Observation is the most demanding of all the skills involved in mastering Laban Movement Analysis (LMA). I must confess to being a slow learner. While I have been teaching observation for over 35 years, it has taken me a long time to grasp why so many students struggle and emerge, even after a year of Certificate Program training, still feeling very insecure about using LMA as an observer.
In the following blogs I share 5 tips for teaching movement observation and analysis. Before sharing these tips, however, I want to briefly discuss why observing movement using Laban’s taxonomy is difficult.
Every observer is biased. Adult learners are not blank slates. They have been observing and making sense of movement their whole lives. This means each learner has a way of categorizing movements. These categories are seldom identical with the ones Laban developed. Thus the student must set aside his/her own way of seeing movement to adopt Laban’s system.
Movement has “no fixed points.” Movement is dynamic, changeable, and ephemeral. Even a movement sequence that has been “set” will vary a little with each performance. These variations frustrate students, particularly at the beginning. Or as one student complained, “Of course I could observe her movement if only she would hold still!”
Laban’s system is parsimonious. There are only a few categories with which the observer must capture any movement a human being can do. For example, pounding a stake into the ground and passionately embracing someone share the effort quality of increasing pressure, although the actions have little else in common. Laban Movement Analysis requires the observer to draw out or abstract effort and space elements from quite dissimilar movements.
Students must not only see, they must also “be seen.” Because Laban’s system is abstract, it serves admirably as a general approach for describing movements of all sorts. But it takes time for a student to be able to identify the effort and space elements that are common in quite different looking actions. To develop confidence, the student observer must not only see, but also have what he or she is seeing confirmed by a more experienced observer.
Analysis alone is worth very little. No one really wants a movement analysis – they want to improve a tennis serve, find a way to relieve back pain, discern whether a politician is or is not lying. In other words, movement analysis should not be an end in itself. Like any other tool, it should be used purposefully to solve a problem or answer a question. Discovery makes movement analysis relevant.