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.

Embodied Decision Making

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movementIn my discussion of Movement Pattern Analysis (MPA) at the public lecture session in Montreal, I aimed to demonstrate how knowledge from the field of dance became relevant and valued in the business world.

After introducing the creators of MPA – Rudolf Laban, F.C. Lawrence, and Warren Lamb – I explained that body movement is different from body language.  Body language is based on interpreting gestures and fixed positions such as “crossed arms indicate rejection.”  In MPA, the meaning is in the movement.

In analyzing movement to assess individual decision making patterns, I explained that it is necessary to distinguish between two main categories of movement.  The first is gesture – an action isolated to a single part of the body.  An example is waving with only the hand.  Sometimes there are simultaneous isolated gestures – like the politician who was shaking hands with two different people while craning his neck forward to read a paper.  What do you get from these incongruous and empty motions?

Gestures are in contrast to actions that are consistent through the body as a whole.  Lamb called these integrated movements “Posture-Gesture Mergers.”  An example is a wave that animates the whole body.

Everyone has a distinctively different way of performing Posture-Gesture Mergers, and these patterns are linked with decision making.  What we have found is that successful teams – whether in business, personal relations, and sporting or artistic enterprises – are composed of people who act true to their own way of moving, neither trying to emulate someone else or merely making gestures.

Over the past 75 years, Movement Pattern Analysis has proven itself as one well-defined approach to the study of movement.  As a discipline, however, movement study is still in its infancy.  And like all babies, it has enormous potential.  We don’t yet know what it may be when it matures.  Find out more about the possibilities of movement analysis in the next blog.

Applications of Movement Analysis

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LabanThe Montreal event included a full morning of various presentations on applications of movement analysis for the public.  The formal lectures, delivered in French or English with simultaneous translation, covered a fascinating array of disciplines and approaches, both qualitative and quantitative.

Brigitte LaChance, a Canadian physical therapist, discussed what Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) contributes to her rehabilitative work with seriously injured clients.  Odile Cazes, a French psychometrician, described how she applies Functional Analysis of the Dancing Body (AFCDM) in training osteopaths in hands-on techniques.  Canadian doctoral student Marie Soleil Fortier shared her research involving movement analysis of four musicians – a violinist, a pianist, a guitarist, and a flutist.  French anthropologist Blandine Bril outlined her quantitative studies of posture and selected work movements drawn from various cultures.

In addition, French scientist Giles Dietrich demonstrated his biomechanical approach to analyzing pivot turns in ballet and Korean dance.  Canadian doctoral student Julie Chateauvert shared her research on sign language as an expressive system.

My lecture addressed the application of movement analysis in business.  Find out more in the next blog.

Observing Movement from Two Perspectives

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LabanThe June gathering in Montreal of American, Canadian, and French movement analysts provided many opportunities for moving, observing, and talking together.  This was a daunting enterprise, for not only were participants navigating between two systems of movement analysis but also two languages – English and French.

To facilitate this exchange, there was a full day of movement workshops based on the themes of flow, weight, and relationship to space.  On the Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) side, Kathie and Pat Debenham, Cate Deicher, Tricia Bauman, and Martha Eddy led sessions respectively exploring weight and flow, combinations of weight and flow, space effort, vision and fluid systems.  On the Functional Analysis of the Dancing Body (AFCMD) side, Emmanuellle Lyon, Teresa Salerno, and Soahanta De Oliveira led sessions respectively on the related themes of circulation of movement through the body, postural muscle tone and weight, and peripheral vision and the apprehension of space.

As one participant commented, the LMA sessions utilized improvisation to evoke expressive movement while the AFCMD sessions employed set exercises linked to dance sequences to facilitate more functional movement.  This only skims the surface of convergence and divergence between the two systems.  And indeed, the workshops and collegial discussion was videotaped and will serve as material for ongoing research by the team of Harbonnier-Topin, Dussault, and Ferri.

Comparing Movement Analysis Practices

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LabanAs one of 12 Laban Movement Analysts who participated in a 2014 research project comparing our observations with those of 12 experts in the French system of Functional Analysis of the Dancing Body (AFCMD), I was keen to hear the preliminary results of the study.

The presentation of the project by co-researchers Nicole Harbonnier-Topin, Genevieve Dussault, and Catherine Ferri at the Montreal conference in early June did not disappoint.  Here is a brief report on their findings.

The study focused on making explicit the “tacit knowledge” employed by expert movement analysts.   To clarify not only what experts see, but also how they accomplish skilled movement observation, Harbonnier-Topin utilized a structured, phenomenological interview technique while asking each analyst to respond to the same videotaped dance sequence.

Eight interviews from each analyst group were chosen and transcribed.  Then these transcriptions were coded as to the various observation processes each interviewee employed, such as describing, identifying, prioritizing, inferring, evaluating, constructing meaning, etc.  Some interesting differences in choice and frequency of process use emerged between the two groups of analysts.

A secondary aspect of the research addressed convergence and divergence between the analytic systems themselves.  Based upon emerging data, the areas of flow, weight, and relationship of space emerged as areas needing additional research.

The Montreal seminar provided an opportunity for additional data collection, as participating analysts were asked to run movement workshops focused on these aspects.  Learn more in the next blog.

Reflections on Decoding Choreutics

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Choreutics has always been my favorite book by Rudolf Laban.  Since first reading parts of it as an undergraduate, it has inspired and mystified me by its occasional and seemingly abrupt shifts between systematic description and cosmic speculation.  Laban hints at a deeper significance in human movement, but how he gets from A to B is elusive, thought-provoking, and exciting.

My most recent re-reading was occasioned by leading a correspondence course on Choreutics, accompanied by  21 curious and acute readers.  I have not dispelled all mysteries as the result of this experience, but I have come to terms with what Laban was attempting to do.  And I would like to encourage all students of movement to read this seminal work.  Because what Laban was attempting to do was to shed light on an ephemeral, omnipresent, and little considered aspect of human life – body movement.  And his work should be seen to be as ground-breaking and significant as Sigmund Freud’s explorations of the human psyche.

Great thinkers must also be great story-tellers.  That is, they must find some way to convey what they perceive in terms that can be grasped by others.  Freud’s approach was to divide the human psyche into three parts:  id, ego, and super-ego.  These are virtual or symbolic structures, for there is no part of the human body or brain that can be identified as an id, an ego, or a super-ego.  Yet these represent different aspects of psychological function and serve to explain, at least in part, why people act as they do.

Laban’s approach is to divide human movement into two parts:  choreutics (space)  and eukinetics (effort).  His mode of representation is geometrical – for patterns and sequences of both space and effort are coded on three-dimensional models.  These are both literal and virtual.  Movement in space can be captured as linear lines and shapes mapped on a 3-D crystalline grid.  Kinetic energy is less tangible, and Laban’s representations are more abstact.  Effort is a “fluid shadow.”  Sometimes it flows seamlessly from inside to outside and outside to inside, like a lemniscate.  Sometimes it circulates freely, twisting and untwisting.  Sometimes kinetic energy becomes knotted and stuck….

Like Freud’s psychological constructs, the kinesphere and dynamosphere are symbolic structures.  There is no geometric grid surrounding the mover, no inner cube of dynamic energies. Laban’s geometrical models represent different aspects of the human movement experience and serve to explain, at least in part, how and why people move as they do.

Diagonal Corridors of Action

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For many years, I have been puzzled by Laban’s emphasis on the cubic diagonals.  He has embedded these oblique internal lines, which connect opposite corners of the cube, in his theories of both space and effort.

Spatially, diagonals represent the most mobilizing lines of motion, the slanted trajectories that lead to flying and falling. In addition, the cubic diagonals serve as axes for all the most familiar Choreutic sequences:  the Primary and A and B Scales.  The girdle, the axis scales, the polar triangles, and transverse 3-rings are all situated alongside or around these oblique lines, forming a variety of movement shapes encompassing an empty corridor of action.

Effort sequences also evolve around the diagonals.  In Choreutics, Laban maps various effort patterns on the cube:  the Standard Scale of the dynamosphere, a knot, a twisted circle, and a lemniscate (see Choreutics, Figures 20, 35, 36, and 38).

Like his Choreutic sequences, these Eukinetic patterns are portrayed as unfolding alongside or around a cubic diagonal.  Although he represents these dynamic phrases on a 3-D model, Laban writes that effort sequences “never have a precise place in three-dimensional space.  They work, as we know, within the movement visible in three dimensions, and are symbolised by diagonals around which they evolve like fluid shadows.”

In this sense, Laban’s use of the diagonal as an axis seems to be analogous to the hub of a wheel.  As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu observes, “We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move.”  Thus the cubic diagonals provide the center for Laban’s models of spatial and kinetic sequences.  They are the “whole” that makes the person move.

Making Choreutics Personal

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Bringing choreutics to life means finding a way to make it personally meaningful.  This is the key to being able to teach this part of Laban’s work in a lively way.

The forthcoming Octa workshop aims to support personal understanding and good teaching practice.  So there will be homework assignments that ask participants to bring their own imaginative forces to bear on moving and teaching choreutic forms.

For example, consider the Primary (aka Standard) Scales.  There are four of these 12-rings.  These lengthy scales meander across the surface of the kinesphere, passing through each of the four corners of the vertical, horizontal, and sagittal planes and returning to their starting point.

Whew – it’s hard to even describe these spatial sequences in words!  It is even more challenging to remember and perform these sinuous sequences, for their twists and turns can feel counter-intuitive….

But there are ways to bring body and mind together.  Here are a few suggestions.  The Primary Scales can be subdivided into phrases linking three or four signal points.  These shorter phrases have respectively the shape of a C or an S.  Musical accompaniment in either 3/4  or 4/4 time can help the mover phrase these trace-forms.  Careful choice of the planar starting point can give the scale a certain character.

For example, I have found that I like linking three signal points and starting and ending each phrase of the scale in the sagittal plane.  If I’m leading with the right arm, this neatly partitions the scale into two halves, the first transiting through the right hemisphere of the kinesphere, and the second through the left hemisphere.

This approach works fine for me with two of the four Primary Scales.  For the other two, I’ve had to develop a mnemonic verse to remember where I go and why.

Join me in finding new ways to bring choreutics to life in the upcoming Octa workshop July 19-21, in Golden, Colorado.

Choreutics – The Whole Enchilada

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Like many movement analysts, I’ve always thought that choreutics was synonymous with space harmony.  But now I see that choreutics is not just about space.  For Laban, choreutics is the whole enchilada.  It is body, effort, shape, and space – movement as an integration of the physical, psychological, and spiritual.

I will be incorporating this new perspective in the forthcoming Octa workshop, Bringing Choreutics to Life.  The focus will still be on space, but with the aim of using body, effort, and shape to experience more fully the patterned trace-forms that Laban identified as a beneficial physical practice.

Close examination reveals that Laban had two aims in writing Choreutics.  The first was to present his descriptive framework of human movement, which he conceived to be a physical and psychological phenomenon.  Consequently, Laban’s framework has two domains:  the kinesphere and the dynamosphere.  The kinesphere encompasses visible motion through space, conceived as “trace-forms.”  The dynamosphere contains the thoughts and feelings that give rise to physical actions, conceived as effortful “shadow-forms.”

While these two distinctly different aspects of movement must be separated for analytical purposes, Laban swears that “in reality they are entirely inseparable from each other.”  And this gives rise to his second aim, to postulate a harmonic structure in human movement, a means by which things that are different in fundamental nature (such as effort and space) are brought into agreement.

In other words, Choreutics is about differentiation and integration.  It is about how body, effort, shape, and space cohere in meaningful human actions.  It is meant to be a physical practice, but one with deeper significance.  Find out more in the forthcoming Octa workshop, Bringing Choreutics to Life.