Rehearsing Laban’s Prototypes

Posted on April 7, 2016 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Polar triangles, axis and girdle scales, primary scales, and the A and B scales – these were the Laban prototypes we wanted to study. Thus the research project began with a crash course in space harmony for three Ohio University dance faculty (Travis Gatling, Tresa Randall, and Marina Walchi).

We only had three days to prepare our performers (all relative newcomers to Laban theory) for the motion capture/videotaping session. We wanted the dancers not only to remember the prototypic sequences but also to perform them well. Consequently, each morning and afternoon rehearsal began with a Bartenieff Fundamentals warm up as an inroad for connecting body and space.

As the week proceeded, the dancers were introduced to the three geographies of the kinesphere – the octahedron, the cube, and the icosahedron. They learned the dimensional and diagonal scales as Laban’s models of stable and mobile trajectories respectively. They embodied the cardinal planes, tracing the peripheral edges and central diameters. They were introduced to transverse movement and learned the A and B scales.

We then moved on to prototypes drawing on the more subtle “deflected directions.” Thus the dancers were taught the polar triangles, axis and girdle scales, and finally the most complex and counter-intuitive primary scales.

In the final afternoon rehearsal, we jointly decided who would perform each choreutic sequence and worked on fine-tuning the phrasing. The acid test would start the following morning, when we gathered in the campus TV studio for the motion capture and video recording session.

The “Laban Prototypes” Project

Posted on April 5, 2016 by Carol-Lynne Moore

In 2008, Professor Madeleine Scott and I ran a choreutics-based research project at Ohio University. The project examined Laban’s claim that fragments of the choreutic forms (aka spatial scales and rings) compose a fundamental alphabet of human movement.

The examination had two parts. First, we set out to duplicate some of the choreutic forms that Laban represented as geometrical line drawings. Motion capture technology is able to produce a similar kind of record, for it captures the dancer’s movement as a linear tracery of light, allowing one to see the trace-forms of the dance without the dancer. Secondly, dance class sequences, spontaneously improvised dance passages, and excerpts of a choreographed work were also recorded using motion capture technology. In addition to the MOCAP recordings, video recordings, taken from front, back, both sides, and above provided additional data for analysis.

The following blogs describe the research process and preliminary findings.

“God Geometricizes….” Said Madame Blavatsky

Posted on March 3, 2016 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Artistic and scientific circles were not the only circles that overlapped in the fin de siècle period. European artists of the period were also involved in various secret spiritual societies that flourished in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

For example, the painter Wassily Kandinsky was an ardent follower of Theosophy, one of the occult spiritual movements of the period, and one that was very attractive to artists. As religious historian Mircea Eliade notes, avant garde European artists “utilized the occult as a powerful weapon in their rebellion against the bourgeois establishment and its ideology.”

Novel spiritual practices were not merely a form of rebellion for the European avant garde. The occult revival also gave artists new ways to think about the nature of art as it moved beyond representation and symbolism toward formalism and abstraction. Kandinsky drew upon precepts of Theosophy, such as the quote above by Theosophy guru, Madame Blavatsky, to theorize a spiritual visual art composed of only form and color. By these means alone, Kandinsky wrote, the artist could “cause vibrations in the soul.”

Laban was also attracted to the occult. During his career as a painter (1899- 1919), he supposedly associated with three esoteric groups: the Free Masons, the Ordo Templi Orientis, and the Rosicrucians. The extent of Laban’s involvement is a matter of speculation. Nevertheless, in Choreutics, his treatise on the geometry of human movement, Laban does acknowledge that his subject “necessitates a certain spiritual emphasis.”

What does this mean? Find out more in the correspondence course, “Decoding Choreutics,” beginning March 26.

Was Laban Seeing Double?

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Carol-Lynne Moore

More than any of his other books in English, Choreutics reveals Laban’s dual vision as a dance artist and movement scientist. The forthcoming course, “Decoding Choreutics,” examines Laban’s double vision from more than one angle.

For example, Choreutics and the whole fabric of Laban’s space harmony theory can be seen as a design source for dance. The various scales and “rhythmic circles” can be mined as abstract patterns for movement creation. In this sense, Choreutics is analogous to various design sources utilized by Art Nouveau artists at the turn of the 20^th century.

The fin de siècle was a time when artistic and scientific circles overlapped. In their stylized renderings of natural forms, Art Nouveau artists drew upon scientific illustrations. A case in point is Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature. Haeckel (1834-1919) was a biologist-philosopher whose beautiful illustrations of biological forms, ranging from microscopic creatures to sea life, plants, and animals, inspired the artists of his day.

One of the Art Nouveau artists who drew upon Haeckel’s illustrations was Hermann Obrist, with whom Laban studied in Munich. Originally trained as a botanist, Obrist the artist moved progressively from realistic depiction of natural forms to increasingly abstract and geometrical designs. Laban’s own geometricizing of the biomorphic curves of human movement in Choreutics follows a similar trajectory.

Led by the Art Nouveau movement, early 20^th century artists were looking beyond the surface appearance of visual objects to reveal underlying patterns and organizing principles. With the advent of the atomic age, scientists were doing the same. Thus when Laban, the artist, turned his eyes to dance and human movement, he, too, was seeing double.

On Choreography

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Carol-Lynne Moore

In the preface to Choreutics, Laban defines “choreography” as the “designing or writing of circles.” While we use the word today to designate composing dances, Laban was obviously familiar with the origins of the term, which come from two Greek words – khoros and graphein.

Khoros refers both to the Greek chorus and to the circular space in which they danced, while graphein obviously means to write. Laban extends the “writing of circles” to mean notating dance and movement and uses this as a way to mention his own system of dance notation.

Choreography has another meaning for Laban. In a slightly modified form, Choreographie is the title of an earlier book, published in German in 1926. As Vera Maletic notes, “A well-informed translation and annotation of this book is long overdue.” This is because this work presents key aspects of what has come to be known as Choreutics and Space Harmony. In fact, Maletic believes that Choreographie was the first outline of Choreutics, which can be taken as its second volume.”

The English reading public must wait for a well-informed translation of Choreographie. But we have the second volume. Join me in decoding this masterwork in the upcoming Tetra seminar. Learn more….

Chasing Laban

Posted on February 16, 2016 by Carol-Lynne Moore

In Choreutics, Laban mentions in passing a dizzying array of subjects —

Pythagoras, crystals, Lissajous curves, symmetry, semitones and overtones, lemniscates, tetrahedra, the Golden Mean, range of motion….

Through many years of studying Laban’s published and unpublished writings and drawings, I have often found it necessary to “bone up” on various subjects that he only mentions in passing. This is not easy, because Laban seldom specifies his sources. Yet they must have been substantial.

Indeed Walter Sorrell notes, “I only know from hearsay that Rudolf Laban was a voracious reader whose thirst for knowledge embraced everything from religion and philosophy to literature and science.” Laban’s student and colleague, Sylvia Bodmer, concurs — Laban “could talk with authority on practically any subject – science, psychology – with knowledge.”

In trying to follow Laban, I’ve learned many other things. But just when I think I’ve caught up, Laban skates ahead, leaving me with more to ponder.

However, the fun is in the chase. Find out for yourself in the upcoming Tetra.

Decoding Laban’s Choreutics III

Posted on February 11, 2016 by Carol-Lynne Moore

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

Posted on February 9, 2016 by Carol-Lynne Moore

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

Posted on February 4, 2016 by Carol-Lynne Moore

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

Posted on February 2, 2016 by Carol-Lynne Moore

Around 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….