Writing |

I 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.

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….

Writing Meaning in Motion

Capturing Movement’s Traces in Written Forms