Effort and Human Potential

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“We live only part of the life we are given,” writes Michael Murphy in The Future of the Body.  “Growing acquaintance with once-foreign cultures, new discoveries about our subliminal depths, and the dawning recognition that each social group reinforces just some human attributes while neglecting or suppressing others … suggests that we harbor a range of capacities that no single philosophy or psychology has fully embraced.”

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Rudolf Laban would certainly agree.  “Preference for a few effort combinations only results in a lack of effort balance,” Laban notes.  “New dances and new ideas of behavior arise by a process of compensation in which a more or less conscious attempt is made to regain the use of lost or neglected effort patterns.”

If we live only a part of the life we are given, it is because we habitually use only a few effort combinations. To me, the great benefit of effort study is to experience, if only fleetingly, other ways of being in the world.

While I was first studying Laban Movement Analysis, I had a profound experience embodying an effort combination of the Spell Drive.  I momentarily became someone else and glimpsed an unfamiliar inner landscape.  This was not a part of the world that I normally inhabit.  Maybe I didn’t really want to live here.  But it was wonderful to discover a new realm of experience and to realize that I could consciously choose to enter this new world simply by moving in a certain way.

To me, the study of effort is the study of human potential, a chance to access a greater range of capacities that are not just physical in nature, but personal, psychological, and perhaps even spiritual.

Effort Range: Home Base and New Territory

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“A healthy human being can have complete control of his kinesphere and dynamosphere,” according to Rudolf Laban.   This suggests that a wide range of motion is both desirable and achievable.

And yet, each of us has effort and shape preferences that define our way of being in the world. These familiar movement patterns anchor us; they provide a “home base.” 

On the other hand, it’s fun to move beyond this comfort zone and experience novel dynamic moods and places.  This summer, MoveScape Center workshops provide both — a chance to revel in the comfort of home base and/or the opportunity to explore unfamiliar movement landscapes.  

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In the “Introduction to Movement Pattern Analysis” three-day seminar, you will have your own movement profile constructed.  You will learn more about your unique effort and shape range and how these movement patterns relate to decision-making processes.  This seminar draws upon the work of renowned movement analyst, Warren Lamb, to illustrate how movement study enhances the understanding of self and others.

In the “Expanding the Dynamosphere” two-day workshop, you will explore new movement territories, visiting the lands of Action, Passion, Vision, and Spell.  The emphasis is on awakening movement imagination, expanding your dynamic range, and finding new paths for greater expressivity.

It’s your choice – the comforts of home?  New frontiers?  Find out more ….

Demons Into Goddesses Through Effort Magic

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Laban personifies each of the eight basic actions in Mastery of Movement. He characterizes Floating (all indulging qualities of Weight, Time, and Space) as the Goddess and Punching (all fighting effort qualities) as the Demon. He goes on to note that it will not be difficult for the actor or dancer to depict these characters, for we “remember the age-old symbolism of love’s soft floating movements, and of the violent and abrupt movements of hatred.”

During the recent MoveScape Center Mastery of Movement Beautiful girl following butterflies on a mountaincorrespondence course, Rebecca Nordstrom created a sequence of basic actions and imagined this movement sequence as a scenario involving the Demon and the Goddess. It is a beautiful example of how imagination can bring Laban’s effort theories to life.

 

Becky has graciously allowed me to share her scenario….

Scale of moods order: Punch, slash, wring, press, glide, dab, flick, float.

A demon looks at the large oblong object that mysteriously appeared in his lair. First, he strikes it with his fist, punching repeatedly to try to break it open. He then slings it violently and repeatedly around the room sending it crashing into the walls, floor, and ceiling (slashing). When that doesn’t work, he grabs it in his hands and tries to twist it open with great force (wringing). Lastly, he leans against it with all his force trying to crush it (pressing). Exhausted, he collapses into a heap and falls asleep.

Out of a hole at one end of the object a veiled figure slowly, gently and steadily emerges (gliding). Once free of the object the figure quickly but gently pokes at the surrounding veil with long delicate fingers and toes (dabbing). Once loosened, the veil is gently but quickly tossed aside with flicking gestures.

Now completely free of the veil, the figure begins to spread its wings and gently, delicately rises. As the butterfly goddess knew, she was only able to emerge from her chrysalis cage with the help of the unsuspecting demon. She hovers over his sleeping body to whisper her thanks before floating gently out of his lair and into the bright sunshine.

Space Games

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I have space toys, but Laban liked to play space games. He played one game over and over and over and over again and again ….

 

His favorite game went something like this: start at one corner of a polyhedron – it can be a cube, octahedron, or icosahedron. Then trace a line touching every corner only once and return to the corner where you began.

 

Unpublished drawings in the Laban Archive in  England show that Laban played this game over and over again. When he found a pattern that he liked and one that made bodily sense, it became a Choreutic sequence.

 

 

Too often, Choreutic forms are taught through imitation and students are expected to accept the sequence as something “good for you.” Where is the fun in that?

 

In “Bringing Choreutics to Life” we approach Laban’s geometrical sequences with a sense of play. We will work with props and music; we will sing while we do them; we’ll turn them into folk dances and swordplay; and we will search for fragments of Choreutic forms in dance, mime, and circus acts. In short, we will have serious fun!

 

Find out more about the Octa….

 

 

 

 

The Octa Is Coming

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In July, the Octa workshop, “Bringing Choreutics to Life” takes Laban’s space harmony theory into practice. This three-day workshop presents key Choreutic concepts in a way that is accessible for participants new to Laban’s ideas as well as experienced movement analysts.

Laban himself admitted that “our mental functions employ geometrical symbols to express orientation in space, but generally our feeling does not comprehend living movement within geometrical plasticity.” In other words, both understanding and embodying choreutics can be steep learning curve!

 

I ought to know. I’ve been teaching choreutics for over 30 years. While I love the material, I am keenly aware that many students struggle.   In the Octa, I plan to demonstate a variety of ways to present Choreutics and to make it lively and meaningful.

 

Find out more….

Body Movement Is In

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Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, was fascinated by how analytical thinking leads us to misperceive our own experience of being alive.  For Bergson, life is an unceasing, continuous, undivided process, a sort of cosmic movement.  Yet, we tend to conceive our lives as passing from feeling to feeling or thought to thought, as if each is separate, unchanging thing.  In reality, feelings and thoughts are themselves in a state of flux, and it is the experience of continuous changes that is central to the experience of being alive.

Bergson illustrates this view with a movement example.  Let us consider a movement that begins with the arms in an open position, and ends with the arms folded across the chest.  The movement of the arms will trace a line in space.  That line, like any line, can be broken into a series of points.  With high speed photography, multiple placements of the arms as they traverse a line from the open to the crossed position can be captured and made discrete.  But as Bergson points out, these snapshots turn the movement into a series of static positions.  The movement itself is something else.

Echoing Bergson, Rudolf Laban writes, “In the past we have clung too stubbornly to a static conception of our environment, and consequently to a misconception of life in general, as well as of our own personal lives.”  The body language proponents are clinging to a static and mechanical conception of bodily being.  They are missing the continuity of change that is the essential quality of movement.  Consequently, they misconstrue the meaning of nonverbal actions.

Therefore, body language should be out.  Body movement should be in.

Body Language Is Out

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Virtually any time I tell someone that I am a movement analyst, I am met with a puzzled look and the query –“Oh, like body language?”

Warren Lamb hated having Movement Pattern Analysis characterized as body language, and rightly so.  Popular treatises on body language primarily focus on poses and isolated gestures and affix simple meanings to these.

For example, while trawling the internet recently, I came across a “scientific portal on body language” that explained the meaning of various poses and gestures.  For example, one photo showed a man (his head cropped out) seated in a narrow and erect pose.  According to the explanation, this position conveys interest or surprise.

Another headless photo showed the fellow with his arms crossed over his chest.  This gesture was said to indicate being defensive.

Of course, postures and gestures do have meaning.  But poses and gestures come and go in an ongoing stream of human behavior.   Just as the meaning of individual words can change depending upon how they are used in a sentence, so too the meaning of poses and gestures must change in the context of the ongoing movement flow.

As Warren Lamb would say, there are so many ways to fold the arms over the chest.  Surely there are worlds of meaning to be perceived when we stop thinking of bodily action as a set of static punctuation points – arms open, arms crossed – and start to perceive it as a process of change, one that can be done in many ways.

Exertion and Recuperation

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Untitled design (1)When the dancer Rudolf Laban began to study work movement in British factories, two concerns predominated.  The first was efficiency; the second was fatigue.  By the 1940s, of course, there were laws governing the length of the workday and providing additional protection for the health and safety of workers.  Nevertheless, repetitive activity of any sort is tiring.  Human beings are not machines.  We cannot repeat any motion endlessly without the need for variation.

In turning his dancer’s eyes to repetitive labor, Laban identified a basic rhythm.  He recognized that there is some form of preparation, followed by a more intense phase of effortful exertion, and concluding with some form of recovery and recuperation.  Laban found that the concluding phase of recuperation was often overlooked in the  “efficient” ways of working prescribed by the time and motion specialists.

Laban took a different approach. As I describe in Meaning in Motion, he believed that recuperation did not mean passive rest.  Rather he looked for effective ways for a worker to recover actively through effort variation.  For example, if the job function required downward pressure, Laban introduced an upward movement with released pressure somewhere in the movement phrase.  This allowed him to build recuperative actions into the job function itself.

Fatigue remains a problem in the workplace today, despite the fact that jobs are increasingly sedentary.  Nevertheless, the importance of building active recuperation into the rhythm of the workday remains a concern.  Find out more in the following blog.

No One Wants a Bar of Soap

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There is a well-known marketing adage – no one wants a bar of soap. Customers want to be clean, have soft skin, or smell nice. By extension, no one wants a Laban Movement Analysis. Instead, our customers want to dance better, find a way to stop back pain, or gain insight into self and other.

Rudolf Laban called movement “man’s magic mirror.” He saw that movement reflects motivations, thoughts, and feelings. He drew analogies between the mastery of movement and the mastery of self.

In the Laban Movement Analysis world to date, however, there are only three outstanding applications of movement analysis that link movement and meaning: the Kestenberg Movement Profile (nonverbal aspects of human development and parent-child interactions), Choreometrics  (folk dance style, work movement, and climate), and Movement Pattern Analysis (decision making patterns of self and others).

Several factors make these applications of movement analysis outstanding:

1)  Human movement behavior is observed and coded systematically,
2)  Movement data is linked to meaning in ways that are both explicit and transparent,
3)  The interpretations of movement behavior derived from these applications of movement analysis are accessible and make sense to the lay public.

Movement analysis is most valuable when it yields benefits. Find out how Movement Pattern Analysis can benefit you at the upcoming Embodied Decision Making course on Labor Day weekend.

Embodiment: What Goes Around, Comes Around

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Vancouver Canucks VS. Calgary FlamesA wise man once observed that prayers are always answered. But what comes to you is not what you think you want, but what you embody.

Movement Pattern Analysis developed by Warren Lamb provides an objective picture of what an individual embodies and how individual patterns of movement are linked to decision-making processes.

Lamb found that all of us have a preferred pattern of taking action, and we will act in accordance with those preferences whenever we can. Power comes from understanding your preferred pattern and how to use it most effectively.

Movement Pattern Analysts never tell clients that they must try to change their movement patterns or their decision-making preferences. Ian Marks, Chief Executive of Trebor, a British company that used Movement Pattern Analysis profiles for over 25 years, summarized this perfectly. He noted, “We have found that people discover there is no good profile or bad profile once they learn their strengths and how to use those, and when they learn how to cover for their weaknesses.”

We can’t promise to answer your prayers, but we can help you understand what you embody in the Labor Day course, Embodied Decision Making.  Find out more….