Laban Resources
Geraldine Stephenson
Interview with Stephenson and Lamb 27th July 2004
Interview with Geraldine Stephenson and Warren Lamb 27th July, 2004
Summary of Interview
Laban and the Nazis. The Teaching Courses at AMS, Manchester. Who taught most at the AMS, Manchester. How Lisa and Laban taught together. The Curriculum at the AMS, Manchester. GS’s morning training sessions, the influence of Rosalia Chladek. The Educational dimension to the AMS, Manchester. Physical Education and Laban’s Approach to teaching movement to children. Laban’s approach to teaching and learning movement. Efforts and Movement Behaviour. The relationship between Effort and Shape. Laban’s notion of Effort and the connection with therapy: the work of Irene Champernowne, Judith Kestenburg and Irmgard Bartnenieff. Somatics and movement studies. Choreutics. The work of Hettie Loman.
The Interview
Laban and the Nazis
Warren Lamb: The question of Laban having had any connection with the Nazis never arose when we were with Laban at the Studio. Remember that these were the immediate post-war years and there were still a lot of people who had been bereaved and had suffered a lot. So you would have thought that there would have been a lot of ready objections to Laban, had there been any evidence of his Nazi-leanings. We all had the impression that he was a refugee from the Nazi regime. One reason it never arose was that Laban seemed to be such a ray of light, offering a future, and creativity. He was somebody who gave people hope and confidence in the future.
Geraldine Stephenson: It may have been naïve of him to stay on after so many other artists had left but this was Laban: he probably thought he could win them around with his movement choir. Really, he would.
WL: I really think that he was naïve enough to think that he could influence the Nazi leadership into his way of looking at life, movement and individual creativity. Remember that Manchester in 1946 was still a very bomb-damaged city. The area of All Saints where the Studio was situated was very close to an area that had been almost completely destroyed. There was very much an environment of struggle: rationing was still on. The premises that they took in Oxford Street, was a slum and almost derelict. In this post-war environment of struggle and reconstruction with people trying to repair their lives, Laban seemed so poised and above it all.
The Teaching Courses at AMS, Manchester
GS: The work of Laban and Lisa at that time went mainly into the educational field. They had all these courses with teachers. As soon as they got up North they began to work with teachers. The movement world at that time was going very much towards education. I don’t believe that he would have for a minute believed in the Nazi view of things, but if he believed there was a dance in something he would do the dance regardless. Which is what he did finally, and that was what got him thrown out of Germany.
WL: Laban himself had experienced things which could have rendered him bitter, but he never displayed this. I never detected this.
GS: He starved after 1946 and his digestion was never right after then. He often used to refer to his ‘stomak’ being bad.
WL: He used to fall ill quite frequently but never showed any bitterness, simply recovering and bouncing back to be a creative as ever.
GS: I have Laban to thank for being ill. It was in my second year at the Studio when he got one of his illnesses and I was despatched to Bradford to teach his courses there at the drama school. I was the same age as most of the students, though some of the men were older than me since they’d been in the army. Bernard Hepton and David Giles were both older than me. Everybody expected people to be at odd ages then.
WL: I wonder if this has anything to do with his accident in 1929 when dancing in Don Juan? They say he suffered from depression after this.
GS: I never heard him talk about this during my time at the studio.
Who taught most at the AMS, Manchester.
Dick McCaw: How much did he teach at the Studio?
GS: Lisa taught the most, Sylvia the next, and then Laban.
WL: And Lisa would take over from Laban whenever he took ill. Valerie Preston-Dunlop claims that everything Lisa taught was on instructions from Laban. I don’t believe that that is correct. Maybe Laban might give Lisa some ideas to pursue but she was herself very creative in how, as a teacher, she developed those ideas. I’m sure she had lots of ideas of her own.
GS: I think that it was half and half. Laban would direct her to an extent, but then she’d demand her own freedom. Besides, how could Valerie know?
WL: I think that she found a lot of notes that Laban had written for her, but that doesn’t prove either that she followed them, or that she didn’t give lessons without notes. She had a mind of her own. Those notes could only apply to a relatively small proportion of occasions when she taught.
GS: She would also react to how we were moving and take the lesson in a different way in response to us.
WL: When Laban and Lisa were teaching together, Lisa was very responsive to what the students were doing, while Laban tended to be his dignified, aristocratic self, making judgements and prescient points. Lisa was much closer to the students, getting hold of them and moving them. We were manhandled quite a lot.
GS: We were manhandled in peculiar ways given all the twisting movements we were making.
The Curriculum at the AMS, Manchester.
DM: Did you feel like there was some kind of curriculum at the Studio?
GS: I didn’t feel there was any curriculum at all.
WL: It was a very flexible curriculum.
GS: I suppose we did have to prepare studies or compositions for the next lesson – occasionally we would do that. But we never knew what they were going to teach as far as I can remember.
WL: Everything that they taught in relation to movement either came under the heading of Eukinetics (Effort) or Choreutics (Shape). We would do perhaps a Eukinetic study and then have to show it a week or two later, or a Choreutic study. And they would very rarely come together, except for anything that we did on the diagonal scale, but the movement work was under those two headings.
GS: Sylvia didn’t fit into that pattern of teaching. She wasn’t like that at all.
WL: She was most entertainingly wild.
GS: You didn’t really understand what she was saying part of the time. She spoke very loudly and spat as she taught and we didn’t always know what she was after – perhaps she didn’t know herself. Some people never did understand her – they just got on and did something.
WL: But you couldn’t help but be fascinated by her. There was never a dull moment with her. But do you agree that all the teaching of movement was taught under those two headings of Eukinetics and Choreutics?
GS: Oh, absolutely. But what I can’t remember, though I have looked up in my notes, is whether we ever did any kind of warm-up to get us into the class. We just went straight into Efforts or whatever. I can never remember any kind of warm-ups. I was brought into to do that.
GS’s Morning Training Sessions, Rosalia Chladek
WL: I well remember your invigorating training sessions. It was called ‘Training with Geraldine’, and was usually an hour each morning.
GS: But then that had not been done before. That was in my second into my third year.
WL: Didn’t Lisa sometimes take a training session?
GS: I remember that Lisa and Laban very often used to turn up late in the morning. They were seldom on time. We had, in the meantime, been asked to warm up. There was this half hour in the morning which we were given to ‘get ourselves ready’. We did whatever we felt like. What we did they never bothered about. But we never had a programme of Bend, Stretch, Twist, like what I do with Dick.
WL: Were you ever briefed for these sessions?
GS: No, not at all. It was only after I’d been to Switzerland to the International Dance Group with Wigman, Kreuzberg, Jooss and Chladek that I really got some ideas for my warm-ups. These came from Rosalia Chladek. She had a series of exercises building up to elevation, and we were on the floor every day of the week, only get up on to our feet on the very last day. I talked to Laban and Lisa about all this and they said that they wanted some of this in the training at the Studio.
WL: The curriculum seemed to consist of what ever talent the students were at the Studio fortuitously had. Laban recognised this talent and then you had to apply it. Geraldine knew something about anatomy so then we had some anatomy in the curriculum, otherwise it wouldn’t have been there.
I thought that Laban did have a very rigorous training when he had his schools in Germany.
The Educational dimension to the AMS, Manchester
DM: You have said that when Laban went up to Manchester most of his work was in education. Then his course at the Studio was recognised by the department of education?
GS: This was more on Lisa’s side than Laban’s. His interest was more in what Warren became involved in – the industrial side.
WL: Lisa was the person who got hold of the education idea and really followed it through. But Laban supported her. I recall conversations with him where he made it clear that Lisa was doing well. He was a very critical man. I remember him criticising Myfanwy Dewy, calling her a cow.
GS: She was a very important person, one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Education.
WL: He was charming and gallant and really floored all these HMIs. He supported Lisa in pioneering the introduction of movement in the educational system.
GS: Myfanwy was quite well off and I think that she may have subsidised Laban. I think I read something about this. Certainly she helped them. She gave Lisa a sense of security. I do think that behind all this lay the awareness that Lisa and Laban were German.
Myfanwy and Ruth Foster, and Elsie Palmer, all HMIs, were very powerful people. And they used to come to the courses that Lisa and Laban had given, going back to 1941.
WL: Myfanwy Dewy took a close interest in the Studio. She lived nearby and attended everything that she could: end-of-term presentations, and that sort of thing.
GS: Valerie Preston Dunlop used to share a flat in her house for a year. We rented this flat from her in 1949.
WL: It was sometimes like Myfanwy was an adopted daughter of Laban. These were very powerful people in the field of education and they succeeded in creating a revolution. A new syllabus was created in 1947 and two publications came out, one called Moving and Growing (or Growing and Moving) and the other called Planning the Programme. The first was for Elementary school-children and the second for Secondary children. They had some wonderful photographs of children doing really lively, adventurous movement.
Everybody believed that this was how the teaching of physical recreation was to happen. But then it all got fouled with an argument between the physical education people and the dance or arts people as to whether this belonged to the arts department, or to physical education. Laban and Lisa didn’t really care. From their point of view it belonged to both. But the boundaries between the two departments were hard and fast. That argument lasted for years.
GS: Yes it did, but I don’t think that it destroyed what they were doing. It was a nuisance. I can say this since I was at a PT college, and I do understand why they were so worried. Joan’s students were so flexible about how to move and the PT wanted all their movements set.
Physical Education and Laban’s Approach to teaching movement to children
DM: While both of you know a great deal about what is called ‘Recreational Movement’, I am unfamiliar with the term. What was the aim in teaching this to children? In what did it consist?
GS: In my lessons with Dick we have quite a strict syllabus, but at the beginning we do have some movement that is freely flowing. At the studio all of the work was freely flowing, inventing, inventing, inventing all the time. This is what we got the kids to do, to move in whatever way they wanted. Of course it was a bombshell for the teachers who had learned set patterns, and they felt threatened. It was teachers who had open minds had no problem with it. Elsie Palmer and Diana Jordan got the Laban work going because she felt that this was what the children needed, and not the fixed movements of Swedish gymnastics. These teachers who had been learning with Laban in summer schools and suchlike since the early 1940s started introducing it into schools.
WL: In terms of understanding what was being taught at the schools you need to look at Laban's Modern Educational Dance he gives 16 themes of movements to be taught to children at different ages up to 15 - 16 years old. All the earlier themes up to the age of 10 - 11 concentrate on Effort and he only introduces choreutics after the age of 11. I don't know whether this is actually right: I wonder if you can't teach young children shape and space harmony at an earlier age.
GS: I think that the Effort work had a lot more to do with personality and how people were as people. Laban was interested in getting people to create. He wanted people to be expressive to do something different. When Joan Goodrich suggested that Joan English and I went to the Guild course in Sheffield, I could see the extraordinary movements that everyone was doing. This is where I saw Mary Eldridge doing the most amazing back bends. We didn't do this kind of thing at Bedford. All the people in the course were doing these news movements, things that they'd never done before. Laban was awakening people's bodies, and think that this what they did with the infants in the schools - awakening their bodies, rather than doing set-piece movements.
WL: One of the arguments of the PE people was that Laban was trying to replace Physical Education. That meant that we would no longer have Olympic-quality athletes coming out of these colleges. But Laban's principal was that, just as you come to the Art of Movement Studio to study movement for three years, and then consider whether you want to dance or teach or do therapy, similarly he believed that children should be educated in movement in their school years and when they got into their mid-teens they might begin to think about becoming a professional tennis player, or go in for athletics, or some other specialisation. But he was against specialisation at an earlier age. Of course if you want to develop somebody into a Wimbledon tennis champion you've probably got to get hold of them, aged three. So this was an argument that weighed heavily with the physical education people. I used to go to the Carnegie college of PE for Men in Loughborough [Leeds?], replacing Laban just as Geraldine had done in Bradford. I used to go there twice a year for about a week each visit over a period of about three years. I couldn't do some of the feats that the students were capable of doing, but I used to set the students simple movement sequences that I could demonstrate and which they were quite awkward at. I don't know that it is a good thing to make yours students feel awkward, but I did this deliberately because I wanted to expose that, as rigorously trained as they were, nevertheless here was a simple coordination that they were having difficulty with. It provoked great argument which always divided the students about 50/50 - on one side there were those who said that this wasn't PE and that they were athletes and had to do with dance and such messy stuff. Whereas the other half were impressed and would say that they didn't learn flexibility, or how to move their bodies so as to adjust to life. They were just concentrated on the specialised PE regime. That was the sort of argument that was pursued.
GS: It's interesting to look at the two ends of the spectrum because we began by talking about the little children at school and now we have gone to the older people. Laban threw up so many problems because people had settled in to what they thought they should be doing and his work threw it all around. Some went for it and others withdrew. to start with I think there were many more women than men who were interested in it. People like Myfanwy Dewy and Elsie Palmer would give courses to teachers around different schools.
WL: I think Loughborough was very ‘old school’ but they had an enlightened principal who was very torn between a curriculum that would attract students and go with the trend – but he did invite Laban to do some teaching there.
GS: Laban did muddle things for people – it divided the PE world.
Laban’s approach to teaching and learning movement. Continuing discussion of PE
DM: It is about a different philosophy of education. How do you both feel about Laban’s approach to teaching and learning movement?
GS: My revelation came in 1948 when I was thrown in at the deep end. It was on a Tuesday when Lisa came into a class where I was playing the piano and told me that I was to go to Bradford on Thursday and teach Laban’s drama students. I was flabbergasted - I had never got round to thinking about teaching outside the studio. I asked Lisa what I should do, and he said that I should do some warming up, the Efforts, and get them to create some scenes. That was the plan given to me, but it was up to me how I was do it. But the students lapped it up. They thought it was terrific. They had never thought of character and effort. Immediately they took hold of it and they wouldn’t have liked it if they hadn’t of thought it of some use. Esmé Church who was head of the school was all for it – it was right for the students.
WL: I want to return to the physical education of young bodies at schools. My expectation from the very, very revolutionary work that was being done in a lot of schools, especially those where people like Myfanwy Dewy and Ruth Foster had a direct connection, my expectation was that movement teaching would replace physical education. Laban’s idea was that a child’s body should be educated fully, so that it got the fullest possible experience of movement harmonies, of Eukinetics and Choreutics at the appropriate age-stage so that eventually with this awareness of the whole world of movement the child could grow and mature into activities, of sports and work with a much better understanding of the body-mind connection. That has not happened. It is beginning to happen in the field of recreational dance.
GS: Marion North really did put a stop of this kind work because she wanted to have Classical Ballet and Graham in the ‘Laban Centre’. This shift of emphasis helped to stop the development of Laban’s approach to movement education. However, I never knew what happened in schools because I never taught young children: my only experience of such teaching was of much older students at Bradford. I don’t have an experience of teaching children.
WL: I feel depressed that the categorisation of Physical Education from the arts or dance is as hard and fast as ever. While children might be taught a bit, given a few more opportunities for dance in a recreational setting, but it is still categorised as dance and physical education remains something very separate. Whether there is ever a prospect of movement education being embedded in the educational system according to Laban’s dream, I don’t know. All the current evidence is that there is a great emphasis on sports and that funding in this field goes to the sports, and to encouraging specialisation so as to develop sporting champions. I hated PE when I was a child.
GS: I hated it too. Going over the horse …
DM: Dominique Dupuy talks about the complete lack of drama in gymnastics: the body can do all these wonderful things and yet there is no sense of drama or personal expression. There is something very serious about this division between recreational movement and physical education, because there is a huge amount at stake. Can you trust people to express themselves? Does one give them the means? (And I think that the Efforts are a very useful means for achieving self-expression.) Or do you tell them what to do? I think that behind the prescriptions and proscriptions of PE there is a fundamental fear of the body.
WL: On a scale of being free or not free, there is a totalitarian tendency to inhibit people deliberately so as to conform.
DM: In connection with movement education, could you talk about how the education of the whole person?
WL: I think that you touched upon something very important when you talked about a fear on the part of those in charge of education as to whether we can trust people to express themselves. I think that a lot of teachers don’t want things to get out of their control. I think there is a lot of repression, actually. A lot of people on the streets don’t know how to move their bodies. Just as I have a problem with new technology so one finds people who are unaware of how to make their bodies work and function. I would dearly love there to be a reintroduction of that revolution that happened in the late 1940s with a new syllabus. I may say that I am excited my sports, but I have also said that I can foresee in years to come people will be going to big stadiums to participate in movement choirs rather than go and watch a soccer match. This of course is very extreme, but maybe it might happen!
GS: Today the only organisation that might promote such things is the Laban Guild, but it is very scattered. But I think they regard the Efforts as very old-fashioned, despite the fact that they are the basis of how one lives! There is no point in simply inviting people to do what they want because it will have no content. To me the Efforts are so important.
Efforts and Movement Behaviour. The relationship between Effort and Shape
DM: You say that the Efforts are ‘what we are made up of’. Could you both talk of how you learned them and how they helped your teaching?
GS: When I am watching someone perform a sequence I am always thinking how they could do this a little quicker or a bit stronger or more sustained, or whatever. When working with actors on their characters I might ask, ‘How would that character not walk?’ This is what Laban always used to ask. I never think, ‘Now I must apply the Efforts’, it is just automatic with me. They are in my body, in my being. I use them to make something better.
DM: Eukinetics are a way of training the eye into how you can understand or read movement.
GS: The Efforts helped me to learn Historical dances. I learned them through feeling the Efforts. They helped me understand the qualities of these dances. I teach and used to choreograph through the Efforts because they are there in me. Of course they were always there but I didn’t know what they were.
WL: But do you see any shaping in these movements?
GS: I see much less of the shaping than I do of the Effort. Of course, I see shaping but I always go first for the Efforts.
WL: At the Studio I was always characterised as the Efforts man while Valerie Preston Dunlop was the Choreutics person. I think that Laban correlated Effort with work and space harmony and shape more with art and philosophy, things away from work. I was designated by Laban to teach movement observation and I still have some notes from my teaching. There was one report that I made of 12 or 15 classes given over a term and Laban came to two of them. Everything that Laban got me to do in my visits to factories and my observations was to do with Effort. A great watershed for me was when I approached Laban a year or two before he died and asked whether there was any reason why I shouldn’t observe how people shape their movements, and relate this to their efforts. He seemed rather surprised but agreed. Now I have got so wedded to the relation between Effort and Shape and look upon movement as a combination of them, and that nobody makes an Effort that isn’t shape, nor do they ever Shape their movement without an Effort. In my own movement pattern I use more Effort (what I call Assertion) than Shape (Perspective), just the same as Dick – we are both effortful characters. I think the relationship between the two is so rich. I would never accept an invitation to teach Effort by itself. But Laban himself encouraged this division by publishing one book called Effort and another called Choreutics. I’ve often questioned quite how that came about. Although Laban didn’t originate in the dance-world, he started off by studying architecture and went to an art school in Paris, most of his life was devoted to dance. And if you look at the history of dance from early Ballet to Isadora Duncan, it has always been understood in terms of shape. Laban began by codifying Choreutics and it was only later that he began to analyse Effort. I remember that Kurt Jooss took this up as being something that one could add to dance. He and other dancers saw this as being something new to dance. Laban must have felt that he was the man who was introducing this whole new concept to dance, and I suppose the first fruit of it must have been the Green Table. Jooss continued to work with Effort and to claim how important it was for him. Then through the movement choirs and the work with the craftspeople Laban developed this idea that Effort was an indication of the character, the personality of the person. Most people were being encouraged by current conditions not to express the real Effort – they were being repressed, man was being made into a machine. He developed a great philosophy of man’s effort and how it should be recognised and enriched. People didn’t live unless they had a richer vocabulary and awareness of effort.
GS: Do you think that Effort was conceived before World War II?
WL: Yes. With Jooss and other people. Although Effort had been published in 1947 following his work with Lawrence, he had explored Efforts with dancers and in movement choirs in Germany. In his pageants with different craft-workers he had already explored the different types of movement each of them had.
GS: I think that the pageant that he created for the 1936 Olympics had people ‘dancing their jobs’.
WL: That’s a good way of putting it – Dancing their jobs! All the choreography of Hettie Loman [who created the company ‘British Dance Theatre’], one of the students at the Art of Movement Studio, was effortful: it exhausted audiences.
GS: Warren danced in her group and had a duet called ‘Born of Desire’ with Valerie Preston Dunlop.
Laban’s notion of Effort and the connection with therapy. Irene Champernowne.
WL: The extent of Laban’s influence in England and how it grew was astonishing, even accepting that he came with a reputation from Germany. He supported all the work of Lisa Ullman, he did that pioneering work with Lawrence. He developed a link with a woman called Irene Champernowne who had the Withymead Centre in Devon that specialised in Jungian therapy. In those few years during and immediately after the War, there was such a breadth of interest that spread throughout England: in Education, Industry, in Theatre and in Therapy.
GS: There was also an equivalent amount of antagonism.
WL: The Jungian approach to psychiatry really spread in that time – even though it was anathema to Freudians. One of the psychiatrists who became quite a close friend was Culver Barker. He used to go to Switzerland to talk with Jung, and would come back and say how interested Jung was in Laban’s ideas about movement. He was very much in favour of incorporating many of Laban’s ideas into Jungian practice. I have note in my archives that Joan Carrington, my first wife, who came to the Studio, gave a lecture with me to a group of at least 15 Jungians. I remember some of the questions. One of them followed my reply by saying, ‘What Warren Lamb means is …’ I stopped him, ‘Excuse me, I mean what I said!’ Despite my rudeness I did a lot of work with Dr Barker and another Jungian psychiatrist, Dr Lottie Rosenberg who became a friend of the family. Laban did have a reputation for being a healer. Mary Wigman writes about Laban’s healing hands and his touch. She tells the story of a woman who was crippled and confined to a wheelchair and he got her to move and so discover that she could rise out of the wheelchair and walk. Laban liked to think of himself as a healer; whether this was more from a mystique element, or because he used his intuition in movement, or both. Veronica Tyndale Biscoe (Sherborne) carried this work on and developed some students who continue it. I remember that recently somebody gave the Laban lecture for the Guild on her work.
Of course the relation between movement and psychoanalysis is also being developed by Judith Kestenberg, though she is, of course a Freudian. I tried to get her interested in Jungian principles and also in Abraham Maslow’s work. He had the idea that people acted according to their comfort zone and that their first requirement was to get food and avoid starvation. Secondly, they sought shelter until you gradually rose to the top of your needs which is self-actualisation. I tried to get Kestenberg interested in what was called this hierarchy of needs. Then there were other things like Bioenergetics, Alexander Lowen, who is still alive and practising at the age of 93. This is rooted in the biochemistry of the body and different cycles of what goes on in the body. But it is rooted in an understanding of energy and owes something to Wilhelm Reich who in turn was very influenced by Laban. Reich devised what he called an Orgone Box into which people would go to create energy. When I was in New York with Reich he was with a woman who had been very close to Laban [Felicia Sachs], formerly having been a pupil of his in Germany. She was a partner of Reich at that time, 1953. Although I was there to take a message from Laban to this woman, I talked with Reich and it was obvious that he was very indebted to Laban. Basically his aim was to generate people’s creative energy – whether his link with Laban movement comes from the Orgone box I’m not sure but there was a big sexual element; it was very much to do with dynamic energy. Of course Reich was judged to be insane and was incarcerated for the last couple of years of his life. In this field of therapy I am detecting quite a large amount of interest in Laban. Whilst I was embarrassed and upset by Kestenberg’s obsession with Freud and her refusal to go beyond Freud in any way, what is happening now is that Kestenberg’s work is catching on, it is spreading amongst dance therapists in America and as a result is spreading to Europe. Also many cities in America have Jungian groups and quite a lot of them – some articles have been published on the subject – have become interested in Laban. So there is some renewal there. I gave a lecture to about 40 dance therapists a few weeks ago and it seems they, whilst becoming interested in the Kestenberg work, are not containing it simply within the Freudian doctrine. This expansion in the field of therapy is quite remarkable and quite desirable. Some of these dance therapists are publishing articles that are very rigorous in their research, some dealing with particular problems of children, autism for example. Janet Hamburg is working with people who have Parkinson’s disease. People have developed a particular application of movement study to specific needs.
DM: We seem to be returning to the claim that Laban can understand – and maybe, thereby resolve - a whole range of human problems through movement.
WL: You could say that through a proper movement education you avoid the need for any therapy. Irmgard Bartenieff was a pioneer who achieved a lot through movement, first working with people who suffered from polio. She escaped from Germany to New York just before World War II. She couldn’t find any work in dance, and that is what led her into therapy work, and she was successful.
Somatics and movement studies
We were talking earlier about the lack of interdisciplinary activity across the border between dance and physical education, but the somatic studies that are happening now are wholly good - and I hope that I have helped this to happen. Somatic studies is becoming recognised as a field in its own right. It has developed in the University of Surrey, unfortunately in the performing arts department – I would have preferred it to have happened in another department. It is recognised at least as not belonging to dance. I am also associated with a course at a college in Chicago which deals mainly in somatics – but from a therapeutic angle. We still haven’t escaped from the dance category completely, but some progress has been made and I think in the years to come, somatic studies (which includes Feldenkrais) will become much more a study in its own right. The interest now into body-mind and the research into the brain can also be coordinated into the field of somatics, to a certain extent. I am hoping very much that somatics which grow in its own right and thus we can recognise Laban’s contribution to this field.
Choreutics. The work of Hettie Loman.
DM: Could we now turn our attention to Choreutics?
GS: I am no good at that! However I did love the Seven Ring. I suppose because it was ‘dancey’. I can’t remember it at all.
WL: Hettie Loman did a choreography called Song of the Earth to Bach’s toccata and fugue in D minor for organ. Her three dancers began on the floor and started doing the seven rings which got bigger and bigger. I thought it was beautiful in how it used Choreutics, even though Hettie was so effortful. Nevertheless the inspiration was the seven rings.
GS: I don’t think that Hettie got anywhere with her choreography because she was too advanced, too way out for then.
WL: Unfortunately none of our presentations was very finished. I remember someone saying that what we were doing was remarkable but we were all doing it with dirty fingernails – the costumes were pretty awful; the staging was mostly poor.
GS: She did something with professional dancers eventually. She did have a lot of ideas.
WL: Her ideas fell over each other.
GS: We were such an odd mixture of people in the first years of the Studio.
WL: Whenever Laban was talking about Choreutics he was in a dance mode, he was relating it to dance and to harmony. Then he would get into a mysterious, metaphysical realm and start talking about the cosmos, trying to convey that Choreutics really was such a vast subject that none of us could get to understand it.
GS: I don’t remember him saying that, though he could have done.
WL: My aim was not to get into metaphysical mode. I never saw why you couldn’t do a study of the three ring and then the seven ring. And then when I later got into the matching of the Eukinetics with the Choreutics, why you couldn’t relate it to everyday life which I tried to by saying that if you put emphasis on Choreutics then you emphasised the perspective, where you place yourself, what you do in the kinesphere. Whether you shrink or grow it, whether you flatten it or open it. This tends to put us more in touch with our environment.
DM: Your ‘Pin-Ball-Wall’ is exactly about this social occupancy of space.
GS: Yes. All our sessions are conducted on our own, which is so different to how we learned it with other students there with whom you could interact. So we have another basis to our lessons. I feel that you miss something in not being able to relate to other people. Laban was very much about that. Do you remember doing the wave at the Studio?
WL: Yes I do. That was a very frequently done thing. A successive movement was how it was referred to.
DM: What were your favourite exercises?
GS: Doing ‘the wave’ was one of them. Otherwise I loved jumping. I was young and daft.
WL: I really worked at the Studio, it was very demanding. And doing Hettie’s choreography as well: she had me lifting the dancers, because I was the only man. I remember that I used my war gratuity of £68 for five year’s of active service and that the fees at the Art of Movement Studio were £32.00 a term. It must have been mid-term when I went, end of October/early November because I paid £16. The following April I paid £32.00 and then I was broke. Valerie came a fair bit later, April 1947 I think, because I remember thinking of myself as a fairly experienced student when she arrived.
On the subject of Choreutics, I think I was earmarked by Laban from my first meeting at Lawrence’s offices, as an Efforts man. That did influence me in my comprehension of Choreutics, though I do remember doing studies in the three-ring and such like. We were asked to create a choreography on a particular theme, and then re-introduce in another level, high or low. I remember Lisa and Laban sitting in rather an intimidating way watching our pieces.
GS: But they never knocked anybody down with these things that we did. They always found something in them. Laban, whilst searching for something positive to say would pronounce, ‘Now!’ followed by a long pause as he continued searching.
WL: He was consistently supportive except on just the odd occasion when he would burst out. It was sparked if he felt that anyone was getting a little too big for their boots or if someone criticised him. There were moments when we did feel that we weren’t getting what we’d paid for, when neither Laban nor Lisa would turn up. I remember there was an American girl called Caroline Maldorelli.
GS: She was not in the first year, she came later.
WL: She complained about something and Laban jumped on her, saying that she didn’t know anything, that she had no future, and so on. He did the same with Mary Wigman – he pounced on her saying that everything she did was inharmonious; but such was her respect for the man that she weathered it. She didn’t allow it to influence her. But Caroline Maldorelli left the next day; went back to America. Apart from these occasional outbursts he was always very supportive, enlightening and helpful. Whenever he spoke to you, you felt that he was saying something meaningful and significant.
DM: While some commentators see Laban’s genius lying in his Choreutic and more abstract researches whereas much of what both of you have been saying touches on a more humanistic approach to the value of movement in human development and behaviour. It was about the whole human rather than some Platonic secret key to movement.
WL: I think that it has something to do with Choreutics and Platonic space, but people will always take what Laban offers, from where they are coming from. Laban certainly gave excuse or provocation with his statements about cosmology and movement.
I think that Laban has set the groundwork for a field of research that is to come. Certainly a lot of people who are highly qualified are coming to recognise the potential in recognising some of Laban’s ideas. I think the future will be with these people rather than with some of the originals like Geraldine and me. A friend of Geraldine and mine, Carol-Lynne Moore has spent more than two years trying to work out what Laban had discovered in terms of the mathematical proportions of movement, and concepts of harmony and dis-harmony and linking it with music. She has, I think, discovered some important principals, and she’s written a book [The Harmonic Structure of Movement, Music and Dance, 2009] on this which will hopefully be published within the next few months. I think this will be quite significant in this field. My use of Choreutics is very simplistic compared to this sort of study into Choreutics as developed by Laban.
Stephenson and Lamb March 25th 2005
Summary of the Interview
The interview follow WL’s participation in one of GS’s lessons with DM. WL’s reflections on the exercises GS is teaching DM. Connections with her teaching at AMS, Manchester and with contemporary body work which is often rather flat and humourless. Bend, Stretch, Twist. The logic behind GS’s lessons for DM. Rosalia Chladek. GS’s lessons answer the needs of the student, she answers the particular needs and capabilities of DM. WL’s Movement Pattern Analysis of DM. The connection between WL’s analysis and Laban’s theory of Effort.
The Interview
WL’s reflections on the exercises GS is teaching DM.
WL: Your lesson took me back quite a lot to 1947 when you were teaching at the Art of Movement Studio. Of course what you were teaching then was in the context of people who were professionally studying movement, and in some cases aspiring to become dancers. In my own case I wasn’t aspiring to become a dancer, but I did become a member of Hettie Loman’s dance group, but more by accident than design, because I happened to be a man who was around the place. But from this morning’s lesson it did strike me how valuable these exercises are for anybody – particularly the relaxation exercises in my case, since they pointed out the tension in my upper spine. I say this, despite the fact that I do my own exercises based on effort/shape patterns with which I improvise a bit.
Right now I am particularly interested in the three rings, because I have to teach something on them. So, I am incorporating them in my daily practice. I have never really done basic exercises as Geraldine has just done where one allows the head to drop and then allows this to lead your spine down into a flop. I have never been able to relax, I always work too hard at it. Just to allow your head to drop is a very good reminder to me of the sort of thing that I should do.
I remember your anatomy classes at the AMS all those years ago. I remember your walking around with your Grey’s Anatomy, and I remember that I should have studied anatomy more myself. The knowledge of anatomy – of the muscles and of the skeletal structure - that you have shows in your teaching, it is very much part of it. Your lesson reminded me a lot of what I should incorporate in my own bodily work, even at this late day and age. At the same, I would say that you are incapable of teaching without being stimulating and inspiring. Nowadays body work is a lot more popular, with Yoga, Pilates, and other methods, but very often they seem to be very profound and meaningful, that element of them seems to make them rather dull. In your teaching you can succeed in being profound and yet at the same time full of fun, joy and inspiration. That’s what particularly impressed me this morning. Although many people take up this other body-based systems, I think that they would be better working with you in many cases. They can become stuck in some esoteric approach, something which has great seriousness, but which is based on a very specific understanding of what the body is doing and it is particularly specialised approach. What you are doing is much more generalised, and much more appropriate to developing a command of your body and, hopefully, having enough body awareness to enable you to get your body to do what you want it to do. It will become a well-tuned instrument. Your approach could be called the ‘body-awareness school’, or something like that.
I was talking to Carol-Lynn Moore when we were recently working on a three-day course, which was so popular that it lead to two follow-up courses. All of these people have worked on some kind of body technique, or what is more or less known as Somatics, and yet their understanding of how the body moves is very, very poor. They really need to start where Laban believed you should start: having a three-year basic course in movement before you go on to do anything else. These are people desperate to work in movement and yet their own bodies are very inadequate as instruments to do that. On reflection, I think Geraldine’s body awareness course is in fact it is more than that, it is more like body-training, since it incorporates elements of a dancer’s training, but adapted in this case to the needs of a non-professional. I think that your approach would go some way to achieving what Laban believed everyone should have: a basic three-year training in movement.
GS: I started to work with Dick on these sessions, but I didn’t know that I was going to be doing this for such a long time. My first thought was that we’d be working towards movement that led to theatre and that could have immediate relevance to drama. I quite quickly found out that he wanted me to work on his body to get him more mobile and more agile, to become more knowledgeable about how his body worked. I put away the idea of putting this into any theatre and have worked with him for two or three years.
DM: The story, as I remember it was that, following a very popular and successful workshop for IWF in September 2000, I had asked you to give a weekend workshop in 2001. You had felt that you would need an assistant for such a long commitment and I agreed to assist you, so we began some lessons in April 2001.
Bend, Stretch, Twist. The logic behind GS’s lessons for DM
GS: What I have been doing for some time is based on bending, stretching and twisting, and that has been my idea for working with Dick. I have been able to use that approach at other times when I have taught. I have developed these sessions because of him, because of what his body needed. If it was somebody else it probably would have worked out quite differently.
DM: What did you see when you first saw me in 1999. What did you think that my body needed? Could you explain Bend, Stretch, Twist?
GS: I could see that your body was very stiff and that this was going to make for difficulties, or that that would need attention. What has been so helpful to me has been your willingness to try things. Some people shy off because they say that they have this problem with their back or ankle – I never believe them because I think that they just don’t want to give their energy to it. You have had enormous energy. Most of our sessions last three hours which is quite long: I have never done such long sessions with just one person. I used to take the actress Patricia Burke (1917 – 2003) for private lessons, but these were for an hour. I think that Bend, Stretch, Twist must come from Laban, but I can’t ever remember doing this kind of a lesson with Laban at the Studio. Because you are a very straight man, at first you found bending and twisting very difficult. It is often difficult to English people, even to ballet people it is difficult because you don’t twist around like that. Each week I work out what I’m going to do with you, and your lessons include a lot of variety, otherwise it would be impossible to continue them.
Rosalia Chladek
Gradually things have come into the lessons that I learned years ago – for example the Chladek work that learned myself back in summer 1949. Chladek and Mary Wigman stood out: Wigman because her movement was so dramatic, and Chladek because her exercises were so very specifically about elevation (and because she hated the English!). We only elevated on the very last session when we did little runs across the diagonal. I brought this into the training at the AMS when I was asked to do the morning sessions.
WL: You learned it as a dance technique but how you teach it now has wider application in terms of physical training.
GS: Dick enjoys that kind of work and has become very good it at now. Obviously, he needed to strengthen his legs because they were all over the place. A lot of what I do is a result of the person revealing him or herself to me and then I create something specifically for them. I don’t solidly do set exercise each time. I did try to do some of these things set exercises like the Chladek ones at a workshop for the Laban Guild and while some liked them, others were put off by the fact that they were set. They were too much like hard work. Dick, especially with his spine, has really benefited from these exercises.
GS’s lessons answer the needs of the student.
DM: Why do you pay so much attention to the movement of the upper spine and to the shoulders? Many of your exercises focus on this part of me?
GS: Because that is where you are stiff – I work on the parts of you that need work. If I see a pupil whose movement is hampered by not being able to move with the neck and head then I need to address this problem. I don’t set out with a plan of going from A through to Z: I always have a teaching plan, but when I get into the Studio with the person, my plan changes a bit to accommodate their needs. I did study anatomy when I was at Bedford and I suppose that this has stuck with me over the years. At the time I thought it was very tiresome having to do so much anatomy when one could have been dancing, but in fact it has been very, very valuable. I don’t know whether dancers and choreographers study it today. If you start with a basic feel for anatomy, then the movement that you can teach does for everybody. As long as you are careful about your students – be they young or older.
WL: Unlike so many of the people that I meet in this field, one thing about you is that you are a very good advertisement for what you teach.
GS: That is partly because these lessons with Dick stimulate me to move and to dance. If you had known that you would be learning dance when you began with me I am sure you would have run a mile.
DM: Your first IWF workshop in 2000 did in fact include quite a bit of dance.
GS: Yes I did include some historical dance so as to discuss the idea of different kinds of movement behaviour, and to introduce the Efforts; for example, in a pavane there is a lot of pressing, whilst there is a lot of free-flow in a waltz. I never actually expected that you would dance – it was just something that has come about in our lessons. Of course, most of the session isn’t dance, it is movement, but there are some set pieces we have developed.
WL: I saw a film at a recent Laban Guild day of a teacher getting a group of students with learning difficulties to move, and it was clear what pleasure they took in the lesson. I wonder how much training such teachers need in anatomy for movement?
GS: This is why I think the Efforts are so useful, because they help you understand, or better, to feel, what kind of movements such people need. There are such a variety of movements that they can do.
WL: I once saw a movement therapist working with a patient who was clinically depressed: the therapist was exhorting the patient to move in a way that was totally over the top, and I actually felt that she was doing quite a lot of harm. I’m not sure about the idea that just getting people to dance is in itself therapeutic. That is what is being promoted, at least it seems to be the case. I think this is quite indiscriminate, and it is quite dangerous. I would have hoped after the last few decades of Laban work that there would be more discrimination in what people are doing in this area. Take for example, how Geraldine has taught you. She has been very discriminating in what exercises she has chosen to teach you, along with her general approach to your lessons.
WL’s Movement Pattern Analysis of DM
Turning to my MPA of Dick, I would say that my analysis revealed a lot of increasing pressure in his movement. Of course, in order to keep on increasing pressure, you have to decrease pressure on occasions. He did an awful lot of what Laban would have called weight-effort than he did space-effort, but even more than that he did an awful lot of time-effort. In my theory there is a relationship between Dick’s exertion of pressure – and we all at some time or other exert pressure – it usually comes together with timing. They are both pretty intense and figure predominantly in his make-up. This is the unique feature of Dick – how he combines his pressure variation with his time variation. There is a lot of pace in what he does, he likes to be in control of the pace, he doesn’t easily follow a pace that other people set - whether that’s a fast pace or a slow pace is another matter – he likes to take that initiative. On the effort side he tends to do more effort than shape, basically.
The connection between WL’s analysis and Laban’s theory of Effort
I was looking through some of my early notes from the AMS, and I was surprised that Laban saw Eukinetics as being to do with either industry or education. This might have been an oversimplification that he had made to keep things simple for us. I see that the two efforts can be taken together – both shape-effort and weight and time effort. An effort has to be shaped in some way or other. Even if you are gathering or scattering, there is some weight-time effort that is also characteristic of this shape-effort.
To put alongside my comments on pressure and timing, another feature is that Dick tends to take more effort-initiative than shape-initiative. Although Dick responds well to exercises which demand him to move in the horizontal plane, I felt that the sideways and forwards-backwards movements did not incorporate much posture-gesture merging. It was more gestural. I think it would be helpful from a developmental point of view just to feel that you can get a degree of progress in unemphasised areas of movement. It’s like the stimulus you get from a correction from a teacher. You know that within your pattern of behaviour there are certain features that tend to be fairly low compared to others to which you give a lot of emphasis. I think it’s very good for you to feel that even if your shape-effort is low, you could call upon it, and be aware of it, and maybe marginally, it could grow a little. Take for example how you perform the scales, which you do with good bodily effort; but when people have more emphasis on shape-initiative it really does seem that they are designing a shape in space in an architectural sense, and you perceive this as an observer. You might have been laying bricks in space rather than designing space. Dick is certainly disciplined when he starts the A-scale, but he really likes to end with a powerful oomph of a finish – that is, with effort! He just can’t restrain himself
GS: It is his enthusiasm for the movement, and of course enthusiasm is an effortful thing. This is why teaching him is such a joy – precisely because he is effortful.
DM: trying to get a sense of space is more than simply kinaesthetic – it is also a sense of shape, and this I wish to develop. I hope to get there in three years. Being just effortful is very wearing, quite literally so when you consider my joints. I wonder if I would become flexible mentally, more flexible in my behaviour through my learning to move with more space-initiative.
WL: Three years is a realistic target to make some development. There is such an art in seeking to develop this greater perception of shape. Dick is like me: when I try to relax I work very hard at it. So one has to be very hard not too work to hard, not to become too earnest in trying to develop one’s shape initiative. You have to try to allow it to happen rather than trying to make it happen.
DM: Warren, what would your advice be for Geraldine and I over the next three years’ lessons.
WL: To develop your perception of shape: whether it is to do with nearness or farness, contortedness or harmony; what constitutes harmony as opposed to the grotesque; a sense of those sorts of things. Laban often talked about harmony, contrasting what he considered to be harmonious with often grotesque movements. When he was in Germany he experiment with the grotesque a lot in his dances. That sort of contrast would be a good thing.
DM: Geraldine is continually inviting me to be more adventurous in my movements in space – to explore more. She is trying to encourage me to be creative in my response to space.
GS: Now you have so much more mobility than you had when we first started.
DM: it was only this year that I could only keep my balance while swinging my legs forward and back. Now that I can perform a wider range of movements without being concerning with falling over, I can start thinking more about shape.
WL: Concentrating on a sense for the direction in space is good. Rather than thinking of moving up, it is good to think of upwardness, so that when you are with other people your movement might give them an uplift. This you can do. But to get a sense of width and openness, you don’t offer this to the same degree of upwardness. To create a feeling of openness, of width and breadth, to create a forwardness, to create a sense of the space ahead of you – you need to create a sense of space, rather than simply concentrating on what the body is doing.
DM: I feel it is about me learning how to respond to space.
WL: Let me give you an example of what I recently did with a professional dancer for whom I had just done an MPA. I created a movement phrase with which I knew she would have particular problems and she did indeed admit to having difficulties.
Interview September 23rd 2005
Summary of Interview
Another review of progress made in our lessons together – she goes to where her student is. Rosalia Chladek and the course in 1949 that GS attended. Trying to have my feet turned out! Regular exercises in GS’s classes: Leg Swings, the Wave, Gathering and Scattering. The importance of hands in her training. The Efforts and GS’s Effort studies. Bend, Stretch, Twist in GS’s training.
The Interview
Warm Ups
DM: The warm-ups that we do now are really quite different to those that we did a year ago. You now seem to be very interested in the different qualities of the skin that we meet space with: whether we lead with the softer skin on the inside of our arm, or with the rougher skin on the outside. Even when warming up you now ask me to explore the different qualities of touch and movement that these two types of skin afford.
GS: When I started working with you, you didn’t really have a clue what to do at the beginning. So I had to proceed terribly slowly, trying out this and that exercise. Now, after all these lessons you do know my method and way of working, and therefore at the beginning of the lesson I aim at different things. It depends really on how you are. I address the beginning of the lesson to however I find you – be it tired or full of energy. Sometime we have to begin very simply so that you can be brought into the feeling of the lesson. I go by how you are.
Chladek
GS: It was Laban and Lisa who suggested that I should go to a summer school in Switzerland in 1949, and Chladek was one of the teachers there. She did a lot of bending and stretching whilst lying down on the floor and getting the legs into action because she was interested in elevation, that is, jumping and landing. But if you just started by jumping and landing you could easily hurt your legs, so these exercises warm up and strengthen your calf muscles and the joint in your legs. This also started my interest in working on the floor, exploring different ways of bending and stretching.
Trying to have my feet turned out!
DM: Over the past four years you have paid particular attention to whether my feet are turned out or not. Could you explain why having ‘turned out’ feet is important?
GS: firstly, I would say that feet which ‘sickle’, look terrible! Sickling is when your feet turn in towards the centre of your foot. You look stupid in your head if you walk with your feet turned in.
DM: So the jumps of one onto one, one onto two, two onto two and two onto one, follow on very logically from the Chladek? These are the elevations which we have been preparing for.
GS: Yes. And now you are taking more risks with your movement so an exercise like this becomes much more interesting, both for you to do and me to look at.
123 123 12 and 6 4 2 and turn
Laban liked any rhythms that were irregular because they make you think and feel differently. The change in metre almost obliges you to be creative. It makes you do something different to what you might have done had it just been a ‘square’ rhythm. Laban was always for getting you off the ‘square’ and the straightforward! It was typical of him to choose something uneven since it seemed to make you develop new ideas for movement. It made you use your body in a different way. If we were doing this in Manchester there would be somebody in the centre of the circle stamping out the rhythm, while people around would be invited drawn into the circle to create their own dance. Maybe up to three people might finally be dancing to the rhythm. This was a different way of doing technique because of the rhythms. I think in those days not a lot of that was done – in Classical Greek and Ballet you didn’t get that.
DM: Does this come back to his fascination with the Grotesque?
GS: Yes, I would think so. There was a lot of grotesque in Laban’s work but there were also things that weren’t, which were well-shaped.
Leg Swings
GS: This is an exercise which I associate with Lisa. It has a lot of value because it helps develop your sense of balance – as you well know! It helps with the lifting of the leg both forward and backward: eventually you will manage to swing yours much higher. You can do it in so many different ways. So far we are only doing quite simple combinations. There is always room to play with Laban’s ideas – you can always play with them a bit more.
The Wave
DM: The Wave has been a staple in our lessons since the very beginning, what significance does it have for you as an exercise?
GS: I can’t quite remember where I started this exercise, but I think it was in Bedford with Joan Goodrich. Lisa was very fond of it. She used to get us very deep down, nearly on the floor with our bent knees. It was a huge movement forward with the knees and then the hips. There is a feeling about doing this move which is exciting. Although I cannot remember doing the backwards wave I feel sure that we must have done. It was a very strong movement that we used to do from corner to corner of the Studio. I think that you and I do a more with it than we used to do at the Studio, but I could be wrong. For example, I don’t remember that we used to go forward and back as a duo, but very likely it was there.
DM: What do you the think is the function of the Wave in terms of training?
GS: I think it helps strengthen muscles in the legs with the deep knee bends, for a start. It also helps make the spine much more supple since it makes extreme bends both backward and forward. It is helps you develop your balance. It’s got just about everything in it.
DM: Over the past couple of years the quality of arm movements has become a big theme in your training. One instruction that you have given is to ‘feel the air’ with the softer skin of the arm as one travels forward in the Wave, and to press back with the back of the arms. There must be an aesthetic dimension to this.
GS: With all these things you can make them very military, very mechanical. Or you can make them quite expressive. But equally I like the feeling of doing this exercise, I like the feeling of lying backwards on the air. This exercise has a lot to give. If you’ve got a number of people doing the exercise you can see just how much it can vary. It’s the sort of movement that works whether you do it large or small. You can do it small and still feel good. It also uses the hands a lot, they are almost gathering and scattering the space, but in the Saggital plane. We might get even more out of it as our studies continue.
DM: I’ve noticed over the years how you have slowly fed in an increasing number of details as I have progressed. For example, only recently, now that I am finding my balance in the exercise, have you asked me to bring my feet closer together. Now that the mechanics of the movement have been better mastered by me, we are focusing more on its aesthetic, even its kinaesthetic dimension.
GS: Although I am so elderly now I can still do the movement, even though I can’t get down so deeply as you do. It is very meaningful for me to do it.
DM: It can be practised on a seat or at the barre.
GS: Using the barre allows you almost to touch the ground with your knees.
Hands
DM: From the very start of our lessons you have done hand exercises with me. Why are hands important to you, and why do you think it important that they should be included in my training?
GS: Hands are vital to me. To start with as a child I did classical ballet where immediately hands are dealt with. The hand is held in a special way in Ballet. It isn’t so much a movement as a position in which the hand is held. If you lift both arms above the head there is a way that your hands must be held – it was very definite. I can’t remember that they were dealt with by Lisa and Laban. For Laban the hands were part of the arm: whatever movement you were making, be it floating and delicate or thrusting, the arm and the hand had to work together – much more than in Ballet. You could do a whole dance just with the hands.
DM: But you seem to go much further than either Laban or Classical Ballet. You did once say to me during a lesson that my hands, ‘were completely meaningless’.
GS: I notice people’s hands very much in movement. Very often they don’t do anything with them. I find this extraordinary since for me a hand has always been part of the arm. Whatever you are doing up to the wrist must be continued beyond it into the fingers. Hands are so expressive: they can show anger, delicacy, love – every emotion. They must not be left out in dance. So many people only go so far as the wrists.
DM: Would you say that if the movement gets into the hand that there’s a chance that it will go beyond the fingers and into the audience?
GS: I think you’re right, I’m sure it does. There is such a variety of hand exercises. Actually we’ve only ever done exercises to train the hand, but we’ve never put any particular aesthetic emphasis on the hands. I’m always aware when your hands aren’t involved with your arms. That’s when they look meaningless.
DM: Maybe when the hands aren’t involved there is no intention to the movement – there really isn’t any personal meaning in it.
GS: It could be that you are so involved in questions about arms or feet that the hands die away. You can also get the opposite where there is a lot of movement in the hands but the arms are dead. I find that men are more difficult with hands, because they think it is too ‘sissy’ to use their hands delicately. They fear looking feminine. But if it is simply continuing the movement of the arm, it isn’t effeminate at all. You have never been difficult about your hands. Some actors don’t know how to use their hands, other use them too much! They fiddle. If an actor shoves his hands in his pockets because he doesn’t know what to do with them, I notice they have been left out of the expression of the body.
DM: We do about six different hand exercises, can you remember where they come from?
GS: No I can’t, but I’m sure that some must have come from Lisa and Laban, but nothing actually stands out in my head. I think it has come about because of all my work with actors, because they need a lot of help with their hands and one notices much more quickly when they’re not using them. If you’re working with one or two other people you can do wonderful things by connecting with your hands. You can make up all sorts of interesting stories with your hands. Certainly if you’re doing something like slashing or punching your hands have very much got to be part of the movement.
Gathering and Scattering
GS: This definitely came from Lisa and Laban.
DM: What is the value of this exercise for you?
GS: Firstly I enjoy doing this movement and always have done. I have very long arms and this means that I am very aware when I am gathering. This movement can be so tiny – a mere unfolding of the fingers - or you can do an enormous movement of the whole body, and there is everything in between. You can turn with this movement, indeed it has a huge amount of variety for dancing. You can turn on the gathering, though the big turn comes on the scattering. I don’t know that actors would value it very much – they might find a gathering and scattering in the hands useful, because they don’t often work with their fingers. I remember that we used to do it at the Studio across the diagonal – I was across it in three hops, the Studio was so small. It is, of course, a diagonal movement. When you have a lot of space scattering can be so much fun because you have this freedom of being. Gathering can almost be an attitude towards the world. I love scattering because I have long arms and legs and it gives me a chance to fly.
Bend, Stretch, Twist in GS’s training
DM: I used to have difficulty with this movement because, as with so many of these Laban exercises, it is both labile and flexible – which means you need to have a good sense of balance. Now that I have a better sense of balance I find it great fun.
The Efforts
DM: You created the effort studies, ‘Whip and Twist’ and ‘Press, Glide, Float, Flick’.
GS: I created them to help get you to twist. When you came to me you were very stiff, you were like one long piece. I would create any exercise get you more flexible and moving. I would describe my programme for you as consisting of Bend, Stretch, Twist, which is from Laban. You could bend a little, but you were very reluctant to twist, which is often the case with men because they feel that it is feminine. It is for women to be flexible.
DM: Think of how we categorise sexuality. Gay men are called bent, while heterosexuals are called straight. To be a man is to be unbending.
GS: I remember at the Studio that the men were happy to be flexible with their arms below the shoulders, but felt very self-conscious making flexible movements with their arms above their heads. I do think that men are more worried by flexibility. You were very inflexible because I think you were used to being in charge, as director of the International Workshop Festival.
DM; I remember that in early lessons you would ask me to run and then get into a twist, then untwist and run to another part of the studio before getting into another twist. I found this very difficult. At the time I couldn’t see the purpose of the exercise – of course, I found it very difficult. Part of my learning curve with you has been to realise that there aren’t really any stupid exercises. I used to feel ‘superior’ to some of the basic exercises that you set me. They didn’t seem ‘serious’.
One thing that you have made me particularly aware of is finding a flexibility in my upper spine. You have helped me discover a softness in the thoracic spine that I never had before. You continually exhort me to rise from the chest rather than collapse, to think of creating a convex rather than a concave shape. Finding this softness in my upper spine has helped me twist with greater ease. Even when doing the deep twist in ‘Whip and Twist’, the upper chest is rising rather than collapsed.
GS: I remember that when I started with Laban I used to find the flexible movements very difficult because for a woman I was very tall. I remember that actors used to enjoy making flexible movements while more classical dancers liked to remain straight, of one piece. When I did my solo pieces in the 1950s I used to do some quite grotesque dances which involved quite a lot of twists in the body. Laban’s work used to be criticised in the early days because it was so grotesque, because of all the twisting and the strange use of the hands. When I was at the Summer School with Chladek, she never twisted at all. She was very tall and very commanding – very frightening. I can’t imagine that she ever twisted very much.
Although I haven’t taught for years, when I did, actors used to be fascinated by the Efforts. They offered them a variety of ideas for characters. Otherwise they would be playing every character in the same way. Latterly I think more of the component parts of the Efforts – weight, time, space and flow. Rather than thinking of wringing, I think of a movement that is sustained and indirect. I’ll think of a movement that is quick and direct, that is, I focus on just two elements of the Effort. I am interested in particular movement contents rather than generalisations. In Laban’s time the Efforts became a kind of joke – everyone was talking about them. If people talk endlessly about slashing and wringing and flicking it can become meaningless: you need to think of the contents, the individual elements, of a movement. But to me they have been invaluable – and, as I say, especially to actors. You can give an instruction like, ‘Try a little bit more sustainment when that character sits down.’ Maybe that one element might be useful in helping the actor understand how his character sits down or gets up. I find myself using them all the time. Indirectly I use them a lot in your lessons. I understand movement in terms of these of elements or contents.
Teaching
DM: After you gave up full-time teaching at the Studio, did your emphasis move from teaching to mentoring?
GS: Come the sixties I was busy with choreography and a lot of television – also a certain amount of theatre. I wasn’t in the teaching field any more. Actually, I did teach at a drama school and give the occasional weekend course.
Interview 16th November 2005
Summary of Interview
This is another reflection on the lessons GS has given to DM. It also coincides with their work on a DVD Rom created by Peter Hulton charting DM’s progress with GS over the years. The conversation is free-ranging and quite personal. It looks over the four years they have been working together. There are reflections on the usefulness of the Efforts, and of the sense of space GS has created within DM. Successiveness.
The Interview
How GS Teaches
DM: let’s begin with how it all began. Following your very popular one-day workshop for the International Workshop Festival in 2000, I invited you to give a weekend workshop in 2001. Your condition was that you had an assistant, and there being no likely candidate, I agreed to take on this role. Therefore you had to train me up for the workshop. I think we had about 12 lessons between April 12th and September 29th when we gave our workshop. Then we decided to continue, and I did this for very personal reasons. First, because I wanted to learn how to move purely for the pleasure of moving. As a human being, I am considerably happier being able to move, than I was before. I have always wanted to be able to move. That said, I found the first three years of lessons very difficult because I had such difficulty with basic things like balance and remembering movements. I didn’t enjoy movements like Gathering and Scattering because I simply didn’t understand what they were.
The second reason for working with you on Laban movement was that I knew it would be useful for my teaching. This is why I have always been glad that you come to watch me teaching Laban and give me feedback on how I am getting on.
GS: It is an absolute gift that you welcome me into your classes and I do feel that I can help you develop in your teaching of Laban. Maybe this is because you are older and less hung-up about being observed when teaching. Neither of us knew what would happen when we started working together – it was just a try-out.
DM: It must have been a challenge for you since you hadn’t taught much between the mid-1960s through to the late-1990s. You must have been so busy working in film, television and on the stage – given that your CV has 200 TV credits to your name!
GS: I hadn’t taught for years. I was doing choreography.
DM: You were talking about how you used to demonstrate a lot when you taught.
GS: I thought I demonstrated far too much, but then I was a lot younger. In the days when I could really dance it was worth demonstrating because people needed to see the possibilities of the movements. Now I don’t do it because I can’t balance, but also because I don’t need to – my teaching is different. I had no idea what you would be like when I started teaching you.
DM: Apart from actors whom you’ve coached – like Maureen Lipman or Edward Petherbridge - I’m your first private pupil you’ve ever had.
GS: You’re the only one.
DM: I find that your strategies of teaching very interesting. It may well be that your poor balance means that you can’t go as deep or swing as you used to, but it’s amazing what I can learn from seeing you demonstrate a movement. There is something about the quality of movement, in its intention, structure and architecture that I can learn from. Your shoulders may be rounded, but they aren’t raised in habitual tension as mine are when I swing my arms. I also learn when you imitate my movements, amplifying the error that I am making: your caricatures of me are immensely useful because I can almost feel what I am doing wrong – where I am tensing up. It’s better than a video because you highlight the particular problem for me when you exaggerate it. It becomes clear for me to see.
GS: I’m glad because you’re never quite sure if someone sees what you’re doing.
DM: You seem to be quite pragmatic in your approach to teaching. Did you have a specific idea in mind when you started teaching me?
GS: No specific idea at all. I just knew that we should start with exercises exploring ‘Bend, Stretch, Twist’ and then see how you get on. I still do that now, in a way. It is part of the teaching. I don’t just do a set of exercises for the sake of doing them. Sometimes you’ve been tired at the beginning of a lesson, so I start gently, and then get lively. Other times when you’re full of beans then I use it. I think a teacher has to notice what a person is like. It was fairly easy to see what you could and couldn’t do. With everybody the big problem is balance and the use of the legs – but that’s a natural thing.
DM: There were my legs, and my feet (obviously they’re related!), but I was also so rigid, so flat, and also so effortful! ReIated to this was the stiffness in my upper body – neck, shoulder, sternum, upper spine, ribs.
GS: That was very major. Obviously that followed years of you tightening your ribs and shoulders. It’s natural – many people are like that. If you work at the computer you are concentrating and you tense up.
DM: You have helped me make distinctions between so many different parts of myself – be it in the shoulders or in the feet. I now have a new feel for the floor. You have helped me find a deal more flexibility in my upper spine.
GS: An enormous amount. What I’ve missed, perhaps, is teaching in a group. Normally one has a group and one can pick out different aspects of a movement as performed by one person, and everyone else can learn by watching that person. They can see at once that the shoulder is stiff, or whatever. You learn from seeing what people around you are doing or not doing. It forces you to do it better.
DM: This happens in the Feldenkrais training where we are often invited to observe how a student moves in order to learn something about their particular movement pattern or response to an instruction. In our situation all I can rely upon is your lucky talent for mimicry. If you couldn’t mimic I would be really stuck.
GS: You are very gracious in acknowledging your mistakes and failures.
DM: Sometimes I don’t always understand what I am doing wrong and need you to explain it to me in a different way. I remember particularly the Chladek exercises at the barre, when I looked down at my feet and though I knew that I was to avoid ‘sickling’ with my feet, I didn’t really know how to avoid it because it was so much my habitual way of holding my feet. I could understand your instruction at a certain level, but I couldn’t really do much about it. My kinaesthetic awareness wasn’t yet there. Only when they started ‘unblocking’ could I feel what you were after. I recall moments during our lessons when I suddenly felt ready to examine a certain detail upon which you had asked me to focus.
GS: It all takes time. Do you feel that my telling you about your shoulders, or feet, or whatever helps you observe your students better?
DM: Absolutely. I feel that a training like yours does connect me up more as a person. I now have a much more acute awareness of how I use my feet, how I hold tension in my shoulders than I ever did. But it’s not only helped me to observe students, this also goes for watching dancers or actors on stage.
GS: When I was at the Studio in Manchester and we had Lisa and Laban both teaching, Lisa would do a lot of demonstrating because she still could, but Laban never demonstrated anything – he probably couldn’t because he was so stiff by that time. It was good to have the two, because they are different ways of learning from people. I do a bit for you, but because I’m older, obviously I can’t do it as well as I used to. I enjoy demonstrating a bit.
DM: Peter Hulton has continually advised you to demonstrate the movements for this DVD ROM because while the movement might be incomplete, we as viewers can easily fill out the dotted lines that you draw in space. We can see where the movement should go. I know that sometime it’s not clear from my movement what you are aiming at. I think that my difficulties in learning how move make me a more sympathetic teacher, because I can recognise so easily their problems!
GS: You have also used our lessons to ask questions about how to teach certain movements – particularly ‘the Wave’. Actually, we do an awful lot more with the Wave than Lisa and Laban used to do: I don’t remember them exploring the forward and backward wave in pairs as we do. Because you are the only student in this class I often partner you in an exercise. This makes me create things that maybe we - and certainly you - haven’t done before. That is of value.
DM: Apart from performing exercises in pairs, another of your strategies is to turn an exercise on its head: reversing the direction of the movement, or whatever. Normally we have ‘whipped’ high and ‘twisted’ low, so you asked me to do the reverse and it created a fascinating movement. Wringing high was a really beautiful movement. This spirit of change helps me from slipping into habits, both as a teacher and as your pupil. Another thing that you have encouraged me to do is create sequences of exercises and studies - running them together
GS: You often link them with a turn, and that’s something that you simply couldn’t do a year ago.
DM: I have realised recently that you encourage a great deal of play in the way you teach, and I am trying to develop this playfulness in my own teaching. I have been too serious in the past. I think it is more important to try and get the movement out of someone rather than trying to drum something into someone.
The Efforts
GS: Actors certainly need to know about the Efforts. As do dancers. If ever I was working with an actor I would always bring in the Efforts or if not the Efforts, the elements of movement – strong or light, sustained or sudden, direct or flexible. If I was teaching a group of actors now I would focus on the elements much more than the actual Efforts themselves. Asking how a character would walk – slower or quicker – is a very useful question. Or you could ask a space question: would that character raise his arms above his head, what space around himself does he use? In the early days the Efforts were so overused. You might have a teacher who would get everyone to do pressing, and then flicking – it was dreadful! If you didn’t break it up somehow it would be terrible.
DM: I am just realising how difficult it is to make really graduated transitions between the different efforts. In your Press Glide Float Flick, each of the changes is really quite a challenge. The first difficulty is the change of pressure from a pressing to a gliding, and then the change of direction from the focus of the glide to the indirectedness of the float, and finally the change of duration from the seemingly endless floating to the sudden flick!
I think Laban might have been slightly to blame for some of that because he did love to explore the mathematical permutations of any of his discoveries, be it the choreutics or in the Efforts. If you just explore the permutations for their own sakes, you divorce the exercise from anything to do with feeling or drama.
The way that you teach Whip and Twist or Press Glide Float Flick always focuses upon the feeling, I would even say the meaning of the movements and of the transitions between Efforts. I think that your studies can be a fantastic means of mastering the Efforts. They are a useful means by which you can feel these changes in movement qualities. In your notes to me you pay so much attention to the detail of movement, that I always feel that it is a new challenge, a new experience for me. You help me understanding what I am doing: you help me become aware of the quality with which I move. This is exactly how I teach movement to my own students. The Efforts aren’t abstract, they are simply about the nature of movement.
GS: Do your students observe each other as they move? I think that that is so important – you need to see what it looks like. When one person gets something another sees it and then passes the idea on. I never remember Laban talking about the Efforts, you just had to do them – otherwise you never would have understand what they were about. It was move, move, move. I’ve never heard of anything like the Efforts in any other actor training.
DM: Apart from Michael Chekhov, I don’t think there are. Stanislavsky used to insist upon movement training – acrobatics, dance, fencing - but not something that linked back to an understanding of human behaviour. It’s not like the body is being considered as an instrument, but as very precisely an instrument to act with, an instrument with which to sense and judge. You can only judge the quality of movement through your feeling for movement as developed through the Efforts.
A sense of space
DM: Another thing I’ve got from you is a sense of space. You may think this strange since you don’t really teach choreutics, but Laban had a lot of exercises that were to do with how we address space, whether it is an opening or enclosing movement, narrowing and widening, or gathering and scattering. Now you are asking me to be aware of whether I lead with the soft skin of my inner arm, or the coarser skin of the outer arm – this is an incredibly subtle instruction and again addresses different qualities of movement.
I find Laban’s planes of movement hugely useful in terms of understanding where a movement is located, and, just as important, where it could be located.
You offer exercises that make me aware of how much space one takes up: in the Door plane there is the pin that occupies the minimum possible space, and the wall that extends outwards as far as possible; and then in with a more flexible sense of movement there is a tightly-bound ball and an expansive ball – all these are attitudes to space and I find them most useful in terms of acting. I think these are ways of being in space. I am fascinated how people shape themselves in relationship to the space they are in, and in the company that there are in. Just as we have different registers of speech according to different social situations, I think we different registers of shape and extension in space.
GS: If you get five people in a room who all know each other then their arms are waving about all over the place; whereas if they don’t know each other they are stuck to their sides. If one of them did use their arms more they would seem to be taking charge of the situation.
DM: If you’re in the company of people you don’t really know, then you don’t make much commitment in your movements in space. I bet if someone was a bit ‘enclosed’, they would be invited to ‘make ourselves at home’, that is, to join in the space.
Successiveness
This is another of the really important principles you have taught me. Successiveness makes clear something that a lot of theatre practitioners demand of actors, which is that their movements or gestures aren’t peripheral but involve the spine. You have paid so much attention to the feeling of this sense of movement, of how it moves through our joints – from spine, to shoulder, to elbow, wrists and fingers.
What I like so much about the way you teach Laban is that it is much more than a physical training: you educate the feelings. You educate the feelings in two significant ways: firstly, because you begin with a physical sensation, it resonates with a movement, precisely because it travels through you; secondly and because of this felt experience I'm sure that it elicits a response from an audience. Successiveness is a certain quality of movement, a certain way of being able to join with it as it moves through you. It is so different to just making a gesture, it is a means of moving with all of yourself, in a full-bodied way. There is a certain grace and ease in successiveness - and there's such a pleasure in its execution.