Interview on March 8th 2004

Summary of the Interview

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On Laban’s notion of spatial harmony: ‘When any mention of harmony is ever made in connection with Laban then it is always space-harmony that is referred to.’ ‘There is also a way of considering whether Effort Rhythms are harmonious or not.’ ‘It is difficult to observe, to analyse or prove whether there is any harmony or not in a movement without looking at the parts of the body that are involved.’ Some of this is a repetition of material on space harmony in the January ’04 interview. Examples of Harmonious Movement. Examples of affinity or disaffinity in movement. The Diagonal Scale and Effort and Shape. ‘I am almost alone within the Laban fraternity by considering the basic efforts as being in fact basic effort/shapes.’ The practice of Laban’s Spatial Scales: ‘Laban held the idea that if we practice these scales that we will achieve a harmony with the cosmic structure of all matter; however I am not sure that I personally can follow up on it.’ The ‘rings’ within the icosahedron. On the Grotesque: comic effects, and ugliness in everyday movement. Changing the mood through the movement. Degrees to which one can change one’s ways of moving. On decision-making. ‘If we are going to make a decision we have to give attention to what we are going to make this decision about; the next stage is to form an intention of what we want to do as a result of what we have given what we have given our attention to; and then there has to be a third stage of the implementation, the commitment to action. These terms are adapted from Laban – he talked about attention, intention, decision, precision.’

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The Interview

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On Laban’s Notion of Spatial Harmony

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When any mention of harmony is ever made in connection with Laban then it is always space-harmony that is referred to. That is understandable in respect to the world of art and dance: for Laban, space harmony was a very important part of space choreography. It was in his advice to teachers on what they taught to children that in was only in their later age – when they were teenagers – that space harmonies should be taught. He regarded it as a phase of development within civilisation to which we have advanced and in the primitive and relatively more barbaric state we wouldn’t have any sense of space harmony. The Egyptians understood space harmony, and the Greeks understood even more and this influenced Laban himself in developing the polyhedral forms, giving him a mathematical base for defining space harmonies.  

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I would like to emphasise that this isn’t the only form of harmony that we can look upon in movement. There is also a way of considering whether Effort Rhythms are harmonious or not. Certainly with regard to the industrial work that I did we were trying to help workers achieve a more harmonious way of doing the job that they had to do. This could be perhaps by incorporating some additional movement; replacing a movement that they had got into the habit of doing with something that was better related to the nature of the job. This intervention, of course, was also to help them succeed in relating their own individual rhythms and patterns of movement to the job: then they would achieve a more harmonious relationship. It was never really referred to as ‘harmonious’, Laban talked about their movement achieving rhythm as distinct from having no rhythm. A better way of looking at it was that there was always some form of rhythm but you could have either a good or bad, an appropriate or inappropriate rhythm. Some rhythms could be harmonious whilst others could be relatively grotesque. The same could be said in respect to space harmonies: by going against the rules of mathematical proportion which Laban built into all his scales, you would get into various degrees of disharmony, or what one might call extremes of grotesqueness. Similarly, the same phenomenon could apply within the field of the efforts.  

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It is difficult to observe, to analyse or prove whether there is any harmony or not in a movement without looking at the parts of the body that are involved. It may be that a form of disharmony is created because one part of the body is contradicting what another part does. A one-man-band where the players has drumsticks tied to his elbow, cymbals to his knees, whilst he blows a harmonica: by an act of immense concentration he can create some music, possibly not pleasant to listen to, but at least something that can be achieved. I think it would be extremely unlikely for any person seeing someone playing all these instruments to think that the movement was beautiful. On the other hand someone playing a violin or harp, even a conductor conducting the orchestra is much more likely to convey harmony. Whether a conductor of an orchestra actually assumes some element of disharmony in his or her own movement to accompany passages where there is dissonance in the music is unlikely but interesting to speculate upon. The example of the one-man-band was to illustrate the point that we have to look at parts of the body in relation to each other if we are going to try to understand harmony in movement. It would be useless to regard somebody just whirling an arm around as that being a harmonious movement, unless we look at it in relation to the body. 

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Examples of Harmonious Movement

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I don’t know whether we can relate harmony to beauty but beauty as well as being in the eye of the beholder, has often been attributed by poets to how a person moves rather than in a subject’s fixed presentation. I was fascinated by Goethe’s description of how Lady Hamilton successively kneels, pounces, exclaims – he quotes a whole list of movements and notes how one followed the other. Plutarch wrote that Cleopatra wasn’t really anything to look at – in today’s terms she wouldn’t be a pin-up - but that she was beautiful in her movement because it was so fascinating and compelling. Today very often when models conform to what may our Western cultural standards of how women are supposed to measure up in terms of beauty - this is of course something that is culturally specific, canons of beauty in this country have changed over the ages –they let themselves down when they gesture, smile or walk.  Their movement disappoints you after having them in a photographic still image.  

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Just to summarise: there are space harmonies and there are also effort harmonies and we have to look at how one part of the body is functioning in relation to another.  

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Affinity or disaffinity in movement

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Then there is a whole other aspect of harmony which I think is better referred to as affinity or disaffinity when we look at the relationship between the effort and the shape and there seem to be certain relationships that are more concordant than discordant. To give an example: if you are going to wield a hammer then it seems that you do a more appropriate shaping to the effort by hammering in a downward direction. Maybe you have to hammer in the ceiling, and it can be done; but there is an argument for saying that it is not so appropriate to do an increasing pressure movement upwards. It is much more ‘natural’, it seems to be much more appropriate to do a strong movement in a downwards direction. Similarly, if you are really focusing on something, say you are repairing a watch, then you don’t to do it at arm’s length, you want to bring it in to a more concave-shaped kinesphere so that you can get the effort of directing and perform the very delicate movements required. On the other hand if you are brushing things away, say flies that are swarming around you, then it would be more appropriate to have a more convex shaping of the kinesphere and bring to together a spreading shape of movement with the more indirect effort.  One could say that our muscles are so arranged that we are physically preconditioned to move forward in a more sustained way and then to accelerate more in a backwards direction. I think this is related to our ‘fight or flight’ protection response. We dart back from danger quickly whereas we advance more cautiously towards what may be ahead of us. In these ways, although we can move in a contrary way to what I am defining as having affinity, from a point of view of efficiency at work it seems to be sensible to try and get as much affinity as you can between the effort and the shape in the working movement.  

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But it has another significance which I have found does seem to be remarkably cross-cultural. If we want to interact with somebody, say to share an activity with a person, then we tend to produce movement where the effort and shape are in affinity.  Whereas if someone approaches you and you do not want to interact with him or her then what we do in order to discourage any interaction is to generate a firm of disaffinity between effort and shape. This is remarkably cross-cultural. You do find this when looking at people who are known to be loners and who have a reclusive tendency that there is a considerable disaffinity between shape and movement; whereas people who are more sociable, who like to be with people, constantly produce movement where the Effort and shape are in affinity. The understanding that people may or may not want to share their activity, and the tendency that we have to introduce disharmonies in our movement if we don’t want to interact is a very important factor in team relationships. Somebody without necessarily being uncooperative, may nevertheless feel that he or she just can’t contribute something at that moment and wants to withdraw and so will introduce a disharmonious movement.  Other people will sense this in the group and therefore conclude that the person is anti what the rest of the group wants to do. I find that misinterpretations are made when people are working together on the basis of how they move. Sometimes the interpretations can be correct but very often they are misinterpretations. I have found that on the part of person who is thought to be uncooperative that there is no intention whatsoever to be so. The movement creates a misunderstanding. This can be recognised and dealt with in a way that avoids misinterpretation and which rather draws upon a knowledge of how and when a person does want to interact, as distinct from an attempt to compel someone to do so because this is expected from a good member of the team. I think exhortations to work well as a team have very little merit, whereas understanding how people are motivated to interact can have a significant effect on how people can work together better as a team. Of course, teamwork doesn’t always consist of just being physically together. Even when people are on the other side of the world your perception of them, built upon previous encounters where that person’s movement has had an influence on you, will influence how you interact with each other, even though you aren’t in their physical presence.  

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The Diagonal Scale and Effort and Shape 

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My conclusions about shape/effort affinity originated with Laban’s propositions about the affinities between effort and shape that can be seen in the Diagonal scale but he took it no further than that. The first movement of a Diagonal Scale which he considered was Floating: the first element of which consists of an open movement, which goes together with an indirecting movement, but this also includes a rising, and therefore a progressively lighter movement.  It also includes some forwardness and therefore a sustained movement. The combination of the indirect, with the light, with the sustained he described as floating, and the shape appropriate to that would be open, forward and rising. He would always refer to basic efforts and I always think in terms of basic effort/shapes. Still I am almost alone within the Laban fraternity by considering the basic efforts as being in fact basic effort/shapes. The Diagonal scale is not just three effort processes as in the example I’ve just given – flexible, light, sustained – but six processes: flexible, light, sustained as well as open, rising and the forward. When you take in account that there are two ‘flow’ processes as well and that these will most certainly be involved in the six effort/shape processes in ways that can be both fascinating and meaningful. So in the first movement of the diagonal scale there are eight movement processes happening. To get them all going together is an impossibility but you can work at trying to align them and get them into relationship with each other. When you reverse the first movement, when then get into a punch, this can be quite an immense transition from extreme to another: the contrast between a float and a punch is truly extreme.  

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I remember as a student referring to basic efforts – Floating, Punching, Gliding, Slashing, Dabbing, Wringing, Flicking, Pressing – as a generalisation because you never get them completely. When I have seen students performing the diagonal scale I have never seen them manage to get the six different movement elements happening together in one of the movements. With somebody they will have got the indirecting process but then the sustainment process might become so arrested that it looks like the movement is being performed in slow motion. In the sense of movement being a process of variation, to see six processes of variation – or eight if you take into account flow – happening together is virtually impossible. The extreme of one component very often will be reached before another – what we actually see is not so much a floating into a punching movement but one that consists of a phrase, a sequence of graduated actions. This is why I regarded the idea of efforts as a generalisation.

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Another form of harmony can be regarded in not just the matching but in the consistency of the processes going together. For example, if you are going to rise and you want to increase the element of lightness, the diminishing of pressure, in order to have delicate, fine sort of expression: for this to happen consistently you have to avoid the tendency for these processes to happen one after the other rather than together. The cohesion of a movement lies in the consistency of the linking of its different component elements.  

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The practice of Laban’s Spatial Scales

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Laban thought that the practice of the Scales was a civilised thing to do as opposed to the primitive or barbaric ways of moving. In our advanced civilisation we could aspire to ways of moving that were in harmony with the cosmos to a degree that earlier civilisations had not succeeded in doing – with possible exception of the Greek civilisation where there was some understanding of harmony and beauty. The scales were devised according to rules of mathematical proportion, proposing ways in which we could move around the kinesphere, looking at the kinesphere as having a polyhedral form. Laban talked a lot about the tetrahedron being an appropriate form for the Egyptian civilisation because they had a more limited understanding of the space around them. In our advanced civilised age, the icosohedron is a more appropriate to the way that we move. But looking ahead into the long-distant future, the dodecahedron was advanced as being more appropriate. I always understood Laban’s talk about the dodecahedron as the form projection into the universe. It is interesting that recent research does seem to offer some substantiation of the view that the universe has a dodecahedral shape, however quite how to relate doing your scales to the shape of the universe is quite a big jump, and I’m not sure that there is a relationship, or even that doing the scales is going to make us more harmonious people. I think there may be something it in, and certainly Laban believed that when children reach an age of perception it was good for them to practice the scale, and that this might induce a more harmonic relationship with the environment.  

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I understand that Laban held the idea that if we practice these scales that we will achieve a harmony with the cosmic structure of all matter; however I am not sure that I personally can follow up on it. I like to do the scales and have a sense that I am keeping my body tuned, rather like keeping up with language by working on vocabulary. If you stop reading or having any stimulating conversation I suppose that you would start to lose your vocabulary and you would no longer have such a facility for writing and talking. Maybe it’s the same with the scales: only I would add that it no only applies to space-harmony scales, but should also do our effort and shape scales and in that way we would keep in touch with our repertoire and would be more likely to use that repertoire and therefore have a greater range of movement.  

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The scales are simply a technical basis. When you play musical scales we are reminded of certain intervals you are not creating anything but perhaps you are reminding yourself of the basis of harmony. The same goes for movement: if we go through certain effort-space scales or some effort rhythms that remind us of the range available to us of effort. Then we do keep in touch with the relatively larger repertoire. It doesn’t mean that we are going to use all of that repertoire because we have our own individual selectivity, our own individual patterns that we prefer. But that is a matter of proportion: we will still have a bigger repertoire that we can call upon in one way or another. The recommendation that I give to people for development purposes is not just to do with scales but rather to get an understanding of the relationship of what would be an extension of their movement in the perspective of what movement comes most easily to them. On the theory that if we had a good grasp of language which we lose leaving a very small vocabulary then we have lost our full range.  

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The ‘rings’ within the icosahedron

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Within the field of space harmony there is a vast field of application within the context of art or dance, quite different from I have just been talking about which concerns personality development and behaviour. In respect of dance many of these scales, or rings, as Laban called them, can be made the subject of a choreography of a creative work. Just as in music we have forms like studies and etudes and preludes in certain keys, I think there is the equivalent in dance. When I trained at the Art of Movement Studio we quite often had to do a study based, for example, on a particular ring.  There are two rings which divide the icosahedron into two: there are three rings which are triangles that are oriented at different levels. The four rings aren’t particularly interesting – they simply come in and out of a plane. The five rings are the more peripheral aspects of the icosahedron. But when we get to the seven rings they are fascinating: there are scores, there could be hundreds of them. Around each dimension you can build a seven ring. They have certain characteristics of joining steeples which have an angular transitions and volutes where the angle is obtuse.  They all have different forms of expression and different qualities and I’ve always seen them as directly analogous to say a Chopin etude. I’ve often wondered why no-one in the dance world has wanted to develop this. As far as I know, there is no school that has encouraged the choreographing of studies based upon Laban’s space harmonies: it is a vast potential that I think could one day be realised.  

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Thinking of the work that Carol-Lynne Moore has done on harmonies in movement, I think, possibly in the academic field, that musicologists may come together with choreologists, and there will be a matching of music harmony with movement harmony. Movement and music harmonies will be developed in kindred terms. Then of course it would become taken for granted that if people wanted to become dancers then they would really have to become educated in the basic harmonies. It is disappointing that much that Laban opened up in this field has not been done and only now is beginning to be done. I think much of this is due to the dominance achieved by the Laban Centre on the one hand and their failure to tap into this potential.  Maybe it might now start to happen.  

Similarly on the effort side we can do certain phraseologies of efforts which can be understood to have relative harmony or disharmony. Just as we can have Choreutic studies so we can also have Eukinetic studies – and this is, in fact, what we used to do in the Art of Movement Studio. In connection with Eukinetic studies maybe harmony was not so much the right word as ‘expressive’ or ‘consistent’ which could be more useful terms. Nevertheless, it is similar to an understanding of harmony or beauty. It was interesting to me that a composer called Dino Castro who worked in Paris in the late 40s and 50s was interested in this field. I used to give him some effort phrases lasting up to a minute maybe ninety seconds which I would record and he would then transpose it into music. The result, he claimed, was a theme which could be possibly built on to create a major work of music. I do have some of these compositions that he created. He would claim that he was making music which was effortful, just as Laban claimed in the early 1930s together with Kurt Jooss and his ground-breaking ballet The Green Table. This ballet, which dominated the dance world for so long, really incorporated effort – it was effort-ful. Many composers since that time have incorporated efforts into their works, but Castro was saying that this was a way in which you could bring together movement and music with an understanding of the matching effort and shape processes. 

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On the Grotesque

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Laban did seem to have an interest in the grotesque and in his choreographic work of the 1920s he used to like satire and witches and that sort of thing. I think he needed to develop ideas about what was grotesque in movement because of his interest in what is harmonious: that way you get the one in relation to the other. I feel that if you get an inconsistency or a contradiction in a movement that very often tends to create grotesqueness, and comedy too. You get the unexpected: a comedian moves in a certain way and then collapses the pattern of movement. Charlie Chaplin’s movement was very often in that form. I don’t know whether Laban would say that comedy is related to the grotesque; I don’t know if it is necessarily so. But this is a vast subject and I feel that it is a bit crass to generalise.  

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Of course I am always trying to relate this to what we can se in everyday life and we you see people doing ugly gestures it often seems to be that it would be much more pleasant for the people that they’re in contact with, as well as for themselves, if they could not do such grotesque movements. I think I see more everyday grotesqueness than I do in England: the way that people walk very often, in supermarkets, getting in and out of their cars, very often the way that a mother will handle her child – lots of things of this sort. What makes them grotesque is firstly that the gesture is very often inconsistent with the movement that is going on in the rest of the body; secondly there is an appropriateness of the effort is relation to the shape: this is inefficient. I begin to wonder about my own movement since we all seem to be able to relapse in such forms of grotesque behaviour. It can happen if you are worried about something, or are having to give attention to practical things whilst your mind is trained upon some bigger issue. Very often when we are torn in this way our movement reflects it in some form of ugliness. Whether learning about movement harmonies is going to help us to avoid slipping into these movement uglinesses in adult life remains to be proved, but it is a possibility. I think that it’s worth paying attention to Laban’s grotesque in relation to the harmonious: I think it could be a very valuable form of study to be incorporated in general education. 

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We can relapse into bad habits in many aspects of life, and we can allow it to continue. Take the example of food. If we eat too much then we get fat, but if you continue then you suffer worse. We can get into a bad habit of movement because we might feel tortured about something – this is human nature: we get distressed and express this distress in various way. But what I think a movement education can do for you is that you can be perceptive enough so that eventually you can correct it.  You do begin to apply the corrections. This does require a discipline, just as one has to monitor one’s diet. It may come more easily than to others and there are obviously many factors involved. But the process of applying corrections seems to me to be what is mostly going on. We have to expect to relapse but we can have some sort of moderating power or control over the extent to which we relapse; and by constantly applying corrections we will be able to keep more on the side of harmony than grotesqueness in the long term. You go a little off balance so you make a corrective movement so as to restore that balance.  

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Changing the mood through the movement. Degrees to which one can change one’s ways of moving. 

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In terms of all the component parts that make up a personality the ability to change someone’s mental behaviour through how they move is going to be marginal, but it does have an effect. It can be particularly significant in reversing a process. Again, I tend to look upon everything as a process, so I would ask whether it is tending to get worse or better, on the assumption that it is not going to stay the same. It is often reversing the process that is so difficult; if the process has become established then it requires a major therapeutic procedure. My career has included taking on individual cases. I have had a number of individual students many of whom worked in the arts: sculptors, violinists, pianists. I worked and continue to work with a lot of people who aren’t in the field of management. Not so much now as in the 1950s and ‘60s but it still remains of interest how people can develop, how they can change. I am particularly interested in the fact that we are constantly being told that we have to change and that if we don’t change we will be left behind because the pace of developing is so fast. If this is learning about computer technology then I agree, but if it is applied to personality development then I have my doubts. People are constantly being exhorted to change, but never inform to what they should be changing into.  Very often it is little known from what they should be changing. There’s a lot of vagueness in this. So I am interested in trying to get a little more definition into how we can change significantly. People do go to gurus and think they have changed and then relapse, and note that there has been no change. This has to be related to one’s position in life at any moment in time. People often want to change because they are miserable, or because of distress or disturbance in their life. All sorts of change are possible: in attitude, temperament, politics, philosophy – all of which can have significance, though the change may not be as significant as people think. Politicians change party but seem to go on the same in terms of the sort of person that they are.  Really significant personality change is likely to be marginal and from the standpoint of movement it can be demonstrated that we don’t change significantly – unless as a result of a major traumatic event.   In which case it is the events which is significant.  

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I am very interested in how you change, not least because at my age I have noticed how you contract rather than develop. In all that I am declining I am desperately looking for something in which I might be progressing!  

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The degrees to which an individual can change their movement pattern

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I am looking at a painting which represents the myth of one of the North American peoples – it concerns the figure of the white bison. Someone else could paint a picture on the same theme and it would be different. The artist could change this traditional mythical scene different by making the sun a little bigger, the bison a little smaller – but these would be changes in detail, marginal changes. In a similar way, Dick McCaw is basically who is, and this can change in some detail, and there may be big changes relative to the achievement of harmony in personal relationships and so on but it is still the same Dick McCaw who will be recognised in twenty years’ time. It behoves us not to expect to change all that much but to examine to what degree we can change marginally while being happy with the basic picture. I think that is the problem with a lot of New Age claims that they hold out to people – the myth that they can change fundamentally.  I think this is a disservice.  

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On decision-making

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Within my thinking about space harmony I have related the process of decision-making to Laban’s ideas rather simplistically. If we are going to make a decision we have to give attention to what we are going to make this decision about; the next stage is to form an intention of what we want to do as a result of what we have given what we have given our attention to; and then there has to be a third stage of the implementation, the commitment to action. These terms are adapted from Laban – he talked about attention, intention, decision, precision. Attention was space-effort; intention was weight-effort; decision, time-effort and precision was concern with flow.  I never quite knew what he meant by precision. I think that flow has to be considered differently to the other three effort-elements. But just to look at the attention, intention, decision, I changed the word ‘decision’ to ‘commitment to action’ because the whole thing is a decision-making process. We begin a decision the moment we give attention to something. If I give attention to a thief stealing a woman’s handbag this attention will result in the intention of calling the police or something.   

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Harmony, perhaps, or proportion, can be applied to the decision-making process because if most of your initiative is in the intention stage but none in the attention stage then you’re going to be very vulnerable to working in a structure where all the signals are given to you by cooperative and loyal people to ensure that you don’t do something disastrous. I worked with a Chief Executive for over twelve years of whom it could be said that he was really out of proportion with regard to almost a complete lack of the intention stage. He would give a lot attention to investigating and exploring, he was very ready to take decisions and get things going, but he was never clear on what his intention was with the result that he got into all sorts of difficulties and had to be protected by good people working with him. He was a brilliant technologist and had fantastic ideas and strategies, he was a great visionary. He was greatly admired, but anyone could take advantage of him because of his lack of intention. Without loyal people working for him and supporting him he was pretty useless. I am just quoting this example because he was someone of whom it could be said that was so out of proportion in his decision-making process for it almost to be disharmonious. He would not grade issues as to whether they were important or unimportant, with the result that he would often be distracted away in all sorts of irrelevant matters. In fact he was never at all clear what issue his was dealing with at the time. In meetings an issue that someone thought they were dealing with, he would handle in such a way that it didn’t seem to exist as an issue, it just created a great fog. He was also very weak because anyone could persuade him. He would leave things in the air a lot. I am just asking the question whether a decision-making process which is so much out of proportion could be regarded as disharmonious. He failed to recognise the relative importance of issues.  

There are three stages of the decision-making process and each stage breaks down into two further stages because of the effort and the shape aspect of attention. So that gives us six initiatives in the decision-making sequence. A person’s pattern of initiative may be equally divided, more or less, between those six. This applies to very few people but it does happen that some people have a fairly even distribution.  They may be understood as not having so much character as being ‘overall’: taking everything into account they are often respected in a team as being coordinators, or good all-rounders, to use a cricket analogy. Now managers do tend to be either good batsmen, good bowlers or wicket-keepers – something that has individuality. It varies but different business cultures tend to want one more than another. You tend to find managers who will perhaps give emphasis to one or two of the six initiatives but nevertheless have a good backing up of the other four. But then you get others who are at an extreme like the one I have quoted where two or three of the initiatives are so neglected and the others so much emphasised that you say it is out of proportion.  It’s almost like saying that we have somebody who is an all-round character, and then we have somebody who is so extreme as to be an eccentric. For example someone who has a lot of attention wants to avoid taking action, wants to be able to function in a complete research environment. The meetings that they enjoy most are where there isn’t much likelihood of their having to agree to taking any action.