Figure drawing was the core of academic art training when Laban was studying at the great French academy, the École des Beaux Arts around 1900. He was able to employ this training in his later career as a dance and movement theorist in three ways.
First, artist’s anatomy includes the study of joint structures. These joints bend, extend, and rotate in certain directions, and not in others.
Secondly, while individual bodies differ, there is a normal range governing the proportion of different body parts well-known to artists since the Classical and Renaissance periods.
Finally, depiction of bodies in motion rests on a basic understanding of the normal range of motion of various body parts.
Laban drew on these aspects of figure drawing to theorize the relations between body and space from a dancer’s perspective. Find out more in the next blog.