Several years ago, while I was teaching Laban Movement Analysis at the University of Surrey, I encountered one of our Korean students outside the library. She approached me, cradling something in her hand. When she opened her hand, I saw it was a small leaf.

“Look,” she cried with delight. “Doesn’t this have a beautiful shape!”

We had, earlier in the day, been doing a class on shape. I had to agree, the leaf did have a lovely shape. But what was even more beautiful to me was the student’s delight. Somehow, the movement class on shape had opened her awareness to all kinds of shapes around her. She was seeing the world with new eyes.

Movement is omnipresent, yet slippery. It disappears even as it is occurring. It requires some effort to bring movement into awareness, to keep it in focus, to think about it. Rudolf Laban’s great contribution was to provide ways of seeing and thinking about movement. As his protégé, the English choreographer Geraldine Stephenson recalls, Laban “taught us that movement was fundamental to living. As students our senses were opened to movement in nature – trees, clouds, sea – and we saw movement in paintings, sculpture, sound and music.”

Movement study is a way of seeing, a way of making connections. And this is the strongest and best argument for making it a part of general education.

Effective communication and critical thinking are often cited as goals of general education at the university level. Movement study can contribute to the development of both these skills.

It is widely acknowledged that communication has two parts: the verbal and the nonverbal. As the anthropologist Edward Hall explains, words make up only a fraction of any message. The movements accompanying speech convey more significant information. Nonverbal behavior “stresses feedback on how people are feeling, ways of avoiding confrontation, and the inherent logic that is the birthright of all people.”

Laban Movement Analysis provides a means for students to become more aware of their own movement preferences, to extend their movement repertoire, and to become more reflective about nonverbal behavior. This knowledge can be applied to improve communication skills.

Movement analysis can enhance critical thinking about the nonverbal aspects of face-to-face interactions. While nonverbal behavior may account for 90% of human communication, it is often perceived and responded to subliminally. This gives rise to what I have characterized in Beyond Words as “body knowledge/body prejudice.” We each have a private lexicon of body knowledge that is the result of our unique experiences with different movements and the meanings we have come to associate with them. This body knowledge influences our reactions to the nonverbal behavior of others. But because we seldom consciously think about movement, we tend to respond automatically. When we don’t pay enough attention to details of an action or to its context, we can misjudge the meaning of the movement. Then “body knowledge” becomes “body prejudice.”

The study of Laban Movement Analysis enables students to perceive movement more objectively and to think critically about nonverbal behavior. In an increasingly global world, wherein cultural factors complicate face-to-face interactions, reflecting rather than just reacting becomes a significant skill.

“The first inner vision of a choreutic shape and the first inner vision of any architectural creation or an abstract drawing have a great resemblance. The invention of an architectural, plastic or pictorial form is, in reality, a choreutic phrase.”

Rudolf Laban, Mastery of Movement, p. 115

Over my years in the field of dance and movement studies, I became increasingly curious about exploring the relationship between architectural practice and movement.

For some, this may seem an odd pairing. Architects design and create solid, tangible structures that are more or less unchanging over time; dancers articulate liminal traceforms that vanish before your eyes. But a closer look easily reveals what’s essential to both disciplines: space as a medium for creating three-dimensional patterns.

So it was with that perspective that I embarked on a project to see what Laban Movement Analysis could bring to the education of architecture students. Could a choreutic perspective inform and expand their sense of space? How might it influence approaches to the shaping of space and form? Could it support the students’ ability to “read” sites more sensitively? Could it inspire a greater imagination for the uses of materials?

With the collaborative assistance of architecture faculty at UW-Milwaukee I began to explore these questions in 2010.

Since that time we’ve developed approaches that link Laban-based movement study to architectural studio projects; that is, we develop movement “research” for students to engage that will support the execution of specific design assignments.

One of our more successful projects addressed the architectural notion of “suture.” In most cases people consider the space between forms or objects as a void keeping them apart. The “suture” proposes the opposite; it suggests that the space, far from being neutral, is active and serves to hold its surrounding forms together. Furthermore, the space can have a character of its own apart from the forms that surround it. Architects need to acquire the skill of visualizing the space without its peripheral or enclosing solids.

We created a research sequence that involved solo and group movement work, observation and drawing, which culminated in creating 3-dimensional models of a suture. The results – unusual and evocative expressions of space – lead to rich discussions about the relationship of movement and spatial/architectural design.

As one student noted: The movement work was successful in prompting us to consider our bodies as space-making devices rather than as mere sculptural objects. [It] forced us to think about space in a much more intimate way, not as vast and far removed from us, but as something we can immediately touch or express with our bodies.

Clearly, Laban-based movement work can contribute a valuable component to architecture education. The work continues.

Over the past three centuries, knowledge has proliferated. At the same time, knowledge has become increasingly specialized. At the university level, this has led to a proliferation of departments, with courses of study carefully demarcated along disciplinary borders that are not particularly permeable. Indeed, the departmental structure of most universities makes it difficult for inter-disciplinary initiatives to succeed.

Nevertheless, it is the mission of the university to educate, and an educated person is supposed to know a little something about all fields of human knowledge. Enter the general education requirements. In our postmodern, globalized world, general education is meant to address the humanities, sciences, mathematics, social sciences, and “global culture.”

Usually there are a variety of courses that a student can take to fulfill these general education requirements. However, it is rare to find a required course that compares and contrasts the kinds of knowledge generated by these different disciplines. The student is left to his or her own devices to connect the dots. Or not.

This is where movement study could have enormous impact. Movement is a common denominator of human endeavor; it crosses disciplinary lines. Irmgard Bartenieff, who pioneered Laban Movement Analysis training in the U.S., was characterized as someone who thought “mind, body, and action are one, that the individual is one with the culture, and function with expression, space with energy, art with work with environment with religion.” When you studied with her, according to Marcia Siegel, “you could never again see the universe as a collection of isolated particles.”

Movement connects. Laban Movement Analysis can help college students make connections among the very specialized disciplines of our postmodern world.

Courses in Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) have become core curriculum, primarily in university dance and dance therapy programs. However, LMA courses are also appearing in other disciplinary areas such as theatre, music composition and conducting, computer animation, and even architecture – disciplines in which some understanding of human movement is relevant. Movement analysis helps future dancers, actors, and conductors move more expressively and creatively while enabling would-be animators, composers, and architects to observe movement more precisely. In all these fields, Laban’s work is appreciated for its utilitarian value.

Movement analysis is obviously useful in disciplines that involve movement and the representation of movement. But could movement study also be useful beyond such disciplines? In anticipation of the publication of Meaning in Motion: Introducing Laban Movement Analysis, I intend to revisit the role of movement study at the college level. What kind of knowledge does movement analysis generate? Does the understanding of human movement have a role to play in general education?

In the following series of blogs, Cate Deicher and I explore these questions and argue that Laban’s ideas are more than merely useful.