The Tetra Takes Off

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Twenty-one brave readers on four continents began the Tetra seminar, Decoding Laban’s Choreutics on March 26th. This “great books” correspondence course is focused on Laban’s posthumously published masterpiece, also known as The Language of Movement.

The Tetra Takes Off via Movescape Center

Over a six-week period, we are exploring the book two chapters at a time. I use the word “exploring” purposefully, for I see this course as a journey of discovery for all twenty-two of us.

It is certainly proving to be a journey of discovery for me. As the guide, I have two tasks. First, I assign questions to provide a focus for each reading assignment. Secondly, I write a commentary on the assigned reading. These commentaries provide background information to help illuminate Laban’s thinking, link themes that recur across chapters, and, in some cases, clarify what Laban appears to be saying.

I have always found some parts of the book to be mystifying. I don’t expect to be able to dispel all the mysteries. However, I am finding that some confusion is due to errors, particularly in the illustrations and notations that accompany them. Perhaps someday an edition of this significant theoretical work can be published with an errata sheet!

For the moment, it is enough to have thoughtful companions and interesting exchange of views as the Tetra takes off.

Decoding Choreutics – Key #2

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As an artist-scientist, Laban is concerned not only with the geometry of movement, but also with its expressive meaning.  This dual vision gives rise to his theory of natural affinities between lines of motion and effort qualities.

Decoding Choreutics with Movescape

Laban’s working out of these correlations, introduced in Choreutics in Chapter 3, is intriguing but not entirely original.  The expressive value of line and form has its roots in theory of empathy propounded by late 19th and early 20th century  psychologists and art theorists.

 

According to the theory of empathy, we project our visceral and kinesthetic feelings into the objects we perceive.  In order to be expressive, the art object must possess certain formal qualities, but it need not be represent anything in particular.

 

Art Nouveau artist August Endell went on to spell out the empathic reactions aroused by various kinds of lines.  Straight and curved lines, narrow and wide lines, short and long lines, and the direction of the line were all correlated with various sensations.  For example, length or shortness of a line are functions of time, while the thickness and thinness are functions of tension.

 

I’ve been unable to find a full description of Endell’s system, but it seems to me that the germ of Laban’s theory of effort affinities can be linked back to his days as an Art Nouveau artist.  The fact that effort notation postdates the development of direction symbols suggests that Laban may have assumed that the movement dynamics were inherent in the spatial form.

 

Want more clues for deepening your understanding of Laban’s theories?  Register for “Decoding Laban’s Choreutics,” beginning March 26.

Decoding Choreutics – Key #1

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Another example of Laban’s double vision is his concept of the kinesphere and dynamosphere as dual domains of human movement.  To represent both domains, Laban utilizes the cube.

Decoding Choreutics via Movescape

With regard to the kinesphere, Laban uses the cube quite literally.  Its corners, edges, and internal diagonals serve as a kind of longitude and latitude for mapping movement in the space around the dancer’s body.

 

With regard to the dynamosphere, Laban uses the cube formally to represent patterns of effort change.  This shift in how the model should be interpreted is complicated further by Laban’s use of direction symbols to stand for effort qualities and combinations.

 

When Laban wrote Choreutics in 1938-39, the effort symbols had not yet been created.  Consequently, his dual use of direction symbols to stand in for effort obscures the discussion, but not entirely.

 

To decode the models discussed in Chapters 3, 6, and 9, it is only necessary to translate the direction symbols into effort qualities and combinations.  Once this is done, Laban’s discussion of dynamospheric patterns becomes clear.

 

Want more keys?  Register for the correspondence course, “Decoding Laban’s Choreutics,” beginning March 26.

 

On Choreography

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Untitled design (10)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

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Untitled design (2)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

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Untitled design (9)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

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Untitled design (6)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

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Untitled design (4)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

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Untitled designAround 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….

“Space Harmony” – A Misnomer?

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Rudolf Laban liked to coin new words to designate the movement theories he was developing. During the very fertile period of his career in Germany (1919-1929) he coined two words: “Choreutics” —dealing with the spatial forms of movement, and “Eukinetics” —dealing with qualities of kinetic energy.

Laban spent the final two decades of his career in England (1938-1958). During this period he Anglicized his movement terminology. His Eukinetic theories were presented under the term “Effort,” and Choreutics became known in Laban training programs as “Space Harmony.”

Illustration of woman meditating, symbol flower of life

Close examination of Laban’s posthumously published masterpiece, Choreutics, suggests that “Space Harmony” is a misnomer. As presented in this work, “Choreutics” does not deal only with space. It also addresses the body, effort, and shape.

Indeed, only four of the twelve chapters concentrate on spatial form. Three chapters address the body, four chapters discuss effort, and one chapter introduces notions of shape.

When carefully examined, it is clear that Choreutics is a description of movement harmony, not “Space Harmony.” Laban states this clearly in the Preface, where he defines “choreutics” as “the practical study of the various forms of (more or less) harmonized movement.”

In “Decoding Laban’s Choreutics,” the Tetra seminar beginning in March, I take participants on a guided journey through this mysterious book. This journey of discovery can be done without leaving the house, but not without leaving one’s arm chair.

Find out more…