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.

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.”

World of Movement, World of Wonder

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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

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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!

Laban and War

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Rudolf Laban’s father was a general in the Austro-Hungarian Army. As Laban writes in his autobiography,  “My father taught me the life of a soldier, which fascinated me almost as much as did the arts.” Subsequent events show that the life of the artist won.  Nevertheless, Laban drew on his military background when it came to theorizing dance and movement.

Man-Fencing-Laban-War

As Gwynne Dyer asserts, for almost all human history, a battle “has been an event as stylized and limited in its movement as a classical ballet, and for the same reasons:  the inherent capabilities and limitations of the human body.”  Laban concurs, drawing parallels in Choreutics between the cardinal dimensions, the five positions of ballet, and protection of the vulnerable areas of the human body as mirrored in the opening movements of fencing.

 

The metaphor of battle also plays a role in Laban’s conceptualization of human effort.  In Laban’s dynamic framework, each of the four motion factor manifests as one or the other of two contrasting effort qualities.  Four of these effort qualities indicate the mover’s indulging attitude towards Weigh, Time, Space or Flow; the other four effort qualities reveal fighting attitudes, in which the mover appears to be struggling against Weight, Time, Space, or Flow.        

 

In Mastery of Movement, Laban applies these metaphors to develop a continuum of personality types, noting that “The fighting against or indulging attitude towards a motion factor form the basic aspects of the psychological attitudes of hatred and love.  So it is useful if the artist realizes how these two poles of emotion are related to other forms of inner attitude, and how their relationship is mirrored in the movements of different characters.”

 

Find out more about Laban’s movement metaphors in the upcoming MoveScape Center correspondence course, “Mastering Laban’s Mastery of Movement.”

Unlocking Laban’s Legacy

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I began my blogs this year by looking back. Now I want to look forward – to how the past accomplishments of pioneers of movement study can enrich present and future generations.

Unlocking Laban’s Legacy

Rudolf Laban’s assertion that human movement has a harmonic structure analogous to musical harmony is one idea I would like to see taken seriously enough to be tested. While I have presented Laban’s notions in detail in The Harmonic Structure of Movement, Music, and Dance, this is not enough.

Consequently, I am launching the Advanced Movement Harmony project later this year. With measured steps, I intend to present the Choreutic and Eukinetic sequences identified by Laban in comprehensible forms that can be embodied. Many of these effort and space sequences have been published, by Laban and by others. But these representations are scattered, and in some cases, very difficult to understand, let alone embody.

So stay tuned. More about this project as the year unfolds!

More Archival Traces of Bartenieff

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Irmgard Bartenieff’s letters to Rudolf Laban, as I mentioned in the previous blog, also reveal how she adapted to American culture and redefined herself as a professional – moving beyond dance into physical therapy, dance therapy, and dance anthropology.

More Archival Traces of Bartenieff

In a letter to Laban dated July 21, 1944, Irmgard wrote:

“I went into my work with the sick abnormal body with this curiosity, and I discovered, while always working with the sick as well as with the average untrained working person, how deeply buried the joy and understanding of movement is in most people – to a degree that we really cannot be astonished about the small audiences dancers get.”

Later, in her letter to Laban dated October 12, 1947, Bartenieff added:

“As you probably remember, this ‘insulated’ business of what we used to call ‘Kunsttanz’ [art dance] has never fully given satisfaction to me – I am much rather an artisan with good tools and alert senses to perfect and understand movement in its many manifestations and work with many different people. And for that here in America is ample opportunity.”

The Laban community is very fortunate that so many archival traces are still available for study. There is still much to be learned from the pioneers of our field. Find out more in the next blog.

Movement Study Anniversaries — Past and Present

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Continuing the January theme of looking back and forward, 2017 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Language of Dance Center UK and the twentieth anniversary of the Language of Dance US. The LOD centers are dedicated to the promotion of movement literacy by linking dance notation with creative dance exploration and education.

Movement Study-Anniversaries

To commemorate these milestones, a celebration was held on October 28, 2017, at the Royal Academy of Dance in London.This event included a free workshop followed by a panel discussion on applications of the Language of Dance in the UK, US, Mexico, and Japan. A gala party followed, which also honored dance notation pioneer and LOD founder, Ann Hutchinson Guest, on the happy occasion of her 99th birthday.

Looking forward, the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS) is celebrating its fortieth anniversary with a conference in New York City May 31- June 2. Since 1978, the Institute has carried the mission of preserving, teaching, and advancing Laban-based movement studies.

As a member of the Founding Board of LIMS and one of the honorary conference chairs, I look forward to the event, which will not only honor movement analysis pioneer Irmgard Bartenieff but also highlight the many applications of movement study in all walks of life.

Irmgard Bartenieff Archive – A Miracle

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For years after Bartenieff’s death in 1981, the Laban Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies carefully stored her papers but lacked the funds for full preservation and cataloging. The papers remained, untouched and unseen, in a warehouse in Brooklyn. And then there was a fire in the warehouse.

Irmgard Barenieff-Archive-Miracle

 

A cry for help went out to the Laban community, and through crowdfunding, enough money was raised to allow Vincent Novarra, Curator of Special Collections from the University of Maryland Performing Arts Library, to rent a truck, drive to Brooklyn, and see if Bartenieff’s papers had survived. They had!

 

He brought the boxes, along with the Laban Institute papers, back to Maryland. And then the second miracle occurred. The library found funds to hire Dr. Susan Wiesner, digital humanist, to catalog the collection.  

 

None of this would have happened if Professor Karen Bradley had not laid the groundwork for housing these archives in Maryland. Three years later, the Archive is now available for public access.  

 

This means that in the future it will be possible to construct a much fuller portrait of the remarkable woman who has so profoundly influenced Laban training in the U.S.

Dance and the Written Word

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Dance is a nonverbal art. Yet, as practitioners of an evanescent art, writing is often quite important to dancers. Nijinsky kept a diary. Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Agnes DeMille, and Paul Taylor produced autobiographies. Isadora Duncan wrote essays on the dance, as did Merce Cunningham and Murray Louis. Doris Humphrey and Twyla Tharp have addressed creative issues in dance. Katherine Dunham, whose career spans anthropology and performance, has written profusely.

Dance-Written-Word

 

The list goes on and on. Dance may be a nonverbal art, but dancers are hardly silent on this subject. And the written traces of their lives and work matter.

 

Written traces not only include published works but the much larger body of correspondence, notes, sketches, diaries, photographs, even invoices. From these scattered sources a fuller picture of the individual artist emerges – their friends and family, their private thoughts, their challenges as well as their successes.

 

For example, the dance scholar Juana de Laban’s archive is housed at the Dallas Public Library. Dr. de Laban, my undergraduate dance history teacher at Southern Methodist University, was the eldest daughter of Rudolf Laban’s second marriage. Her correspondence with her father, dating from after World War II, paints a much different picture of Laban’s family relations than what is usually recounted in other sources.  

 

For this reason, the opening of the Irmgard Bartenieff Archive in the Performing Arts Library at the University of Maryland, College Park, is cause for celebration. More about this miracle in the next blog.