Inside Meaning in Motion

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Capture“Meaning in Motion is one of the few, if not the only, contemporary texts to integrate historical, theoretical, and creative frameworks for understanding and studying Laban Movement Analysis,” writes Dr. Andrea Harris, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Dr. Harris has been using the text for several years now.  Her comment highlights key features of the book.  For example, Part 1 – History and Development of Laban Movement Analysis – discusses Laban’s career, the contributions of Irmgard Bartenieff and many others who have added to the Laban legacy.

Theory is covered with sections on Body, Effort, Space, Shape, and Movement Harmony.  Each of these sections incorporate Creative Explorations for use in the studio during class time or for individual study.

The book is richly illustrated with photographs, charts, and effort and space phrases.  Five different appendices provide additional material for study. These include bibliographies of various works by Laban, Bartenieff, and other major applications of Laban theory, along with more advanced space and effort sequences, and a section on relationship.  As Harris notes, “ I like that the polar triangles, girdles, axis, A and B scales are in the appendix, in case an instructor would want to incorporate them.”

She adds, “I have always wished for more information about Relationship (Appendix E).  I appreciate that you’ve fleshed out how the various Laban communities conceptualize relationship.”

In the next blog, learn how Dr. Nancy Beardall uses Meaning in Motion in two programs at Lesley University.

Writing Meaning in Motion

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LabanI didn’t start out to write an introductory Laban Movement Analysis text.  It began as a compilation of teaching materials I’ve developed over the last three decades, teaching in Certificate Programs in New York, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Berlin, The Netherlands, and England.

As the LMA teaching community knows, we have limped along for years with copies from a hundred different sources.  And so, it made sense to turn the compilation into a proper text, primarily designed for use in university movement analysis courses.

Meaning in Motion seems to be answering a need in the field.  To date, the text has been used in courses at the Universities of Wisconsin, Madison and Milwaukee; Lesley University; State Universities of New York, Brockport and Potsdam; Utah Valley University; Pomona College; Columbia College Chicago; College of Charleston; and Hope College.

Learn more about this new resource and how it is being used in the following blogs.

Misadventures with Motion Capture

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Untitled design (5)As any performer who has ever worked with technology knows, interfacing human and machine elements is a time-consuming process.  Our experiment with motion capture was no exception.

Fortunately, we had wonderful people to work with – our dancers, Professor Roger Good and his students and staff from the OU School of Digital Media Arts, and Nathan Berger and Rakesh Kashyap from the OU Aesthetic Technology Lab.  The latter two were responsible for the motion capture recording, using a portable MOCAP suit.  This had to be fitted and calibrated on each dancer in order to produce a clean recording.  And this often involved painstaking recalibrations between performances.

It was a very long day, but we managed to record the scales we wanted to capture, along with a dance class exercise, an improvisation, and a section of one of Jean Erdman’s choreographies.  Now even harder work followed, for Madeleine and I had  to learn to read the MOCAP recordings.

While we had certainly captured the trace-forms, they were merely white lines against a black background.  The recording had no visual depth; that is, we could not easily discern which lines represented motion in the front part of kinesphere and which lines represented movements in the dancer’s back space.

Berger and Kashyap came to our rescue here, by creating as skeletal icosahedron that could be superimposed to help us decode the MOCAP tracery.  But this introduced other problems – should the icosahedron turn when the dancer turned, or remain stationary?  Should it tilt if the dancer did, or not?  MOCAP reintroduced issues around systems of reference that have been dealt with in Labanotation.

As with all pilot research projects, Madeleine and I discovered how much we still had to learn.  Nevertheless, a few intriguing findings emerged.  Learn more in the next blogs.