Laban Resources
Warren Lamb
Interview on May 4th 2005
Summary of interview
On tests and profiles. WL has been consistent in his dislike of tests. ‘I am not pronouncing on their capability but on what comes naturally to them. Everybody is different.’ ‘I have always felt that there is scope in this life for understanding people without giving a rating.’ Is WL’s MPA quantitative or qualitative? He explains in some detail how his profile offers an account of a person’s unique way of doing things, their style. ‘When Laban allowed people to find their own individual rhythm in doing highly repetitive jobs, they often took a little but longer but overall production increased because absenteeism, illness and labour-turnover all reduced. I have embodied the same principle.’ His MPA is about matching the person to the job, but there are many ways of doing the same job. The degree to which a person’s decision making changes when they have practised exercises given them by WL. Dick McCaw puts Warren Lamb’s Movement Pattern Analysis in his own words. WL’s response to that.
The Interview
On tests and profiles
Maybe there is something in my psychology that predisposes me against making any sort of assessment or rating because I feel sure there are many examples of where people have been misjudged having failed some sort of test or other. Certainly in the Navy there were a lot of stupid officers who must have been rated as well-educated and other who were not so well educated but seemed much more sensible. I was also interested in the distinction between common sense and whatever sense is exhibited by people who pass exams. When Laban and Lawrence imposed upon me the ‘Laban-Lawrence test’ – and I think they did this because it would sell better, it would be recognised, people would know what it is - a conflict did develop which led to a break. I must have felt very, very strongly about it. That may be exaggerated – it is, after all, a question of definition, but the intelligence test I felt was particularly vulnerable to having a negative influence. For one thing, what intelligence was could be very differently defined. People would say, ‘Intelligence is what I measure with this test.’ It now seems to be the view that intelligence tests estimate timing and speed in being able to answer particular types of questions.
Over the years there have been various types of tests. We take driving tests – that is truly a test. The outcome of any test is always expected that you pass or fail – or you get a mark and there is a level below which you fail. Whilst I’ve always recognised that there are many areas where a test is appropriate, I have felt that recognition and understanding what people can do, as distinct from what they can’t do, doesn’t have to be part of a test. They do not have to be rated as relatively good or bad in terms of understanding what they are capable of. In terms of capability – I remember at the time having to define this – I am not pronouncing on their capability but on what comes naturally to them. Everybody is different.
One has to recognise that there is no one way to do a job, therefore a person might be given a test as to whether he or she would be able to do a job efficiently, but that test would be inadequate because it would be based on just one way of doing the job. Most jobs can be done in a variety of ways – there’s no one way of being a prime minister or being a road sweeper. Everyone can bring his or her own pattern of activity to doing it. Very often there are people who offend the established, prescribed wisdom by doing something quite differently and succeed at it better than anyone has before. You see that particularly in sports. I have always felt that there is scope in this life for understanding people without giving a rating. I fall over myself to say that the movement pattern analysis is not good or bad. It is an analysis and therefore an assessment is made, but it is an assessment on the basis that whatever we come out with does not have to be rated as good or bad. When we get in other forms of rating, for example, of relative balance or imbalance, scope or lack of scope, much of what we get led into saying about people in order to describe the pattern that comes naturally to them – their movement pattern – can be interpreted as being either a good thing or a bad thing. The way someone explores can be good in one context and bad in another. Then the notion develops that whatever may be good in context may be bad in another. That has been the basic principle on which I’ve pursued analysis or assessment – that nothing is really bad. To what extent can one pursue this? Let’s take the example of dynamics. This is something used to get me in trouble. I once remember telling someone that he wasn’t really very dynamic, and he seemed to interpret this in terms of his sexual potency. Maybe I’ve got better in explaining it, but just a few weeks ago I was explaining to someone that he wasn’t dynamic (in the sense that we assess it in the decision-making process) – he prefers to assume that all decision-making processes were are of the same degree and level of responsibility. Comparing him to someone of higher dynamism, then he would prefer to handle fewer, and someone else would take on more. He felt this was absolutely right. This probably tends to make you more sparing as to the amount of responsibility that you are prepared to take on. I’m quoting that to pose the question as to whether that is good or bad? In some contexts it could be thought that the Movement Pattern Analysis tests your dynamism. It’s the thing where do seem to have a score. We do give people a rating on a 10 point scale, so 9 could be rated as a good and 3 or 4 as bad. But when you get it right it is fascinating how people are very enthusiastic to agree with it and the people who understand lower dynamism as being more sparing, not taking on more decision-making responsibility than you feel confident of handling, then they are delighted. The MPA can be something of a revelation. It is difficult, I know, to get away from an element of testing in what we do, but on the other hand one could say that we are being tested all the time. If you see someone being attacked you are being tested as to whether you would be public-spirited enough to act, or would be overcome by fear. This is just to dramatise the statement that we are under test in everything that we do.
In terms of what is known in personality tests and vocational tests I think it is important to differentiate Movement Pattern Analysis from the Kettel 16 point PF, or Meyersbrigg’s Intelligence Tests and many of the tests that are used to differentiate students applying for university places. These tests which do give a score need to be distinguished from an analysis which attempts to account for individuality. In most tests it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that if you have a lower score than someone else then you are inferior to them.
Is yours a more qualitative than quantitative approach?
The 1 – 10 score is used for dynamism. We are observing movement and therefore the quantitative aspect of movement has to be considered, it is there – you can’t ignore it. In terms of movement we sometimes do a number of actions with a relatively little quantity of movement variation, or the same number of actions with a much greater quantity of variations. Laban referred to this as ‘loading’, particularly with reference to effort, but also in shape movement where there can be a greater quantity of variation if you move three-dimensionally rather than one-dimensionally. You are actually creating, initiating more variation in three dimensions than in one. Similarly with effort, if you do basic effort like a punch which is strong, direct and quick, there is more movement, more loading, than if it was just a strong movement but there was no directing or speed. It is a very interesting concept which I feel that we have translated in accordance with Laban’s concept. If we habitually load our movement relatively more than other people then it must have some sort of meaning: and when you are translating this in terms of a decision-making model, that it must mean dynamism, readiness to engage in more decision-making. That’s a way of understanding the quantitative aspect of what we’re doing. I suppose that all the rest can be regarded as qualitative.
One could understand the distinction between profiling and testing as being cognate with a kinetic and static form of understanding. It is not about ticking boxes but looking at how individuals can be successfully integrated into teams – often by demanding a change of job-profiles within those teams.
It allows for movement in the sense that a score for movement could never be predicted. The movement that is allowed may, of course, be consisted with a person’s pattern or not. We never know that when we start observing, it is a result of our observation. Whereas most tests are concerned with some actual achievement or goal or objective, of what can be achieved, and people who get a high score on the test can achieve more – this is not the case with MPA. It may be recognised that something can be achieved by a person because of their skills, intelligence (however that might be rated) but if it requires movement that might be antipathetic to that person’s pattern then we know that although the achievement may be made, the maintaining of that achievement is going to be threatened, and that decision-making will become progressively less efficient or effective. When a decision-making process is being achieved by making movement that is predominantly outside their range, the capability of being able to do is a result of his high motivation to achieve, the absence of movement-motivation can cause increasing ineffectiveness in decision-making, along with all sorts of stress. This goes right back to what Laban observed about factory workers on production lines. He challenged the ‘time and motion’ principle by which the more you reduced the operations that people did, that you established the one most economical way of doing the job, then that would be the way to get the maximum production, proved not to be the way. People broke down, became stressed, and there was a very high labour turn-over. When Laban allowed people to find their own individual rhythm in doing highly repetitive jobs, they often took a little but longer but overall production increased because absenteeism, illness and labour-turnover all reduced. I have embodied the same principle.
Is it about suiting the worker to the job?
It is a matching, but one that I’ve always thought has to be flexible because I’ve always believed that there’s no one way to do a job. If you’re matching a person against a job how do you specify the job? Certainly in working with managers there’s always enough scope in whatever the nature of the management job is to look at possible different ways of doing it. You’re not looking at just one job as a set number of items - that list of requirements that you see in job advertisements – this is a very crude, arbitrary way of making a selection. If you’re going to do it properly you’ve got to look at every application and think that the most unusual and even eccentric person will make the best appointment. Most appointments are made on the basis of who is most unexceptional, who best conforms to what has been regarded as the right way in the past.
One thing that team leaders have to do is adapt to new appointments. I think Carol-Lynne’s new book – Movement and Making Decisions – deals with this aspect of decision-making. It is important that a team be able to adapt to new situations by asking workers to take on new responsibilities and roles. It is remarkable the extent to which people are often kept within the watertight boxes of their roles. The finance director may be able to make a contribution to marketing: you can understand that there might be territorial imperatives which discourage people from crossing boundaries, but I am amazed that opportunities to contribute to the company in this way are not encouraged. On the basis of the understanding that we get from MPA we can fight this sort of restriction by demonstrating how people are going to benefit from such initiatives: the marketing manager will benefit from the finance manager’s initiative. The tendency to feel threatened territorially by this sort of thing does disappear when the marketing manager realises how he or she can benefit from this initiative. When someone takes an initiative that is consistent with their MPA profile I have found that they usually get accepted, but where a person takes an initiative that he or she has read about in a text-book, and it hasn’t really come from their pattern of behaviour, then that tends to be perceived as imposed.
Once a subject has undergone the exercises that you propose to develop a person’s movement awareness would their decision-making process change?
Marginally, yes. But it would be only marginal. It could only be significantly changed if they went through some traumatic event. From the feedback that I get, one way that it is helpful, it seems, is that we become more aware of the pattern aspect of our profile rather than individual initiatives. We become more aware of the relationship. This has the effect that we draw more upon the relatively lower initiatives. If you are effortful and you tend to have a lower use of the shape initiatives then you may just become aware that exploratory, evaluative, anticipatory activities are possibilities. You then possible utilise more what you’ve got without it necessarily assuming a big part of the total picture. It is like looking at a picture from the point of view of colour and suddenly noticing a tiny patch of blue: having recognised that, you never look at the picture in the same way again. Maybe you recognise that this small touch of blue is significant in what the artist was trying to portray. It is the same in our movement: one can realise, ‘Yes I do have that small amount of exploratory initiative and I can see now how it relates to my determining or timing.’ That is one benefit that can influence decision-making. It also has a benefit in the very fact of being an education about the nature of that initiative, certainly in the case of people where that initiative is very low, they really don’t have much perception of it: they don’t really know what it is. They get to recognise that initiative when other people are taking it and become more appreciative of when they see it. There’s also something which I can confirm from my own experience: as you get older you tend to utilise the bigger initiatives more and the smaller initiatives less. Part of the crotchetiness that older people get is because of this: they over-specialise in the use of their resources. What we have called a development course through which I make you aware of those relatively less emphasised parts of your movement profile might have those sorts of benefits.
Dick McCaw puts Warren Lamb’s Movement Pattern Analysis in his own words
It is nearly a year since you did my movement pattern analysis and I am noticing an accelerating change in my behaviour over the past few weeks, and this acceleration results from our conversation with Geraldine in April this year. Part of this happened when you explained the difference between me and a trained mover doing the A-scale. You said that while I do go to the correct points in space, but that I didn’t show you either where I was going nor indicate the space beyond those points. That sense of feeling for space makes me realise that I have always approached things effortfully. While you resist saying that I have tunnel vision, it is true that I am not hugely aware of everything around me. I channel things: I focus things down into a narrow beam of concentrated activity – I don’t broaden my horizons because my emphasis is always on the doing, not the preparatory ‘casing’ of the job. I have quite fixed horizons. I would find too broad a vision of things as being unhelpful, because it means that you won’t get things done. You can only get things done when you narrow your vision. I work from small canvases.
You have also observed that I limited in the forward and backward plane. This corresponds with my awareness that I never take a step back from what I am doing, I don’t take the time to take in the space. I am using phrases like
‘channeling’,
‘tunnel-vision’,
‘getting things in perspective’
‘to take things in’
‘give yourself a bit of space’
‘to have your back against the wall’
‘to paint yourself into a corner’
‘to box yourself in’
I think the fact that these spatial metaphors exist in our language to express how we make decisions prove your claim that there is a connection between movement and decision making. This isn’t something that you have invented. All the phrases I have used are now having a new meaning for me because of the connection that I see between movement and decision making. Do you agree with this?
WL: Certainly the way you are using these terms it does has significance. I’ve been intrigued just as you are talking because you are using movement in a richer way than may have been the case months ago. Your classes with Geraldine plus the instinctive interpretation that you are making of your profile means that as you use these terms you are becoming kinaesthetically aware - you are actually doing the movement that is appropriate to those terms as a true posture-gesture merger. You are actually getting a true sense of what having tunnel vision means in respect to your own body-mind concentration. The saying ‘taking a step back’ is truly developing a form of space-harmony: you are relating your kinesphere, moulding your kinesphere to bulge into the space behind you. This might be similar to techniques which asks you to feel the space behind you as if you had eyes in the back of your head.
DM: I am very aware of the fact that I do work within quite a narrow corridor of possibilities and know that when I have problems there really isn’t anyway for me to go. I have quite a narrow vision of what is significant and meaningful activity. While I realise that I might not be able to change my use of space very considerably – at least I am aware of my sense of space. Working with you has made me realise just how much of our decision-making and our discourse are described in terms of space: another example is the phrase ‘to think outside of the box’ – once again, suggesting an ability to reach other parts of the kinesphere. I now look forward to stepping back and allowing a vista to appear before me. So much has happened since our conversation of March 25th when you encouraged me to stop trying so hard.
WL: But you are now able to think outside that confined space even if it will remain your nature to seek narrow corridors of possibility. You are now developing a broader perspective. Maybe this change in you is a result of your movement lessons with Geraldine and the movement pattern analysis with me.
DM: Do you think that the way I have been describing your method makes it more accessible?
WL: Yes, I do. What you say appals me. Normally I have a feedback session after my two-hour observation and then follow it up with a report and then that‘s it. I know what you’re telling is not unusual. One director whom I profiled said that it took him two years to understand his MPA. There must be hundreds of people who don’t get beyond the feedback session: they are bowled over by the result of profile but I wonder whether they really understand it. What you’re saying is that real understanding can only come through movement.
DM: Once one starts considering just movement there is the risk of slipping back into the mind-body split. While I don’t yet fully understand the way you are approaching movement, I know that it is one that involves a very subtle account of mental and bodily behaviour. You are dealing with a modus operandi and a weltanschauung which can be described in terms of how a subject moves in space. If you didn’t have a body then you wouldn’t be able to experience space. We do tend to think that we can think without a body.
WL: We only have a body in movement. Every part of the body is in movement until we die. I wonder whether we will ever be able to make a connection between, on the one hand, the brain, and the movement of the neurons within it, and the resulting movement of the hand or arm.
DM: Your claim that a person’s way of making decisions can be understood through how they move is becoming quite obvious to me. It is so obvious that these two aspects of oneself are related – one is only one person. You are not making up some new notion of mentality or behaviour. We define ourselves in terms of our spatial perspective, in terms of how we feel and see space. We can only feel ourselves in space when we move, and mostly we move in our place of work. Movement is how we go about things. It is about representation of inner emotions and starts. Even when we are standing still we are having to make hundreds of tiny movements to remain vertical. The German language distinguishes between Leib, the animate body, and Körper, the purely material body. The life in the body is the movement.
WL: The way that you are anguishing about this profile, relating to how you are feeling, maybe suggests that there is an inner aspect to this network. However, I must say that you really are beginning to understand my approach to movement.
DM: I realise that I do have a sense of space in one respect: how I come to represent my understanding of things. I conceive them as mappings. Indeed, I adore maps (even though I am not always a confident map-reader). One of the most important spatial terms for me is connection, how things relate to each other. That is a very ‘out of the box’ way of thinking. I am much more interested in seeing constellations of ideas or principles. I enjoy conceiving of new and hitherto unthought of groupings of concepts: I enjoy interdisciplinary reflection. Things are often kept in unhelpfully enclosed spaces or fields.
The funny thing about Geraldine and I is that she is a spatially-orientated woman who is interested in Effort, and I am an effort-orientated man who is interested in space. I realise that that I haven’t been that spatially aware, but one can’t move into a space until one is aware that it is there. The space wasn’t there for me. It wasn’t present for me as a living fact. Maybe I am still thinking too much inside my body out, but I am aware of space as an adventure as it never has been before. These reflections are my first approximations toward understanding your method.
Interview on June 16th 2005
Summary of interview
This is a detailed account of the proposed commentary for the DVD.
The Interview
Proposed structure for Warrens’s DVD
1. Space and Effort
1. Demonstrations of each effort and each of the planes. During each demonstration have the notation sign for each in the top left corner of the screen, thus establishing the notation early on.
2. The differences between WL’s and RL’s notations.
3. Dimensional Scale demonstrating shape and effort
4. Diagonal Scale demonstrating shape and effort
2. Movement Pattern Analysis
Follow each of the 10 observed movements according to the following sequence:
1. Movement of McCaw
2. Description of the movement by WL
3. Notation of the movement by WL
4. Observations of how this movement fits into the overall pattern.
5. Exercises devised to broaden the subject’s range of movement in terms of shape and effort.
Terms that might not yet have been fully explained or explored
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Kinesphere
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Concavity
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Convexity
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Phrasing, Movement phrase
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Dissipation (where a movement fades rather than the initiative changing)
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Other notes
Context is a very important spatial concept.
For WL the Q of MPA is more motivational than about a world-view. It is about what you are motivated to do.
Transcript from the Minidisc
DM: What we ought to do is have a printed version of the Laban Effort graph.
WL: The idea was that on side of the diagonal line there was the indulging and on the other side the contending. I’m not sure that people will quickly be able to see that from that we have extracted our terms. If they want to interpret one set from the other what we need to convey is that the notion of polarity. People don’t cotton onto this immediately. We need to explain that Laban’s graphs were only ever used for Effort but I was responsible making comparable shape symbols. But then for people to understand this graph they need to recognise that each of these is shown by a polarity which has its extremes: these two signs, for example, correspond to directing and indirecting.
DM: I think we need to have a key which shows what each individual part of the graph means. We need to show the difference between Laban’s and your notations and discuss how and why you developed yours. You need to discuss each individual sign. We can do this by filming you pointing to each sign and discussing them. If this is our last chance to get your method clear then let’s get every detail of it clear, once and for all.
WL: We must try to avoid there being any mystique.
DM: The important thing to grasp is the question of phrasing, and you won’t be able to understand this until you’ve grasped bi-polarity. It is also essential to identify where the neutral point between the polar extremes – Jacques Lecoq’s understanding of movement and character began with an appreciation of the neutral. You aren’t alone in your choice of terms – your method has resonances with many other masters of movement. You aren’t a lone voice. It is just that your chosen field of application – that of decision-making in business – is so seemingly remote from everyday or expressive movement. What you are saying does conform to a lot of what we know – we just don’t know that we know it. You have just been more systematic in accounting for what we know.
On his commentary on the Second Movement
WL: I think that this is clear as long as one understand what indirecting means. I think it’s good that we’re starting with a very simple phrase since some of the later ones get complicated.
DM: It is becoming clear just how important it is for us to explain the terminology in the opening part of the DVD – the example here being an illustration of the difference between directing and indirecting. We just have to make everything obvious and clear to the viewer.
Third Movement
WL: The sign underneath my finger indicates forwardness and here is a possibility for misunderstanding. Advancing can either be concave or convex and it has to do with degrees of opening and closing: you can open forward, which is a harmonious movement, or you can advance closing. Your tendency is to go forward and become concave. It’s difficult for people to understand that while part of you is going forward another is retreating. The arms advance and the spine retreats. Your concave movement is harmonious with the effort. You retreat coming forwards with a deceleration and this is a harmonious movement in terms of effort-shape harmony.
DM: It is essential that we have this detail of explanation.
WL: People understand this once they have studied movement and it is perfectly straight forward. But people who are new to movement study and think that they’re catching on might be foxed by retreating while going forwards.
I hope that some of that commentary would be edited a bit since it does seem to go on a bit. We’d risk losing people.
DM: I think the discussion brings up the question of the kinesphere which we haven’t discussed at very much length.
WL: This is quite an easy concept to explain since most people are aware of the idea of the space around them. Laban simply gave form to the kinesphere. It would be good to give an explanation.
DM: It’s interesting to understand the icosahedron in terms of calculus which was an attempt to approximate the measurement of the sphere through the use of straight lines. I’d like you to think about the difference between a drama lesson in which a teacher gives the instruction ‘Imagine that you’re in a bubble, and now move around within it’ and Laban’s kinesphere which consists of specific points.
WL: Laban never talked about specific points. He thought more in terms of planes or lines which divided what is called ‘above’ from what you’d call below. Most religions divide space according to the high/low axis with all that is evil being in the lower part. That is the first step in appreciating that the bubble can have some form. But we can also create an imaginary wall or door that divides everything that is in front of you from what is behind you. This is in our language: ‘putting things behind you’, ‘turning your back on things’. This is also clear in what faces you, what you have in front of you. Since we’re dealing with planes we can also make a distinction between all that is on the left and all that is on the right – a division that enters into politics. It is more of a differentiation between what you can do with you right and left hands. All we’re trying to explain at present is that this is a form that you can give to the bubble. This is the first elementary form of understanding a structure of the spheroid. We can go on to make many different structures and ways of going around the sphere: we can squash or do whatever we want.
I’m excited by what we’re doing because it’s unprecedented. It’s creating something that’s never been done before.
I do worry just how much a viewer can take in of this kind of information.
DM: Think that the total footage here lasts only an hour, and that at least half of it will be cut – there really isn’t going to be that much material.
Interview July 28th 2005
Summary of Interview
An account of how WL developed his concepts of posture and gesture. How they develop from Laban’s concepts: functional actions, shadow movements and body attitudes. The relationship between shape and functional attitude. The origins of Posture and Gesture. His desire to create a descriptive vocabulary free of the metaphysics and psychology that he found in Laban’s terminology. Posture Gesture Mergure (PGM) in theatre and dance. How to guarantee objectivity in the observation of PGM, the use of electromyographs to record PGMs. How Laban and Lawrence met at Dartington. WL’s definition of the kinesphere. Shaping the kinesphere through the exercise Gathering and Scattering. Dissipation. Bi-polar extremes of movement.
The Interview
How Warren discovered Posture and Gesture
Laban varied quite a lot in the categories of movement that were to be used – however he mostly categorised movement in the factory under three headings:
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Functional actions
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Shadow movements
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Body Attitudes
This is what he taught and this has, I think, been recorded.
Functional actions, shadow movements and body attitudes
I remember the question being asked, ‘Do functional actions always mean that you have to be dealing with an object, for example touching something?’ He replied that no, a functional action could be expressive. It may be as simple as the expression, ‘Put it over here please’, and you make an indication of where that should be. That is functional. Shadow movements he would define as ones that flit across the surface of the body. The definitions I’ve just given you of functional and shadow movement were not always adhered to. As was well known, Laban was constantly thinking up new ideas and new terms, but they tended to be most referred to, so there was some sort of continuity. The third category he called Body Attitude and I struggled for years to define what the limits were to these categories. What was a shadow movement? It could be a flicker of an eyebrow – that would always be agreed upon. But it you did a startled movement of the head – was that a shadow movement, a functional action or something else? Body attitude seemed to me to be referred to by other in a static sense, in terms of a physique posture. It could be sloppy, dreamy, militaristic. Laban’s imagination was very fertile when it came to giving names to body attitudes. But it seemed to me that this wasn’t something that moved or changed but was general. I remember writing about it at the time as being generalised. While the terms, floating, gliding, punching, wringing, dabbing, pressing, flicking, slashing all related to movement, he would still generalise and refer to a certain person as a slasher, or another as a glider. I accepted this as a very generalised, summarised version. But obviously people didn’t go around all day flicking, flicking, flicking. There was a movement process. When Laban was advising on people, and was recognised as having a very deep perception into people’s personality, women in particular, felt that he could penetrate into their innermost being, or understood them. In order to gain that understanding I don’t think that Laban just remained with the concept of the person being a flicker or a slasher; he saw much more than that. During the late 40s and 50s when I started observing and trying to work out what it was that I was observing, I was meeting with Laban. He would add to the definitions in some way, during which I would say yes, yes. But when I subsequently sat down to think what it was that he had told me, and how I could systematise it, then it was very difficult to do so. If you came to him to say that you were having problems trying to systematise his thinking he would say, ‘My work is not a system, I am not interested in a system’. So I didn’t really get much help.
So, I was left with the problem of trying to distinguish between these three types of movement. Was an actor’s movement functional or shadow? It became very difficult for me to differentiate between the two. The only differentiation that I could make was trying to clarify different types of effort rhythms. This is something that I really did learn from Laban. Whereas other people latched onto a generalised and in my opinion an often very static concept of what he meant by body attitude, functional and shadow movements, with me he was always talking about Effort Rhythm. In the industrial work this is how movement was described. I was always presenting Laban with phrases of movement, and very often you could see how the rhythm was used. I wanted to see some sort of progress, some sort of rhythm in any movement I was observing. The shadow movements, as mostly interpreted, you just can’t see that. It may be happening, but it is too small to observe. So I slowly came to the conclusion that there is only one category of movement and that is movement that you can see, as opposed to movement that is so small that you can’t see - so as to determine whether it is slow, quick, strong, light, direct or indirect. That was the first step towards getting some sort of categorisation.
The relationship between shape and functional attitude
In the mid-1950s I was not seeing Laban so much though I did meet him from time to time, and we did keep up a correspondence. At that time I started thinking why didn’t I also observe shape and movement, and asking myself whether shape also refers to body attitude as well as functional action. It seemed to me that there were just two types of movement: body attitude in terms of a moving body attitude which I referred to as ‘posture movement’, and what started off as a combination of functional action and shadow movements became just movement that you could see: this I came to refer to as gesture. In 1962-3 I was writing about the contact with gesture and posture movement, and defining gesture as being confined to a part or parts of the body whereas posture is a movement which is first consistent in its effort, but also in its shape rhythm throughout the body as a whole. First of all there was the question of the contact between these two categories. It might be contradictory. I remember studying Charlie Chaplin who maintained a posture and then often did gestures that were contradictory to that posture and the comedy very often is created in this way. Sometimes grotesque movement might be creation through this kind of contradiction.
The origins of Posture and Gesture
It was from that sort of thinking that eventually when I came to be writing Posture and Gesture in 1965, I think this was the first occasion on which merging between the two was used. It’s not a question of observing a gesture and then a second and unrelated posture, but it is actually in the process of the movement itself that a gesture may become a postural movement, or a postural movement may revert into a gesture. So I coined the concept of merging. It came from a lot of thinking, observation, anguishing and differentiation between the static and the dynamic, between a rhythm or phrase and a movement on its own; trying to avoid generalised concepts. However it didn’t really click until about 1964 when I was writing Posture and Gesture, which was 6 years after Laban had died. I don’t think that there was an Eureka moment when I leapt to the ceiling and rejoiced but I do recall feeling that I had made a discovery, or form of discovery. It was derived from Laban, but the more that I worked with it, the more it made sense.
This has remained and I still prefer to talk about posture-gesture merging, rather what people in the movement world call ‘integrated movement’. Integrated can mean all sorts of things and can often be used emotionally, as well as in therapy. It is more to do with psychological aspects. I wanted to make an observation which had no overtones of psychological interpretation but just that these particular efforts do get merged into posture efforts and others don’t; similarly with the shaping of movement. This has remained so for the past forty years. I am encouraged that people like Dr Frances La Barre has picked up on this concept of PGM and do seem to have substantiated that there is such a phenomenon and that I haven’t just invented it. I was motivated by the need to be accurate in my observations but also objective and practical. I had always felt uncomfortable with the metaphysical side of Laban’s thinking and so I was wanting to be practical and to avoid in the observations I was taking any interpretative element. Laban mostly used to talk giving an interpretation which was perceived as being very, very meaningful, and I’m sure it was. Although I’ve never regarded myself as a true scientist I have really tried to differentiate between what you’ve observed, between what you have and haven’t seen, and to analyse that. Then when you’ve got the analysis, in some way or another to try to interpret what it means rather than getting the two fields of observation and analysis mixed up. I think that this term ‘merger’ is the right one and that’s what really happens. We can make different parts of our body do anything if we are physically capable, and determined enough to master some particular skill …
PGM in theatre and dance
I remember interpreting PGM in theatre and dance, and there being an actor who made too many gestures without merging them into a posture makes me think of Hamlet’s advice to the actors not to ‘Saw the air’. That is really indicating an isolated gesture which are very applicable to stylised performances, but if you get too many isolated gestures and there’s not enough merger going on it did seem to me at the time like ham acting. All of that helped to develop a theory that we all have a pattern on PGM: we can impose gestures that do not merge with the PGM pattern, but that’s at a cost. If we do it too much, I do believe it causes stress, we give an impression of not being ourselves. It is at such moments that people say, ‘He’s not feeling himself’. It eventually got translated against a decision-making model and that’s how it is now interpreted. I remember interviewing candidates for a job and I claimed that it might be possible to concept of PGM to check whether a person is being truthful or not, because there are a number of occasions, it was subsequently found, that they had been lying about their CV. I found that when a person were talking if he or she used only gesture and you didn’t see these gestures merge into a posture – they might be smiling and making very convincing gestures, and so on – then when the interviewer took over the conversation, you would see mergers happen as he or she relaxed. If during the time that the candidate was conversing all that you saw was gestures then that person could, possibly, be untruthful. Though I did and again when the candidate was nervous, and so one should be careful in saying this. But I did raise questions in several cases. When I have observed a lack of PGM I have said that they are contrived, that is, putting on an act. It may warrant some more investigation into a person’s background. I remember one person who had created a very good impression in interview, actually having a criminal record.
The objective basis for PGM
As I say I think that the idea does have some application in the field of theatre and I have worked with a number of actors. I remember one actor who was playing Othello who felt uneasy about one of his speeches, and it seemed to me that he was making gestures that strayed too far away from the posture and when I made him aware of this, he was able himself to get a merger with his posture and he felt very much better and I do believe that that improved his performance. All of this encouraged me in 1964 to think that this discovery of PGM was valid and worth pursuing. Although I have no reason to challenge the validity of that discovery 40 years later I do acknowledge the difficulty in observing the PGMs. When we train in movement pattern analysis in observer reliability it used to be very difficult. Carol Lynne Moore has set up very strict procedures for measuring the correlation between different observers. From time to time practitioners take sets of observations and then they are sent to this independent specialists in this work and they come out with a measure of correlation and they determine what correlations are acceptable and when not. I have been encouraged by the extent to which they do come within acceptable correlation, but it is still a great problem. I have the hope, or expectation, that these observations can be taken electronically, rather than relying on the human eye.
About 8 years ago I visited a biomechanics laboratory in Minnesota, one of five similarly equipped laboratories in the world. These laboratories are affiliated with or located in hospitals, but they have been used in other field, such as analysing sports men and women. I looked at data being fed into a computer and resulting in a picture of the person being generated on a screen. When I was there they were studying a long-distance walker who competed in the Olympics. This was being analysed, matched against different criteria such as efficiency. It was the means of getting the data which interested me. They have an area where this man was on a gravity platform walking on the spot (which I thought at the time might falsify the data) while four cameras recorded him at some incredible rate of frames per second, and he had electromyography sensors attached to every joint. All of this data from the cameras was fed into the computer. I think that this could be adapted to recording movement. The shapes of the movements are fairly easy. Electro-myography gives rhythm and the gravity platform gives pressure variation, so I felt that this would be something that could help us differentiate between posture and gesture. This simply gives a bleep when the muscle is active. We did an experiment once in the University of California with about 20 students who had fourteen electrodes placed on different parts of their bodies and then we had literally miles of print-out. While there would be moments that one or two different muscles bleeped in each of the participants, there would be moments with all of the participants, and this is what excited me, when all fourteen would bleep simultaneously across the page. I would think that this would be a PGM.
McCaw. Clive Barker believed that if an actor moved their spine and pelvis it would quite often elicit a similar type of movement in the audience. Clive definitely believed that if the actor made a ‘truthful’ movement (i.e. with posture-gesture merging) then this would elicit a sympathetic movement response in the audience, even if this was only a rocking forward or backward on the sitting bones.
I think perhaps a good link between sincerity and PGM is the phrase that is often used with people who either aren’t being truthful or are being playful: they are saying it, ‘with their tongue in their cheek’. This has always troubled me because while I think I may be observing a PGM in fact the person is holding their tongue in their cheek, or is excluding their tongue from the movement. I don’t think that that can be maintained for very long, but any part of the body can be dissociated from a postural movement – mostly you see it with people keeping their arms stiff, or their hands in their pockets, though you don’t know what their hand might be doing there. So, I support Clive Barker’s thesis, with the proviso that there may be these parts of the body that are being held.
McCaw: could one say that a posture movement is more likely to be more sincere than a gesture movement? Can you get more information out of a person when observing their postural movement.
In terms of sincerity – yes. In terms of a depth of information about their decision-making – yes. In respect to whether the person is motivated or not in what he is doing – the answer is yes. But of course gestures can be very significant. The gesture of raising an eyebrow might be the signal to start a revolution. A gesture has meaning and it can be very dramatic, but of course that is so only because of the context. Actors understand this very often deliberately or intuitively that an isolated gesture because of what has been built previously can have great significance. Gestures may be mannerisms. What I have found is that an isolated gesture may be observed in a person for years, and is perhaps something that he acquired in childhood growth, it may be that a family thing, or a cultural thing: but if it is an isolated gesture then one hardly ever gets it merged and I have found that it is relatively easy to train the person not to do it any more. However if a gesture does merge with a posture it’s then very, very difficult to get the person to stop doing it.
Birdwistle who did his research many years ago concluded that certain gestures are so culturally specific that they could be identified with certain localities.
McCaw: We’ve not talked a great deal about Desmond Morris and his observations of human behaviour. Because these ‘gestures’ can all be photographed one can hardly call them movements, but I would certainly say that they are culturally coded gestures. Morris makes two mistakes: firstly, he considers that these are movements and not static postures, secondly he argues that they are typical of human beings as a species and not specific cultures. A separate question is whether you are dealing with a more personal level of movement meaning when you focus on postures and that gestural movement is a more cultural phenomenon.
Yes that is the case. But people might have been brought up in certain cultures where some gestures do start merging with the posture, and they are probably going to find it very difficult to escape from that cultural movement. An actor might even find it difficult to escape from it. It may be wisest not to try to escape from it but to utilise that cultural influence to positive effect.
How Laban and Lawrence met at Dartington
I’d always understood that Lawrence set up in business as a management consultant in 1923 and I think was probably the first person to set up as a management consultant in England, although some had already existed in America. He had industrial engineers working for him though mainly motion-study people. Lawrence himself was very broad and I found him to be very far-sighted. He was actually both and engineer and an accountant. It was in the late 1930s that his company was a success and he was invited to Dartington advising them on some of their enterprises – mainly horticultural and agricultural, along with packing of produce. He must have been doing some form of motion study. I heard that he advised them on the picking of cherries, as well as peas. Maybe that happened after Laban joined him. Somebody suggested that he might meet with Laban, and they met at Dartington and Laban started giving advice to Lawrence about picking cherries. After a time the cherry-pickers tended to get dazed, so he recommended something that made it possible for them to avoid that. Then Lawrence started introducing Laban to other clients, the Mars bar factor, the Manchester Ship Canal – they worked together during the Second World War. He created the opportunities for Laban to go into factories. He firstly created a method called Lilt in Labour which then became Industrial Rhythm. Dartington really was the launch pad in the sense that that is where they met. Laban always had the image of himself as a healer, he liked this image. Lawrence has suffered a great trauma during the First World War where he served as an officer, and quite early on he felt that Laban had helped him cope with that. No doubt that assisted in them becoming good friends – it became very close. It was because of Lawrence that Laban moved to Manchester.
Jooss had left Germany much earlier, taking refuge in Dartington in 1933; it was thanks to him that Laban was rescued from Paris. Laban tends to be associated with dance, and that was his reputation in Germany. I don’t quite know how Laban in Dartington started taking an interest in what the workers in the various enterprises were doing. He had been interested in Germany in crafts, so that was already in his range of interests. Whether he asked the Elmhirsts if he could start taking observations of the workers at Dartington I don’t know.
The Kinesphere
The kinesphere is usually described as a bubble of space which we carry around with us. I roughly corresponds to our physical reach, so if you stretch your arm and draw a circle to the maximum of your reach around you, then you’ve drawn a spheroid and this is a kinesphere, which by the way is not just a movement concept, it also is used in psychology. However, if we look at the body-spheroid in terms of movement, it doesn’t always stay the same. In fact we may close and make it more enclosed, or we may enlarge it and make it more open. If you open your kinesphere you may be ready to receive somebody into your arms. Having arrived in your arms you may then enclose your arms around them. One has to ask with an enclosing movement is a drawing away from people while an opening is a welcoming of them. In interpersonal relationships you see a lot of this going. When sitting in airports I enjoy watching people arriving from somewhere and being met by friends or relatives – there are all sorts of greetings, with different types of opening, and then both with enclose their body-spheroids together. The extent of the movement in the opening and closing of the kinesphere can be looked at in a more specific sense, in terms of when they do their enclosing. Are they doing this more in a sidewards way, are they rising up when they do it, are they actually going forward? The answer could be any of these things or in any combination. Not only do we open and close the kinesphere but also we enlarge and shrink the kinesphere. An actor may project from the stage so that all the audience feels that are within that actor’s kinesphere, or he might enclose, close his kinesphere so that he is remote and on his own. Taking into account the way in which the opening and closing happens then we can see that there are variations of the dimension or the shaping of the kinesphere: so if the emphasis is put on the side-to-side, it is as thought the kinesphere is squashed – it becomes elongated like a rocket on its side. Whether it’s an open rocket, or a closed rocket it is squashed. On the other hand if you rise particularly in your opening and close with a descending movement then your rocket is elongated up and down. Similarly in a forwards and backwards way.
On the theme of opening and closing, concave and convex, this is often linked with breathing. We breathe in by opening and out by closing: but you can do it the other way round. I would like to learn more about the connection between breathing and body movement, especially in the context of the martial arts.
Then of course there is the question of opening and closing in the kinesphere relative to the efforts being made. This invites the very rich field of affinities and harmonies. It’s obvious that if you throw something away it’s not very harmonious to enclose at the same time: you’ll probably only succeed in hitting yourself. There is still a lot of research and development work to be done on recognising harmonies and disharmonies of movement and how we define disharmony – relative to what? It is a very rich field for study.
Gathering and Scattering
All of these will be variations or shaping of relative opening and closing: whether we use those words or concave and convex – the words I’ve chosen to use – they do correspond to much of what Laban preached as being gathering and scattering. The gathering was of course an enclosing movement and the scattering was an opening movement. He regarded this as psychologically very significant: significant for what we gain from it. Lots of people assign great significance to this. It may extend to people believing that you gather energy into your chakhras. The opposite movement, the scattering, is about getting more in touch with what is beyond you. Gathering is getting in touch with the inner being and scattering is getting in touch with the outer being. I never like to refer to inner being, though a lot of people do, simply because I base everything I do on an attempt to observe objectively. You can’t observe what is inner. But you can observe someone who is gathering; whether you then interpret it as having significance for a person psychologically, in one way of another is something else. You can of course gather and scatter as a gesture – you can gather in one part of the body and scatter in another. My PGM principles do apply to the kinesphere just as they do to effort. We can see that there are certain shapings where there is a merger and perhaps other shapings where there is gesture. In other words, gestures where there is no merger. Everyone experiences the kinesphere, it is just a question of whether you experience it with your body as a whole or whether you are observing gestures, even gestures happening simultaneously in different parts of the body. The concept of opening and closing is quite familiar to everyone, so it is just a question of being specific as to how it occurs, what parts of the body are being used, and whether they merge, and of course of getting all of that as a record of this before you go to any judgement – as so often we do – that one person is closing away from another because they don’t like them. There are all sorts of interpretations that people will give to their perception of what the opening and closing means and many misinterpretations occur. We talk about someone being open to us, or not as the case may be.
Dissipation
One can understand someone who is a state where they are neither opening nor closing very much. They would then give the impression of being like a sort of sculpture, their limbs seem to make little opening or closing. Another person might be wild when they see you, throwing open their arms so extravagantly that it can be regarded as going to an extreme. Sometimes people get into a state of being almost permanently open and there is very little state of variation between being very open and being not quite so open – there is always some movement going on. At the other extreme there are people who remain closed and for whom a little opening is a great adventure. This closing might be because of a fear or a condition that they have, that they don’t feel confident in opening. Relative to what I said a moment ago about being relatively in a staid and sculpted state: most of us come in between those extremes. When someone makes an opening movement when do you begin to see it as an opening movement? It has really got to advance a bit before you can say, ‘Ah yes, now I see an opening’. Or the closing process may have to have already begin before you recognise it as such. If somebody does quite a big opening movement and then they relax and you don’t see it going to a positive closing then you can say that that movement dissipates. Perhaps another good way of describing dissipation is as the neutralisation of a movement phrase. On the other hand if a person does a very positive opening movement and then goes to a closing movement following it, they have gone from one extreme to the other. That begins a phrase, a more complex phrase to which other movements or efforts might be added. It’s the same with effort: if we really want to exert strength. If you’re trying to get the lid off a jar and it’s very tight, then finally it comes off and you relax: you don’t necessarily go from this exertion of strength to when the lid comes off to a lightness. You have increased the pressure but then you don’t diminish or lessen the pressure. So you can say that after you’ve succeeded in getting the lid off the jar the strength dissipates. On the other hand if you apply a lot of strength to getting the lid off and then you gently place it on shelf, then you have gone from a strength to a lightness, so there is no dissipated: or maybe it is the lightness which is then dissipated. You can visualise all of this happening on a bi-polar scale. I am always drawing these saw-saw things because any sort of movement must have an extreme: you can’t carry on opening ad infinitum, nor can you apply strength ad infinitum – you must come to a limit. These bi-polar see-saws are useful tools to illustrate the process of variation, which is what movement is. A lot of people use movement terms to describe static states so when we use the word movement we must remember that we are describing a process, or, as Laban called it, ‘flux’.
Bi-polar extremes
I have given names to the different bi-polar. If you increase pressure to the point where you can’t do it any more, then you develop a tremor. If you decrease the pressure through the neutral area to a lightness you will reach a flop: this is a result of a positive decreasing of pressure. If you try to direct a movement so that you can’t go any further you reach the point of a fixed stare, they become fixated. If someone starts pointing at you with their finger there will be a point which they can’t point any more. If you indirect the movement positively then you get into twist, where people basically tie themselves in knots. If you accelerate so that you can’t accelerate any more you reach a state of trembling. Quite often people feel that if they’ve darted back because they’ve been afraid of falling, and they’ve accelerated to such an extent that they get into this oscillation as I call it. Whereas if you decelerate then you come to a standstill. I think it is often helpful to have an idea of these extremes so that it is between these extremes that we are observing the variations. Coming back to opening and closing, you can become so open that you reach an extreme. I remember seeing a pop singer who so wanted to open to his audience that he was liable to injure himself. I see the tendency to get close to an extreme in any movement as being in danger of approaching a pathological state. In terms of the kinesphere if you do a sideways enclosing then you look as if you have straitjacketed yourself. If you do a descending movement you can’t fall any further than the floor, just as in rising the next step after the extreme would be to levitate above the floor. The extreme of any movement is paralysis and I think that paralysis is always bad. If in any movement whether it is effort or shape you get to an extreme, you can only overcome the paralysis that it induces by returning along the same route. If you’ve got into a cramp because of increasing pressure you can’t shake yourself out of it, you’ve got to diminish the pressure. That can and is being used in a therapeutic context.