No One Wants a Bar of Soap

Posted on by

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.

Body Language and Social Order

Posted on by

In Body Language and Social Order, Albert Scheflen argues that body language is used for political control, manipulation, and the maintenance of power and class hierarchies. The book reveals how specific bodily behaviors in public places reinforce the status quo. Scheflen utilizes numerous candid photographs of men, women, and children to support his arguments.

When I first read this book many years ago, I found it deeply disturbing. I felt that body movement was a liberating force, not a binding one. Scheflen’s perspective made me reflect.

MoveScape Center, Denver CO

While reflecting, I began to look more closely at the behaviors Scheflen had flagged. Most involved still poses or isolated gestures. In other words, Scheflen was not actually looking at movement of the whole body. He was observing what was static, not what was dynamic. No wonder he concluded that body language tends to preserve order and social stability!

As Rudolf Laban observes, stability and mobility alternate in human movement behavior. Continuous movement of the whole body is punctuated by moments of stillness and by instances when only a single part of the body is in motion. These postures and gestures can be singled out, just as camera captures a moment in time and freezes it forever.

However, there is a big difference between looking at snapshots isolated from the stream of bodily movement and observing the stream itself. In the next blog, I examine differences between the study of body language and the analysis of body movement in more detail.

Rudolf Laban, Revolutionary

Posted on by

laban

Around 1913, a visual artist named Rudolf Laban gave up painting to pursue a career in dance.  He admitted he seemed to have chosen “the most despised profession.”  At the time, dance was the poor relation of all the other arts.  Laban set out to change that.

Over the next 25 years, he performed, choreographed, and taught – activities familiar to most professional dancers.  But Laban’s efforts went beyond this.  He wrote about dance, he organized a dancers’ union, he initiated dance conferences, and he inspired a populist dance movement for amateur performers.

In addition, Laban labored tirelessly to give dance what the other arts already possessed –  a way to record  masterworks (analogous to musical notation) and a theory delineating elements of movement (analogous to theories of line, color, and composition in the visual arts).  According to Irmgard Bartenieff, the systems Laban devised for describing and notating dance and movement make it possible to study and work with these “extremely elusive phenomena in tangible ways.”

Gradually Laban’s genius drove him to a broader consideration of the role of movement in human life.  He pioneered new practices in work study, stage movement for actors,  education, and therapy. He summed up these varied endeavors in the following way:

“It has often been said that I intend to reform in all the fields of human activities in which I have been working….  The truth is that I have advocated and experimentally tried to pay more attention to human movement – bodily and mental – which is obviously at the basis of all human activity. Movement research and movement education have been neglected in our time and some failures of our civilization are surely influenced, if not produced by this neglect.”

It has been over 50 years since Laban wrote those words.  But paying attention to human movement is still revolutionary.