Summary of Interview

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How WL found out about Laban and the AMS Studio, Manchester: a lecture by Theatre Workshop. His work in factories. The ‘Effort Man’. Laban as Guru and healer: Lamb’s assessment of the man. Avoiding mechanical movement: the need for movement education. The Efforts in the 1950s. Harmony of Effort and Shaping, an aesthetic dimension. Inner and Outer movement. Reflections on the above: Theatre Workshop and Laban. Why Warren was chosen by Laban to work on the Efforts? The teaching Lisa Ullmann and Sylvia Bodmer at the AMS, Manchester. Ullmann and Laban. Laban teaches the diagonal scale. Teaching at the AMS, Manchester. Effort and Flow. Effort-Shape. Polarities of Movement Factors. History of Warren Lamb, Lawrence and Laban in the 1940s and ‘50s. An assessment is different to a test. Laban’s character. More detailed discussion of Laban and Lawrence. On F.C. Lawrence. Work at Faithful Overalls and Glaxo. Lamb’s development of his own method: bringing effort and shape together. How he developed his form of notation. Development of Lamb’s ideas following Laban’s Death. On Posture and Gesture, and how he developed these two concepts from Laban’s ideas. 

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The Interview

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How WL found out about Laban and the AMS Studio, Manchester: a lecture by Theatre Workshop.

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I had a girlfriend called Edna Green and she had been interested in the Theatre Workshop. In the months after the Second World War I had been a loose end and she and I had become involved in Drama activities. I didn’t really look upon myself as a talented actor or with any potential as an actor but I’d got interested in drama on an aircraft carrier just at the time that the war had ended and nothing much was happening and a group of us got into doing Shakespeare and stuff in the hanger. I carried on after I was demobbed and there was a group in Liverpool which really did extremely good work and one of the people there, Edna Green, had been interested in Theatre Workshop. She and I were friends and she wanted to go to a lecture on the work of a man called Rudolf Laban and though I didn’t know anything about  him I went along to the lecture and became fascinated by what he was saying, particularly the notation that seemed to me to be a very significant achievement. There should be a movement notation; music has a notation – where would we be if there wasn’t written music? Laban’s notation seemed to be analogous with music notation. 

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Edna and I did quite a lot of research over the next few weeks looking up books where we could find any reference to Laban. I learned about what he had done in Germany and the more that I studied the more impressed I became. Edna and I also went to a weekend course by Theatre Workshop at Ormesby Hall in North Yorkshire. They had been offered accommodation by a man who was the epitome of Colonel Blimp – at the very opposite end of the political spectrum to Theatre Workshop!  His wife, Ruth Penniman, was the one interested in theatre and who had persuaded him to take in Theatre Workshop. It was a very uneasy arrangement, but Theatre Workshop had the space to run courses, but eventually the colonel did force them to leave. At that course I did learn a lot more about Laban. I remember talking with Howard Goorney and Ewan McColl, and learning about Laban’s teaching of movement in theatre, his reputation in Germany and what he stood for. I eventually found out that I could meet with him and we arranged a meeting in Manchester. I met him at the offices of Paton, Lawrence and Company because, of course, Lawrence had teamed up with Laban some years previously. Lawrence had given Laban the opportunity to work in the factories. Laban advised that I should enrol in the Art of Movement Studio which had been newly established by his pupil Lisa Ullman and that he would take an interest in me. I did that immediately. 

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Early work in the factories

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What I hadn’t realised realised was that he had there and then earmarked me as a potential apprentice in the Industrial Work. He and Lawrence had already patented and marketed the ‘Laban – Lawrence Industrial Rhythm’ I think it was called and Jean Newlove had almost been the only person who had worked with Lisa Ullman in doing this, and she was also busy with Theatre Workshop by that time, so Laban needed recruits for the Industrial work. He certainly saw in me a new recruit because it was only after a few months at the studio that he started taking me to factories, having me observe him, and then I would go on my own and make my own observations and bring them to him in the evening and we’d spend hours as he would question every observation and start analysing and using his mathematical talent to make calculations and ultimately to make some conclusions about the workers I’d observed on the shop floor. These were long days for me and I remember being exhausted most of the time, trying to focus on the movements of the factory workers, trying to establish whether this movement was direct, or strong or light, or whatever. 

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The ‘Effort Man’

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What struck Laban about me was that I had latched on to an understanding of Effort, or what was then called the Eukinetic part of his work. He had a very special understanding of the role of Effort in human life. Man’s Effort had not been recognised, or at least not in modern times, and since the Industrial Revolution the expression of effort had been abused and degraded by the experience of how work was conducted. It was basically making man into a robot, into a machine.  Very often he would use the term that people were being mechanised. He felt that I had understood his theory; one could almost call it a philosophy, of Effort and how effort needed to be understood and to be released, to a great extent. People were not expressing the Effort that was in them to be expressed. A similar philosophy was applied to his work on Effort in the theatre. Kurt Jooss had been very influenced by Laban’s early ideas about Efforts. The ballet The Green Table had been the fruit of this collaboration. My own interest in and recognition of the importance of the Efforts certainly impressed Laban. So much so that I became known as the Effort Man, while other people might be associated with Laban’s Choreutics or Space Harmonies. 

My field was Effort, and so when I was asked to teach – many of the students at the Studio were asked to teach – I would work on Effort observation. I used to take groups in parks and railways stations and asked them to observe people’s Efforts.  Everything was in terms of Effort observation. It was not until much later that I realised that one didn’t have to concentrate on Effort alone and that there is another world of movement. This was an index of the significance of Laban’s belief with regard to how to people express themselves, particularly at work. All of his work was isolated, concentrated upon the effort field. The work was called Personal Effort Assessment; Laban-Lawrence Industrial Rhythm meant Effort rhythm. I have more recently come to conclusion that, although there was never any mention of Choreutics or Space Harmonies or shaping in anything that’s been written about the work in industry, Laban did take that into account in some respects.  

Laban as Guru and healer. Lamb’s assessment of the man.

He did have a somewhat guru-like manner and had he did have a reputation for being able to understand people almost at a first glance. Women particularly feel that he had penetrated into their innermost being in the advice that he gave them and that he had understood them in a way that nobody else had understood them. That gave him something of a guru-like manner. And he himself believed himself to be a healer.  There are stories of Laban being able to get people to move, almost like Christ, and they were cured. Mary Wigman in her writings has referred to Laban’s talents as a healer. This was always present in his manner – it was part of his charisma I suppose. In my work with him I recognised his guru-like manner but I certainly didn’t want to emulate it, and had no ambition to be a guru. I have wanted to have a practical understanding of movement and to be able to demonstrate through observation and analysis whatever meaning can be extracted from a movement.  Laban’s pronouncements were accepted as coming from the Master and it is true that they were often very penetrating. What Laban did through his perception I do through hard work! All of this time the emphasis was on the Efforts. I was observing and analysing workers Efforts, discussing these with Laban, and teaching them. This went on until well into the 1950s.

Coming back to Laban as a guru. I also believed him to be a genius but that said, I didn’t worship him, I didn’t hang on his every word. A lot of what he was discussing seemed to me to have a great deal of mystique about it. A word he used a lot was Cosmos. He would talk with me quite a lot about his Space Harmony research, and he really believed that he was touching on something that was of immense, epoch-making significance and that nobody else would have much of a glimmer about what he was talking about. This seemed a bit superior and far-fetched to me. I got the impression of a man who explored and rambled in a way about all sorts of things, many of which were mystical. Nevertheless he came out with some brilliant ideas in what he conceived to be possible, like his Notation. He was extremely creative. 

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Mechanical Movement

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It seems a little extreme to put it in this way, but out of a lot of waffle would come these incredibly brilliant and penetrating ideas and concepts, all of which if adopted, could enhance people’s experience. It seemed to me that people did not move as much as it would be helpful for them to do. There was something in the idea that there is a robot element in modern living – I mentioned this in my book Posture and Gesture. There is much to be said about the aesthetic dimension of movement. If you observe people walking in the street in America and Britain, they often seem so ugly in their movements – one wonders whether they are aware of their bodies. They don’t necessarily have to be aware that they have hunched their shoulders in this way or that, or that they have gesture idiosyncrasies, but  one has the sense that they don’t have much spatial awareness – this much is clear from the way that they move around you. They don’t really know how they move about in space. It seems as though there is something mechanical in people’s movements. I can even recognise this tendency in myself despite all my work in movement. One can very easily get into habits which I think are ugly or potentially so. 

The need for movement education

Children need to be educated so that they can grow up to be confident that they can move. The feedback from someone who moves aesthetically makes them feel better about themselves. Laban’s dream was to revolutionise the world through a greater appreciation of the aesthetic dimension of movement. I incorporated this into personal courses that I gave in the 1950s. I used to prescribe 10 sessions and people would come on the basis that it would useful for them to be more aware of their individual movement. Even at that time I was saying that everyone had their own individual movement pattern and that one could be aware of it and develop it. The phrase that did get used a lot was to discuss with people how they ‘could extend their range’ - almost like having a repertoire of movement and yet this repertoire often gets frozen by the circumstances of life. That concept of extension of range was I think something that matched Laban’s own thought, indeed it came from his thought.  It linked with the aesthetic principle that we could extend our range then would have more movements to choose from, that there was more choreography that we could do, appropriate to different situations that we are in.   

The Efforts in the 1950s. Harmony of Effort and Shaping, an aesthetic dimension

Much of what I am saying now is giving illustrations of what happened in the 1950s.  But this also gives an idea of the impact of Laban’s thought upon me when I began working with him in the late 1940s: that Effort was a neglected study; that Laban had discovered a great deal about Effort and its relation to work and that this was important because we all have to work in some form or other. I was also exploring the distinction between work and play: how differently do we move when we work and play? How do we take different Efforts? Do we simply slump when we play and strain when we work? Maybe we shouldn’t be able to make a distinction between when we are working and when we are playing. There is an overlap between the two.  The aesthetic question and the question of harmony was part of all that I got from Laban, around this time. Of course harmony was always being linked to Choreutics.  And though I should introduce harmony into a discussion of Efforts, I cannot see how this is possible when dealing with aesthetic questions. If you exert Effort in an inharmonious way what do you differently to when you exert it in a harmonious way?  I think it is really difficult to pursue that without taking Choreutics into account. 

Laban did suggest that there were good rhythms and bad rhythms; that the combination of weight, space, time and flow all combined to make it a really positive rhythm as distinct from rhythms which were broken and discordant. You could make the same analogy with music, I suppose. The question becomes immensely richer, when aesthetics are introduced into a consideration of Efforts. Laban too got into that question but not to the extent that he could have. This is certainly apparent in those early days: he felt that was a different application of the Efforts aspect of movement from the Choreutics; that Choreutics was primarily linked with the spiritual, whereas Efforts was much more linked to the world, to material, with the practical and down-to-earth. Space harmonies took us up into the cosmos and into dreams and the occult. Of course he was interested in the Occult.  

Whereas Efforts were much more to do with coping with the world. In his book Modern Educational Dance [1948] he outlines 16 teaching themes for different ages of children: for all the ages up to 11 – 12 it’s only effort that he recommends for children to be taught how to make different efforts with different parts of their body: how to move with the shoulder, the elbow, and so on. The body awareness was acquired solely through the efforts and it was only when one reached 11 or 12 when he advocates that at that age he advocates that children could get a feel for dance as a form. Only then does he bring in an awareness of the kinesphere and how they can shape their movement. I suppose he regards young children as coping with the world of experience and growth and it’s only when they reach adolescence that they can see beyond into a bigger/outer world. 

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Inner and Outer movement

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Laban used to talk a great deal about the outer and the inner experience. I have always felt uncomfortable with it and don’t think I have ever used these term ‘inner attitude’ because it is sloppy. You cannot observe anything that is inner. You can observe a person’s movements and this is coming from some deep-rooted emotion or conviction, but you don’t see the inner movement. The reference to inner and outer movement that is very often made by Laban students did, from the earliest years I worked with him, cause me some concern. I have therefore kept away from inner and outer. 

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[Reflections on the above]

Theatre Workshop and Laban

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Concerning my interest in Theatre Workshop and where this lead me, I should say that I had some very interesting conversations with Littlewood and McColl, but that I had already done a fair deal of reading about Laban. I was looking for confirmation of what I had found in those books. I didn’t really want to be an actor, I was a bit of a fish out of water. The incentive had come from Edna Green – she was keen on Theatre Workshop so I went to their weekend workshop. But I had no desire to become a member of Theatre Workshop myself.  

I remember reading in Cotton’s book [The New Ballet 1946] about modern ballet about Laban. I was avidly going to libraries to find any references to him, and talking to the people in Theatre Workshop. I increasingly got the impression that this was a man who was highly revered. Of course before I went to meet him I had had no idea about the industrial work – that came as a complete surprise. And of course I had no idea that there might be a career here. My parents thought that I was throwing my life away by going to the Art of Movement Studio. I think I was impelled by a feeling that in Laban there was something truly original, new. Maybe I needed something new and original, I think I am attracted to things that are a bit different from the routine. I can’t remember anything specific that I took from the Theatre Workshop conversations but feel sure that they will have said that here is a man of great achievement, with a lot to offer the world, who should be better known. All that made a great seal of sense to me. 

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Why Warren was chosen by Laban to work on the Efforts?

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He didn’t pick me from hundreds of potential apprentices, he just saw a potential in me. He and Lawrence were looking for someone for that work, I came along, and they took me on. Whether he saw any special talent in me, I don’t know. He probably thought that I was a raw character that he could train and develop into suiting his needs. It was a question of supply and demand: I was the only person in the supply chain that was around. Maybe he did see something in me – he did have a very penetrating understanding of people’s capabilities and potential. Maybe he sum me up pretty quickly as somebody who could be trained. On the one hand people were envious that I seemed to travel with Laban and have him to myself, more than many people; but on the other hand I often missed being able to take my classes at the Studio. Eventually, I did get some payment from Lawrence after 18 months or so - £4.00 a week. At that time workers would have an average wage of about £5.00 a week.  

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The teaching Lisa Ullmann and Sylvia Bodmer at the AMS, Manchester

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During my six months initial training at the Studio I valued the teaching of Lisa Ullmann particularly. Any concentrated teaching of Laban to me happened on the job rather in the studio. Sylvia Bodmer was a loquacious, very active, was almost air-borne in the way that she taught. She created an environment in which you felt that you were almost floating and flying as you responded to her ideas. It was mostly bewildering, but also remarkably enjoyable. You never knew quite was being expected of you but what eventually emerged was extremely pleasurable and fun. I think to pass a test on what you had done and learned would be extremely difficult!  Lisa Ullmann on the other hand was very much more down-to-earth, but like Sylvia, she was very movement alive. She was quite bubbly but she did keep you very much focused on what she wanted – quite the opposite to Sylvia. If you had been asked after a class what you had done you would be able to spell out that this was done, and that it was related to that, and then a new element was introduced – and so on.  It was practical in that respect. The comparison that I often enjoyed was that between Lisa and Laban. He would sit there very charismatic and aristocratic, extremely poised. If there was a judgement following a piece of work that we had done, his opinion could be damning but it didn’t give you much help other than knowing that it was good or bad. Lisa would come running up and indicate how something that you’d done could have been done better or differently so as to be better. She was a wonderful teacher. Her classes were some of the most inspiring that I have ever attended. Her teaching was inspirational. She would give you specific guidance on what you could do and why and how you could make it better.  

Lisa made her own contribution to the teaching at the Studio. I disagree with Valerie Preston-Dunlop’s Biography of Laban where she claims that Lisa could never do a thing unless she had notes and instructions from Laban: that’s not true. Lisa was extremely loyal to Laban but she would disagree with what he said – perhaps not publicly but certainly in smaller groups. She would question and was quite a stimulus to Laban in that she helped him develop his own ideas.  I think we should recognise she was making a contribution much more than Valerie Preston-Dunlop has presented.

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Laban teaches the diagonal scale  

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Laban was a very demanding teacher in the way in terms of getting what he wanted and he did believe in a form of training that approached military drill. I remember him teaching the diagonal scale on one occasion for three hours on end. We were just having to float and punch and glide and slash, and all the while he would be shouting, ‘More strength, more strength!’ Very often he would come and get hold of you – something that one couldn’t do these days. But Laban would get hold of people and try and get them to do the movement that he wanted. He seemed to succeed in doing this. With most people it defeats its purpose, the touch changes what one is doing. But Laban seemed to be able to get into the movement, so that you didn’t feel that this was an imposition, something that you wanted to shake off. Lisa Ullmann would do that too and I certainly felt that with her it was an imposition, but Laban seemed to do it in a very heightened, intensive way which you could follow quite spontaneously. But during this three hour session that I was mentioning, everybody was exhausted, they were dropping as he started shouting louder and louder. Maybe he just felt in that mood that day. There was something of the Teutonic about him.  He did put you under pressure to do what he wanted.  

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Teaching at the AMS, Manchester

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There are two contrasting theories on his part. On the one hand was the idea that everybody moves differently and should be encouraged to handle every situation or job in their own way, and thus encouraged to discover what their own way was. On the other hand, of course, if you are wanting to be professional then you really need to train for three years before you can really find what your own way is. So in the context of professional development you had to do the movements according to what he laid down and the standards that he was applying. I completed my three years with him in 1950. The principal elements in this training were Eukinetics (the Efforts) and Choreutics, but also whatever was available. He believed that learning Folk Dances was good to learn about different cultures, we also had Anatomy which Geraldine taught, and of course Notation. We also had Observation. To a great extent it was doing studies – Eukinetic and Dance studies. They were more or less kept separate. The only activity where the two came together was in his teaching of the diagonal scale. This was very complex as it had six different processes going on.  I like teaching the diagonal scale precisely because there is so much in it. I once taught a three-week course in America during a Summer school and we spent most of it doing the diagonal scale in various forms.  This was an experiment to see if we could make it into a sort of religion!  It is interesting to note that Laban was influenced by Gurdjieff – who really did mix religion and movement – and at the Art of Movement Studio we were all encouraged to read his books.  

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Effort and Flow, Effort-Shape

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Effort has been defined by others as the inner impulse which originates movement.  I think that shape can be just as great an impulse in originating movement as Effort.  But in actual fact all movement contains elements of effort and shape.  We have to look upon movement as a kind of continuum, as a bi-polar process, because we are never completely still. We are always breathing and making involuntary twitches and reactions to the world around us. Even when asleep we continue to move. Both effort and shape are on a bi-polar scale of being alive and we neutralise the movement relatively for much of the time. It is there, it is always happening. So effort is always there, it is part of life, it is there before we are born. The nature of the effort, whether it be a space-force-time, or whether it is a flow-effort can vary. So we have a conscious option of whether to choose one or the other. 

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I think while Laban’s genius lies in having identified space, weight, time and flow, I do think that ‘flow’ has to be regarded differently. It is always better to regard flow as some underlying process out of which the effort and shape variations emerge. The difficulty in making a definition of effort is that one is trying to define something that is going on all the time one is alive. One is always making an effort, so make the idea of Effort is an enhancement or promotion of a process that is always already there. We make a selection as to whether it is accelerating or decelerating, not a conscious one, but a choice nonetheless. The fact that we are creating an effort and a shape is another way of saying we are making an effort not to fall down on the floor. What we describe as muscle tone need and effort. It is a fiction to segregate effort from the shaping that goes with it. We can never make an effort without changing the shape and we can sense this with our balance. To be able to have good balance means that you are probably making efforts which are well-shaped. You cannot talk about effort without shape.

 

A very simple definition of effort is that you cannot get out of bed in the morning without some degree of effort. Some people find this task quite difficult, but once you’ve made the effort you still have to shape it of you want to avoid knocking over the bedside lamp. The inter-relationship between the effort and the shape is always present, even though you might emphasise one more than the other. Somehow the definition has to include the fact that you are making a selection. You have noticed that the alarm clock hasn’t gone off and you elect to jump out of bed with a massive thrust and in so doing knock over the bedside lamp and then slip on the floor. On the other hand you might in different circumstances get out of bed rather carefully and take care how you step, and put an emphasis on the shaping. However in both cases the potential for the effort is already there, already alive. The definition somehow has to contain the question of selection.

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Polarities of Movement Factors

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There are a number of ways in which we can understand the initiation of a movement, and how they can have purpose or intention. I have come across quite a lot of psychology where ‘intention’ seems not to mean ‘intention’ as I would define it and much more like an impulse – something which is unconsciously causing some sort of expression or performance. We can look at effort in quantitative terms – having to make a relative large or small amount of effort. This is very much in our language. Laban would refer to what he contributed to dance as, ‘Making dances more effort-ful’. The effortful element was in the choreographer. We are always in the state of making relatively less, even imperceptible movements, or relatively more.  When we are making a lot of effort we have to select whether we want to make this or as distinct from that effort. In terms of movement we can never say that we are making a movement because we are making a phrase, in which something changes, in which there is an increasing of one effort component and a decreasing of another, or the combining of some elements. If I make an effort of pointing I can stay like a statue but obviously something eventually has to follow; it can be a withdrawal or a directing which goes on to something else. We have to think of process when thinking of effort. Process is an essential element when looking for a definition of effort. It is something that advances or retreats, that accelerates or decelerates. Any process of effort can only go so far. If I am getting more and more direct I must reach a point at which I can’t get any more direct.  Usually that registers as a fixed stare, so if I want to make a direct effort, if I want to point something out to you, to focus on that thing, I have to keep renewing it. So a definition has somehow to include the fact that for an effort to be effective it has to be renewed.  [End of Minidisc 1]

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History of Warren Lamb, Lawrence and Laban in the 1940s and ‘50s

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Lawrence was a farsighted man and started his consulting firm in 1923 and was I think probably the first management consultant to set up in England. However he was not a good businessman in the promotional sense. He formed what was really the first business school on England but didn’t promote it and since such schools weren’t understood in England at that time it failed. It lasted about a year or two and then closed shop. He did many advanced things but wasn’t very good at marketing: things might of grown more rapidly had he been. It is a very common complaint within the Laban field is that nobody has really presented their work very well with the exception of the Laban Centre which has been very successful but that success was due to its having abandoned Laban. Laban’s work is not very marketable material.  The sense that I have round the 40s, ‘50s and ‘60s was a considerable interest from a wide range of people in what Laban could offer the world, and in movement. I met people in industry, and then in management, then in world of therapy – particularly Jungian psychiatrists. I was in with quite a group of artists and remember meeting Henry Moore and talking to him about movement. He said that everything he did was movement. Quite a number of people – not Moore himself – did individual courses with me which were dedicated to extending their range of movement and getting them to become aware of their own personal movement. Outside the dance world and in the theatre – quite separately from what Geraldine Stephenson was doing at the Northern Theatre School in Bradford, and what Jean Newlove was doing with Theatre Workshop – I worked individually with actors. I also directed a few plays, including one for the Religious Drama Society. There was enthusiasm for Laban’s ideas, and in movement itself, across a wide range of activities. I don’t find this to be the case now. There is much of academic interest in the universities rather than in practical work.  

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Someone recently commented on the fact the success of my ideas in the 1960s might have had something to do with the ‘swinging sixties’ and the generation of that time. But this had started much earlier and was a post World War II phenomenon. I haven’t mentioned that there was a lot of interest in what Laban could offer influence in the education world, both in Physical Education and in Dance. A lot of teachers were trained in his type of movement. It fell foul of the arguments between the PE teachers on the one hand – who said that movement belonged to them - and the dance people who argued that movement belonged in their sphere. Then there were people like me questioning why a distinction needed to be made in the first place – movement belongs to itself, and to life.  I used to teach at the Carnegie college of PE one of the two foremost P.E. colleges in the UK. I would do a week twice a year and there were always arguments in which the students would be roughly divided 50/50 as to whether movement was appropriate to their teaching or whether it didn’t belong to the teaching of P.E.  The division was always 50/50.  

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This wide-ranging application of movement was something that interested me very much. I got that early on. Laban used to say that movement was the common denominator in many activities and this common element interested me. I tried to prove this by teaching at a boy’s school for two years as well as working with actors, PE students, running my individual courses, giving sessions in movement therapy at St Bernard’s Hospital in Southall. I worked with the head of a department of medicine at University College who believed that doctors would benefit from having a training in movement. So long as you didn’t try to assume abilities that you hadn’t learned within your training as a movement professional you can contribute to a great number of different professions.  

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Lawrence confined himself pretty much to the field of industrial business but his vision did inspire and give confidence to Laban, certainly in the first year or two of their meeting. I think they met first in 1942. I am sure that Lawrence’s support was very important for Laban. Lawrence formed an important part of creating such organisations as the Laban Guild, the Art of Movement Studio, and he was on the Trust that was formed at that time to buy the property at Addlestone where the Studio moved in 1953, and then to Goldsmiths in 1973 when Marion took over its direction. Many feel that she betrayed that trust when she opted to build a Ballet School.  

On Lawrence – his philosophy and outlook.

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I used to spend a great deal of time with Lawrence and regret having lost touch with him in the years leading up to his death in 1982. I regret that more has not been done to acknowledge the part that he played and to recognise him. The moment he had been introduced to Laban at Dartington he could see the respect he commanded with the Elmhirsts – Leonard and Dorothy - and he immediately saw the potential of his ideas. By the time I had come on to the scene there was no doubt about his dedication to Laban. Among the sceptics was Daniel Ellis, one of the engineers: he was very much a Type A personality – someone driven to go for his objective with aggressive single-mindedness. Such people are prone to have heart attacks. Type B personalities tend to be less aggressive. This corresponds very nicely to the difference between those where effort as opposed to shape predominates. I talk about effort assertion: and those who are type A do take more initiative from effort than they do from shape. Type B people who take structure, appropriateness and who are less aggressive tend to be more shape-oriented. However Ellis became so great a convert that he wanted to contribute to Laban’s work and was a founding member of the Guild and served on various committees. True to Type-As he sadly suffered a heart attack and died in his 40s. Another man called Carslake was less aggressive, though was very sharp and intelligent and he and I worked together quite a lot on team-building. There was an overall factory called Faithfuls – described by Eden Davies in Beyond Dance - where I observed about 300 women. The workers had all been doing very local operations – one sewing on pockets, another buttons, etc. What we did was divide them into groups of ten workers, with every worker specialising in between 2 and 4 of the operations, and this group working as a team would make the full garment between them. This worked very successfully. That was 1951. Nobody in else in the world had done this and this was well ahead of the Japanese who came out with ‘quality circles’ a few years later. The whole issue of team work has since grown to be almost a profession in itself. With better marketing we could of course have made more of that but then there was a shortage of people to develop the work. I have already mentioned that when I came along Laban and Lawrence had pounced on me for this very reason. There just weren’t people available, they weren’t coming forward. Those who did were PE teachers and other teachers interested in incorporating movement into their teaching. There were 2 or 3 people who followed me and we seemed to be quite successful in the Laban-Lawrence Personal Assessment. There was a teacher called John Armitstead, and another person called Frank Culver who were going to be trained, but they soon dropped out because they couldn’t stand the pace. 

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An assessment is different to a test

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Eventually there was only me left and I disagreed with Laban and Lawrence when they changed, without any consultation with me, the title of Laban-Lawrence Personal Assessment, which I was personally happy to work under, to the Laban-Lawrence test. I pointed out that we did not do a test, and that the principle that we were working under was to advise people as to what their unique individual strengths were and then matching these with a particular job. We weren’t testing them for anything, but rather matching them.  I didn’t like the idea that we were testing people: we were trying to find the right fit in terms of their job.  

Both in Faithful Overalls and in Glaxo I observed hundreds of workers and then rearranged them on the basis according to which operations they were best suited. I felt that matching activity wasn’t a test and that we shouldn’t align ourselves with personality tests like the ’16 PF’ or the paper and pencil tests, intelligence tests that existed. So in 1952 I went independent. There was a bit of a rift but we soon got back into some sort of working relationship and even though we didn’t see each other so often I did still keep in touch with Laban. We kept up quite a correspondence. It was quite telling that here you had a guru and a consultant who had only one person to carry out their particular method and they renamed it and redesigned the whole procedure without even consulting me! That is typical of Laban. I don’t know whether it is part of his Teutonic nature or not.  

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Laban’s character

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I shall give you another example of Laban’s high-handed manner. Based at the Studio we had formed a dance group called the British Dance Theatre with Hettie Loman. Laban and Lisa had seemed fairly cooperative, but then in 1950 Laban just confronted and said, ‘Now you have done enough; we shall finish with the group and move on to other things’. This was simply imposed upon us. But the very fact that it was unilateral made us pack up and go to London where we continued for another eighteen months or two years. Laban was judgemental, authoritarian and could be very demanding and commanding. Mostly he seemed to be the personification of charm, particularly to women. But he could also attack people very fiercely. This could occasionally happen if someone had offended him or he had felt that a student had been too big for their boots. He would jump on them in a very denunciatory manner which could be quite destructive.  Certainly one student left immediately after one such attack. He knew that this happened and he actually discussed this with me on one occasion. He said to me, ‘My manner is calm and sedate with occasional outbursts’. That was certainly the case and it was quite frightening when you were – as I had been – the subject of the outburst.  I can remember two occasions. 

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More detailed discussion of Laban and Lawrence.

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I only met Lawrence once I had enrolled in the Art of Movement Studio and was already studying movement. He struck me as a very far-sighted person. He really had a vision of what Laban’s work could contribute to the world. Particularly, he was interested in industrial engineering and method study. He had on his staff three of four industrial engineers who were particularly involved in method and work study. At that time the work of the American management consultant Taylor and that of Gilbreth was influential in this country. Gilbreth had developed a form of notion that was called ‘Thirlbigs’ which is his name spelt backwards. This described the operations that workers performed - for example transport load, grip, release and such like - for which signs were given and thus developed into a notation. It was dedicated to reducing a manual job to the smallest number of units with a view to reducing the numbers, cutting down the amount of activity, because it was believed that the briefest and shortest time in which the operation could be performed meant greater productivity in the course of the working day. Laban proved that it was not really the case, because very often production was interrupted by the workers having to take time off, suffering from stress, reporting in sick, absenteeism increased, labour turnover was very high. Laban proved that when workers could embody their individual rhythm into the operation, even though they may take a little longer time, production would increase over time, because there would be less stress, less absenteeism and labour turnover. One would have to say that Lawrence was at the root of this vision because it was he who directed Laban into this type of method study. Much of that is still incorporated into industrial engineers do. Of course the work that Lawrence was involved in at that time was primarily repetitive work which doesn’t exist so much now as a result of automation. Still, are still certain types of production such as food preparation where there is a lot of repetition. With so much manual work be outsourced to China, India and other places and where the workers have to labour from early in the morning to 10.00 at night one wonders how those Asian workers are coping with the sorts of problems that Laban addressed in his work with Lawrence.

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On F.C. Lawrence

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Lawrence’s staff regarded him as ‘a bit off his rocker’ as one of his engineers put it.  They were all mesmerised by Laban as everyone was, given his guru-like character.  But I found this quite hostile environment when I was alone with any one of theses engineers. When Laban was around they were polite, but otherwise they were really very demanding in an aggressive way: they would want to see what I was noting and what it meant. They asked questions in a very sceptical manner. That was very difficult for me for a year or two, after which they all became enthusiastic supporters of the work. That gave me quite a lot of confidence. Lawrence was farsighted and also perceptive. He looked up to Laban at lot and felt that Laban and helped him. He had had a hard time as an officer in World War I and had suffered some kind of trauma as a result of the horrific experiences that he had had. He believed that Laban helped him to handle this trauma. This was another example of Laban’s healing power, and it was probably this that had wedded Lawrence to him. There’s no doubt that Lawrence could see a great deal of potential in Laban’s ideas. They wrote a book together which is usually accepted to be mostly Laban’s but I think that Lawrence had certainly a very big hand in advising and correcting it. I heard someone say that Lawrence hung on Laban’s every word but I don’t think that this was the case: he would have probably contributed quite a bit in discussions with Laban. 

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Of course accountancy was also part of Lawrence’s skills. He was a fully qualified accountant, he was what was then called a ‘cost and works accountant’. The Institute of Cost and Works Accountants has since merged with the Institute of Chartered Accountants. MacDonald and Evans published his book called Marginal Costing which revolutionalised costing and the principles that he outlined in it are still in application. Thus he was also a visionary in the field of accountancy.   

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Lawrence took offence very easily. Anything that he felt was critical of him was regarded as an insult. It was this that killed the work that Ellis and I were doing at Glaxo, and most successfully so. A follow-up in similar Glaxo factories looked a distinct possibility and the company had become a long-standing client. Lawrence met with the Chairman of the company, a man called Wilkins, to discuss the proposal to develop the work, but something must have been said to upset him, because there was a row and that ended everything. He was very touchy and took offence a couple of times at things I had said, though I had had no intention of offending him. 

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When I joined Laban and Lawrence their Rhythm method was being applied in ten or so companies during the war. Jean Newlove, Lisa Ullmann and Syvlia Bodmer had all been involved during the war. Quite what Sylvia did in the factories I’m not quite sure but it would have been a lot of fun. It consisted primarily of taking the workers away from the job for two fifteen-minute spells each day and teaching them movement with a view to letting them experience movement which they could then incorporate into their working rhythm. During the war years the work that Laban, Lisa and Sylvia and Newlove did in the factories involved taking workers away from the job, giving them a class in movement and then helping them when they returned to their jobs to find an easier way of doing it which they were more comfortable with.  When I came onto the scene, the emphasis was much more on selection and then training for that particular job. The selection of a worker for a job became much more important. While I did observe workers at Faithful Overalls and Glaxo, the selection was made on what jobs were available; it wasn’t a question of firing people but of finding the best match of job to worker. However soon my work became about the selection of new recruits, as to their suitability for which job. If there was a shortlist of candidates I was influential as to who was to be selected and who rejected. On the basis of my findings a training programme would be developed. I remember working with someone to develop some equipment that would be designed for the training of recruits. This process of selection and training eventual got into the management field and I do quite a lot of advising on new recruitments but always the work on team-building continued.  

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By the time I had come Laban had already begun working to advise managers and there are passages in the archives where he talk about mental efforts. You had to think of mental efforts more when you were advising managers rather than the machine-workers – however I never quite managed to draw a line between them. It goes in steps as one progresses from being a machine-hand to a supervisor to being a manager. All of my initiation was with workers, particularly in textile factories which I remember being hot and steamy. They needed to be moist to keep the yarn from becoming brittle and snapping. Gradually I became aware of people asking Laban for his advice on a manager’s suitability or a problem they with a manager. Laban always gave his advice in guru-like fashion. I was trying to work out how to find a way of offering such advice in disciplined way and this led to the development of what used to be called Action Profiling and what is now called Movement Pattern Analysis.  It took me fifteen years to develop this way of analysing managers. I only achieved this in the early 1960s. With Lawrence and Laban nothing had been crystallised, partly because Laban never wanted to formalise anything. He always said, ‘I have not created a system’. Whatever he created on day he would have new ideas the next. He truly followed the principle that everything is in a state of flux.  

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Lamb’s development of his own method: bringing effort and shape together

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I had been taught Choreutics and Eukinetics and I began increasingly to wonder why it was effort that was exclusively studied in industrial and management assessment.  It was not until about 1956 or 7 when I went to Laban and asked him whether there was any reason why I should not incorporate shape in my observations. He seemed a little surprised and then agreed. I went on to bring the two together and that really crystallised soon after Laban’s death in the early sixties. It was a process that took several years. Although Laban had begun to work on the assessment of managers he had done this in a guru-like fashion, there was no theory underpinning his judgements. I have some of Laban’s speculations about mental and physical efforts in my archive but whilst there may be some inspired illuminations it doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Concerning notation, when I arrived there was already Laban’s ballet kinetography which can makes a record of any movement, not just dance.  I did make some notations of factory workers. Then he came up with what he called Effort graphs - which weren’t really graphs at all – which is a separate notation. It is possible to have the dance notation and the effort notation side by side, just as in a musical score one has the dynamic indications of forte, piano and so forth. Just as sin music these indicate how a piece should be performed, so the Effort graphs show how a movement is made. I started off using the Effort notation, and as I started including shape in my observations I simply adapted the effort graphs to include shape. Laban was constantly experimenting with notation, even when he was working with me. I have never looked upon the notation we’ve used for analysis purposes as comparable with a notation whose function is to record a sequence of dance movements. Effort graphs had been developed before I came on the scene, he was still flexible in how it could be used and was open to developing something else should it prove more convenient. 

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The graphs that I subsequently developed are not so much notations of movement but the representation of the framework of movement. I present it in this form to demonstrate that movement is process and that she should not use movement terms in order to describe something which is fixed. The framework has been crystallised in the way it has to keep movement understood as a process of variation.   

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Development of Lamb’s ideas following Laban’s Death

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The first thing that happened after his death was that number of his distinguished pupils wanted to get from me what they thought were Laban’s latest developments in his thinking. What were the last fruits of his genius? What was this Effort work about.  I had the reputation of being the Effort man and so they came to me for enlightenment about what he had been working on and what I had learned from him about Effort. These artists include Irmgard Bartenieff and her daughter Joanna, and Betty Meredith Jones, one of the earliest of his English disciples and a few more people. Having to teach these people what I had learned from Laban was a good discipline for me to try to get it into some kind of order. I don’t think that they contributed any component part, but having to work out what I had to teach them, was a very good incentive for me to get it all worked out. Through this process I identified gaps and possible contradictions in his thinking. During Laban’s life he was always there in background so if anything went wrong he would always be there to solve the everything. But once he’s dead …  

After his death I was very often being asked to prove things, to offer the validation for his ideas. How reliable were his theories? Quite rightly, those issues began to arise at that time. Someone must have questioned the reliability before his death, but afterwards it became much more of a challenge to me during those years in the early sixties. At that time I wrote a text with a pianist who had come to me for a development course which he felt had been of great benefit to him in his actual playing and in his teaching. We wrote a book called The Kinaesthetic Approach to Piano Technique where he examines earlier writings on piano technique and discusses how much better it would be if movement was incorporated in this technique and he demonstrates how. He uses the experience that he got from me.  I then wrote about posture and gesture. We tried and failed to get it published in 1963/4. This is one form of application of Laban’s ideas that occupied me in the early 1960s. The chapter on posture and gesture however appealed to Duckworths and they asked if I could write a whole book on the subject. 

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On Posture and Gesture 

 

These two concepts came about partly because Laban suggested that there was functional action and body attitude and shadow movement, and these were the three categories. When it came to practical observation I found it difficult to note shadow movements because be definition they are such tiny movements like the twitch of an eyebrow. Body Attitude has been very much misunderstood and was considered as a fixed thing rather than a movement term. It was like someone having a hangdog expression or a military bearing. Functional actions were considered as being different to expressive actions. Functional actions one observed in industry: you moved your arm in order to pick up a cup. But if you move your arm to accompany a speech then it is expressive. Functional actions were to be observed at work. I could never succeed in making a satisfactory distinction between functional and expressive but there were all part of the wrong category. I spent quite a lot of time thinking about Body Attitude and came to the conclusion that it was movement that I wanted to observe and not attitude. You will perhaps find in Laban’s writings quite a range of definitions, or sometimes none at all. He might say that someone was a floater, a glider or suchlike and I would always feel that this was such a generalisation that you didn’t learn very much from it. But the way that Laban presented it, you felt that it had some significance. But you couldn’t really observe body attitudes as movement. It was difficult to distinguish between a large Shadow Movement and an Expressive movement. Surely Shadow Movements can be very expressive and meaningful. A flick of the eyebrow might be the signal to start a war. I just felt that these were not tenable divisions and that Shadow and Expressive movement came together. But where did Body Attitude come into it? So I finally realised that there were only two categories – Posture Movement. Sometimes the use of the word posture has been problematic because people use it as a way of talking about Body Attitude. I simply have to explain that there is a range of posture movement. The next stage came in finding out how the two related, how the one merges into the other. This was a particularly significant discovery. You can probably fake a posture or attitude, or particular phrases of posture movement, and we can fake gestures if we concentrate hard enough but we can’t really fake the quality of the effort and shape during the merger. That is becoming more understood in recent years. A number of theses have been done on PGMs and a book is has been written called Moving and Being Moved, published by the Analytic Press in 2001. The psychologist [Frances La Barre] who wrote this has used PGM in a very enlightened way. I think that she has added to the literature on non-verbal behaviour and communication. Going back thirty or forty years there was a spate of books by disciplined researchers like Shefflin, Canden and Birdwhistle. And then Desmond Morris who isn’t considered a very serious contributor in the field. But since then hardly anything has published in this field. I am hoping that this book will revive the study of non-verbal behaviour. I am sure it’s going on in various university departments but I don’t hear of much being published in the field. It’s not just posture and gesture but the merging element of the two which is the crux of the matter. That really was crystallised in the 1960s and Posture and Gesture was published in 1965.