the autumn. In this course we move beyond the well-known space harmony forms to embody seldom taught forms such as tilted planes, five and seven rings, and knots.

The Tetra, Octa, and Ico may be taken individually, or, ideally, as a series. Red Thread Certificates of completion will be given to participants at the successful conclusion of each step along this journey.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

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The wintery month of January is named after the Roman god Janus.  Janus had two faces, one that looked back and one that looked forward.  Similarly, this time of year invites introspection – reflection on things past and anticipation of things yet to be.  In honor of Janus, I look back and forward.

Movement study is not recognized as a discipline in its own right.  But someday it will be, thanks to the vision of remarkable people whose work and teachings have laid a foundation for the study of human movement.  One of these is Juana de Laban.

I met the formidable Dr. de Laban in 1972, when I transferred as an undergraduate to Southern Methodist University.  Dr. de Laban ran the graduate dance program and taught the undergraduate courses in dance history.  I had just encountered the work of Rudolf Laban at a dance festival the previous summer.  So, plucking up my courage, I approached Dr. de Laban after the first class and inquired if she were related to Rudolf Laban.  “I am his daughter,” she replied with great dignity.

Dr. de Laban was imposing, but not unapproachable.  By gradual increments we became friends.  She listened tolerantly to my wild ideas, hopes, and aspirations.  More importantly, she helped me and all her students see beyond our narrow notions of dance.

For example, in one of the first dance history classes, she showed films of trance dance.  I remember particularly the Holy Ghost people in the Appalachians, who pass into trance and handle rattlesnakes, as well as a Greek ritual that involved walking across hot coals.  These examples awakened me to the potential power of movement.

On another occasion, Dr. de Laban persuaded several graduate students to put together an informal concert of ethnic dance.  Philippine and Japanese dances were performed, along with an Australian aboriginal dance in which I participated.  This opened a window on the world beyond the departmental offerings, which were limited to Graham technique, ballet, and jazz.

Finally, Dr. de Laban demanded that her undergraduate history students be scholars as well as dancers.  Term paper topics were not to be chosen lightly, but vetted in conference with her in a shadowy, book-lined office.   Few of us undergraduates appreciated her stature as a dance and theatre scholar, for she led by quiet example. At the time, I certainly did not aspire to be a scholar.  But I see now that the term papers I wrote for Dr. de Laban planted a seed.  Retrospectively, I honor her.

On Space and Time

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Dance is an art that exists in both space and time.  In 2016, MoveScape Center will be offering a series of workshops about space, focusing on Rudolf Laban’s Choreutic theories.  As 2015 draws to an end, however, I want to focus on time.

Space is multi-dimensional. Time, on the other hand, is uni-directional.  It flows in one irreversible direction — from past to present to future.

In reality, we exist only in the present moment.  The past is gone; the future may never come.  Yet, paradoxically, we carry the past in our bodies and minds as we simultaneously project ourselves into an anticipated future.

We have no sensory mechanism for perceiving time.  And yet we are aware of time as a phenomenon closely related to movement.  On some uncanny occasions, time appears to stand still.  But mostly time seems to move like a dancer – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.

“Dance exists at a perpetual vanishing point,” observed Marcia Siegel.  “At the moment of its creation it is gone.”  And yet, as Rudolf Laban wrote, “Each bodily movement is embedded in a chain of infinite happenings from which we distinguish only the immediate preceding steps and, occasionally, those which immediately follow.”  In every bodily action, “both infinity and eternity are hidden.”