On Movement Choirs

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Some movement choirs nowadays seem to be too consciously controlled whereas when Laban did his movement choirs, and too a similar extent Lisa Ullmann, they included much more spontaneity. You never really knew what was going to happen.  A number of people would gather - twenty, fifty, a hundred, a thousand - and Laban would organise them a group here, a group there, a group there, a group somewhere else.  He’d use pretty basic terms: one group to be very small and confined and grim-looking; another group expansive; another group very much looking for something.  Each group would have a pretty clear understanding of what they were supposed to do to start with but then one never knew what was going to happen, and it was that uncertainty as to what would happen next that was too a great extent the attraction.  It only remained an attraction of course if what happened next was exciting.  There were some failures.  Lisa Ullmann particularly would have off days, though I never knew Laban have an off day; he always seemed able to rise to the occasion and get people moving.   So he would have the searching group finding something, changing their looking to focusing on some particular direction.  He would have the confined group becoming much more open and into discovery.  And then he’d have the live group getting angry and thumping the ground.  Having got change happening within the different factions in the group then he’d have them begin to inter-relate.  The group that was becoming open would get to meet the group that was becoming firm and angry about something.  So something would happen from that and Laban would see immediately and would start to structure it and the get the group more spread out, or into an arrow formation, or a circle.  Then the shape element would start coming into it: the arrow-group would start approaching the circle group.  Then of course there would be the third group – there usually were three groups in Laban’s movements choirs – and they would begin to have an influence.  Then perhaps the groups would get mixed up.  It was really exciting and you were doing real movement.  

 

Laban was taking cues from his very acute observation of what was happening with the group.  Other people trying this would create chaos very quickly with groups all running around not knowing where they were supposed to be and what to do.  They began to get outside the momentum of the group, and giggle and have conversations – all of which was extraneous to the choir. That never happened in Laban’s choirs.  I think it came about because he very acutely observed what was happening at the moment that it began.  He would fashion it in some way to be constructive within his overall structure, and structure itself was constantly changing.  It’s a good illustration of his sensitivity to both Effort and shape.  These were both coming from the group and he showed how he could shape them to create a composition.

 

Now the people that I know who are doing movement choirs tend to even meet in advance and prepare it thus blurring the distinction between a movement choir and choreography.  This may be interesting.  It does seem to be that movement choirs has evolved in this direction of much more recreational dance.  I always thought that spontaneity was the root of the movement choir experience. I have thus found it difficult to enjoy being in the movement choirs in which I’ve taken part over the past few years mainly because of this lack of spontaneity.  

 

At the end of Joan’s Book, Littlewood notes that she detected a frustration in Laban that his energies and time were being channelled into education, which was safer and more financially more rewarding, and away from theatre which was neither safe nor paid well.  

There is no doubt that he was totally sincere in all his initiatives to try and encourage the teaching of movement in schools.  He got a lot of satisfaction from the mid-1940s when the Minister of Education published a new syllabus which included movement teaching and this syllabus showed photographs of children doing really exciting things in terms of movement.  There’s no doubt that he believed in this and wanted to do it.  Of course, he did write a book called Modern Educational Dance in which he developed 16 movement themes for teaching children at different age ranges.  What’s interesting to me is that you’ll find that the first eight or nine themes, more than half the themes, up to the age of eleven or twelve, are all Effort.  It’s only when they are approaching puberty that he begins to suggest that they should shape their movement.  It’s clear that he is aligning the teaching of shape with dance, whereas prior to the age of puberty, the concentration on effort seems to be that children want to do thing rhythmically, initially perhaps in a primitive sense.  There is an alignment of rhythm from the cradle to puberty and shape and dance from puberty onwards.  That’s just a digression on his view of how children should be taught movement and what was appropriate for different ages.  It is surprising to me that he didn’t that that teaching shape to young children was appropriate.  There’s no doubt about his conviction and his desire to promote movement in education.  But of course he was also promoting movement in industry. I don’t like what he was doing being confined to Industry. Since I’m associated with aspect of his work it makes me feel that I should be wearing a boiler suit!  I try to make the correction that it is really about management and work that Laban was interested in rather than just industry.  He was also interested in therapy too and particularly with Jungian psychiatrists who were centred to some degree at the Withymead Centre run by Irene Champernow.  Laban was very dedicated to all of those things and they were all part of his overall philosophy that movement was a common denominator to every activity whether you mention sports or work or playing chess – he would find that his approach through movement would have some relevance.  

 

However, I do agree that his first love was the theatre.  Originally his first entrée into theatre did come from studying art at the school of art and architecture.  Dance came from that.  Certainly his interest was in dance performance.  But quite quickly he developed an interest in dance as recreation in the sense that everyone is a dancer.  Everybody uses rhythm in movement; everybody structures their movement to some degree, so everyone is to some degree a dancer.  Then of course, when he came to England he came more to theatre and to acting.  But he was theatre as a whole that he maybe felt most attached to.  Although I reckon in terms of his allocation of time in the twenty years he spent in England, I reckon about 95% of that time was spent in activities other than performance and dance.  But if we take into account his activity with theatre as a whole - he also liked to design theatres and quite often played around with such thoughts – maybe one should say it’s more like 85% of his time.  He did say to me that it was very convenient for his to have Lisa Ullman look after him and support him, and he wanted to help her to become established in the education world.  But the way that he said it suggested that it was more of a duty than a desire.  

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A history of how Warren came to discover a correlation between movement and decision-making.  How and when did the idea come about and what stages did his discovery take?

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Laban was working in industry and he had this image of being a guru projected onto him.  People would tell him their problems and he would advise them. I think he was very often advising as a healer as much as anything else.  Of course Lawrence himself had benefited a lot from Laban’s advice to help him over the very serious trauma that he experienced after World War I.  Laban did heal him to a very great extent.  It was from that sort of status that Laban gave advice.   But if he wasn’t there and I was on my own and people came to me, then I had to think what on earth could I say.  On what basis was I giving advice?  

 

One clue that I did use fairly early on was Laban’s association of the efforts: directing/indirecting was associated with Attention; weight effort was associated with Intention; timing effort with decision and flow with precision.  There was a nice euphony in the categories of attention, intention, decision, precision.  So when I was observing a person I’d look to whether they were direct or indirect, or strong or light, or quick or slow, or free or bound.  If there was more space-effort than weight-effort then I thought that this person acts more to express attention than intention.  I began to base how I was responding to these people in that way.  With regard to the manual work a similar procedure was adopted – this is what Laban taught me.  We would look at the operation itself and assess what were the essential efforts that had to be performed for the job to be accomplished.  A placing of something in a particular groove, or something that had to be handled lightly because pressure would break it – that sort of thing.  The essentials were specified.    Then I would observe the individual’s efforts and match the one with the other.  From this and as I began to work more and more away from Laban it began to happen that I was rating the matching process in terms of a person’s strengths and their weakness.  I think Laban was involved in this to a certain degree.  I remember using the word ‘weakness’ with regard to a client and he said that he didn’t like the word because it sounded a bit cruel, so after this discussion with him I changed the word to ‘limitation’.  This didn’t come from a Laban but from a client.  When discussing with Laban we discovered an in-between stage which was ‘latent’ – latent capacities.  I remember discussing this question with Lawrence and he didn’t like the word ‘limitations’, he liked the word ‘inert’.  In my archives there are series of Laban-Lawrence tests which list the features as follows:  a group of strengths, a group of latent capacities, and a group of inert capacities.  I like the term ‘inert’ because it has a movement, or rather, an absence of movement element.  The features themselves which were being put in one of these three categories did come from the matching process, if one of these capacities was focusing on the essential elements in the work in hand.  If that person did show a lot of directing and not so much timing, then that would be rated as a strength.  If the person had a lot of timing in then that would be rated as a strength.  If the person didn’t have much directing then that would be rated as inert (or a limitation or weakness).  If it came in between …I did worry and puzzle over this as to whether it should be called this.  I did try to bring in the flow element.  If there was flow associated with this particular feature then even though it was low relatively in the person’s movement, maybe it did have the potential for development.  It was very unscientific and there was some basis – I was struggling for some basis.  That went on for years.

 

A few years before Laban died when I introduced the matching of effort and shape then I became more convinced that Laban’s association of attention with space, intention with weight, decision with time had merit as a decision-making process.  He’s never referred to it as a decision-making process.  Having passed through the stages of the Laban-Lawrence Personal Assessment, then it became the Laban-Lawrence Test, (which I disagreed with) then I called it Aptitude Assessment because it seemed to me that we were indicating what people found most suitable to do, what came most easily to them as distinct from what might be most difficult.  When we set that something was a limitation or inert I cam increasingly to believe that we weren’t saying that the person could never do it.  Quite early in this process, and I believe this to be quite significant, I felt that if the incentive was enough, people could make themselves do anything.  But what we were concerned with was that people were not only doing a job but also doing a job within a satisfactory career growth.  I was asked quite a lot to advise on people who had been shortlisted for a new appointment.  I always gave myself the discipline that if somebody I felt was unsuited for the job, and this was on the basis of a very time-consuming effort basis on my part to assess what were the requirement of the job and then my observations of the candidate, that if I was rejecting the candidate, then I had to convince myself of what that person was suitable for.  If I was saying, ‘You’re no good for this job’, then I must be able to say what job he was good for.  That brought in a career guidance interest and I did I did run a career guidance service for quite some time. 

 

Aptitude Assessment continued with the basis of the decision-making model.  I think that the terms Strengths, Potentials and Inert were to some degree modified but it was in the middle ‘60s after Posture and Gesture had been published that I started talking about the decision-making process, and that I was advising people on their aptitude for going through that process.  Pamela Ramsden joined me in 1969. She was a psychologist and she poo-pooed the whole idea of it being aptitude within her understanding of what aptitude is from her psychological training.  She didn’t think we were reporting on aptitude at all, she thought we were reporting on motivation.  So we started talking about Action Motivation, a person’s motivation to act, and that a person had a motivation to go through a decision-making process in a particular way.  That fitted my own thoughts that I mentioned earlier that somebody could force themselves to do something which was contrary to their decision-making pattern, but by doing so they would not feel any motivation for what they were doing and we came to the conclusion, and I still maintain, that if do act in a way that is contrary to our movement pattern then we get under stress, our decision-making is not so good, personal relationships suffer.  There are all sorts of negative implications for that sort of being forced by circumstances or whatever – you are forced to accept a job which is something quite incompatible with your way of working then there will be stress.  Quite where to draw the line, I think it is mainly awareness that if you find yourself having to do something that is contrary to your movement pattern, to recognise, to be aware of it and to keep it within some sort of check according to your own awareness of what is happening to you.  That is when she came up with the name Action Profile.  It has been a very good name in the sense that it has stuck.  Although I don’t do action profiles any more since my split with Pamela, and I now refer to Movement Pattern Analysis, far, far more people know of Action Profiling and talk of profiles than they do of Movement Pattern Analysis.  It was a good title from the commercial point of view – people could at least get some idea of what it was about.   When we talk now of movement pattern analysis it sounds a little like psychoanalysis!  I think people may be put off in many ways.  

 

So, just to recap.  It was Laban-Lawrence Personal Effort Assessment.  Then it was the Laban-Lawrence Test which I disagreed.  Then it became Aptitude Assessment with the decision-making process becoming established within the procedure. Then it became Action Profile, then with me it became Movement Pattern Analysis, with the people from whom I split still doing Action Profiles – how successfully I don’t know but it is still continuing.  

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Dick: It started with a very clear focus on jobs – it was something quite mechanical, something to do with productivity.  Then it seems that from specific manual jobs it became more a question of character – Carol Lynn actually uses the words ‘Character Essence’ in her book.  Finally it ends up not with character but with how people think.  Does this describe the shift in emphasis in your thinking? 

 

Warren: Carol Lynn talks about Mental Effort in her book and outlines the history of how Laban got into Mental Effort.  It always troubles me a bit because everything that I do is based on observation and you can’t observe mental effort, all that you can see is a body.  The body does all sorts of movements: it can frown, it can smile, it can fidget, there can be a big variation of effort and shape.  From your observation and analysis of movement you may then discover some relationship correlation with thinking, with the mind. One theory is that there is no such duality of mind and body – in fact we just have a body that moves and that mind is movement.  I think, subconsciously, that has influenced me right from the very beginning although I didn’t talk about it.  I think I see now the sort of Cartesian segregation of mind and body still applies when people use the word mind-body; although this is outmoded, there is still a great element of the duality in the way they talk about mind and body.  I start from the premise that we just have a body.  Maybe if we just start from the observation and analysis of movement, you may be able to talk about intelligence: about how harmoniously, how dynamically that person is moving.  But I don’t think that you can talk about mind.  

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The relation of behaviour to movement

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Laban did this in a generalised way when he would say that this person is a ‘presser’, this person is a ‘floater’, that one a ‘puncher’ – what called the basic efforts.  If you asked him, ‘What do you see in this person’s movement?’ he would typically reply, ‘Oh she’s a ‘flicker’ and she is really not grounded and is probably very unreliable’, and so on.  He would go from a generalised view of what ever basic effort was closest to what she was doing to a more definitive explanation.  I’ve never been able to do that it: it seems to me to be too generalised.  It would certainly be limiting to me, though it was the starting point from which Laban would go from.  Someone was just described to me a few days ago as ‘bubbly’ – I can just picture the movement quality of someone described as bubbly.  Other people might be similarly described but they’d all be different, but at least it could be the starting point.  All people who tend to be described as ‘bubbly’ have this that and the other in common.  Laban would probably say that all bubbly people are ‘flickers’.  Somebody else might be described as ‘stolid’ which might mean more weight, they might be more ‘pressers’.   This has never been a good starting point from my point of view.  Of course it depends on what you’re looking for in movement.  Certainly if you’re giving advice to people about what their character is – and this is was I was doing when people were be considered for a job – is that you can rely upon in this person.  Notoriously people can appear differently in interviews to how they will behave when they get into the job.  With someone described as ‘bubbly’, is she always bubbly? This is always a good question to ask when someone is described in this general way.  When might they be different, indeed very contrastingly different?  When might the person be very down at heel?  Obviously it may depend on circumstances.  If a disaster happens then you would expect that they would behave differently.  That was an important question to ask when attempting to give advice.  You can then get the distinction between what might be temporary and what might be relied upon as more constant.  

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Do you feel that the word ‘constant’ is more methodologically sound that the word ‘essence’? 

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Personally I’ve never used the word ‘essence’.  Nor do I ever talk about inner attitudes, because these all have mystical connotations.  This was not the case with Laban who was always talking about inner attitude and essence.  

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Effort and Shape 

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I don’t think that there was ever any dichotomy between Laban’s understanding of Effort and shape, or Eukinetics and Choreutics.  At the Art of Movement Studio we were taught Eukinetic classes and Choreutic classes, and the diagonal scale which puts the two together, although this was always taught by Laban as primarily to do with Effort – but he would always correct people if they weren’t doing the appropriate shape.  

 

I’m constantly thinking of how is effort being shaped and what effort is being put into the shaping?  The two are so interrelated.  My attempts to interpret the movement process in terms of the decision-making model is worked out very much in terms of the togetherness, the coming together, the relationships, the links between both the effort and the shape.  I think that this was the case with Laban too.  Recollecting how he taught me, although he was concentrating his questions on what I had observed in terms of efforts, nevertheless he was taking shaping into account because I don’t think that he himself could segregate the two.  He was an extremely perceptive and penetrating observer.  I came to the conclusion eventually that this is what he’d been doing all the time – he’d been teaching me just to observe effort but he himself had been observing effort and shape.  I’m sure he didn’t do it deliberately and maybe wouldn’t have admitted it to himself, but who knows, he might have done.  He did have the character of reserving to himself some element of his method.   Although space harmony was at the heart of Choreutics, if ever he got angry, he would say that your knowledge was very elementary and he conveyed that he understood far, far more than you were ever going to understand.  He might have not admitted to himself that effort and shape went together but might have still been aware that he had chosen to isolate industrial work to effort.    

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Could you explore the difference between motivation and initiative in movement analysis?

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In any of the three stages in decision-making we can be proactive or reactive.  Some people just follow their leader and take as little initiative on their own account as they can.  Other people like to take a lot of pro-active initiative.  Pamela’s claim which I agree with is that we are more motivated to take initiative according to our movement pattern, than one which is incompatible with it.  It is often said that people have a high motivation for their job.  A job advertisement might be worded, ‘Only people who are motivated should apply’.  We thought that this concept of motivation to take initiative which is compatible with your movement pattern really explained how people will do some things and not others.   I then related that particularly to top management decision making.  First of all the responsibility a person has the more scope he or she has to take initiative that they want to do, rather than that they aren’t motivated to do.  When you’re lower down that scale you don’t have that scope so much.   It depends on whether you want to keep your job, whether you are aiming for some specific promotion which would require what you assess as a particular form of behaviour.  It is usually when you are in the top job that you are more free and you have more scope to act according to your motivation.  Therefore, and this goes for CEOs and Prime Ministers, if you are motivated primarily to give attention – this is a crude example for purposes of illustration – then you like taking such initiatives, to having surveys carried out, to employing consultants.  But if you are more motivated to take initiative of intention, then that motivation expresses itself as soon as you wake up in the morning saying, ‘Right, what do I intend doing today?’  This can effect what can be done because the strategy which a person with big responsibility will follow is in the two cases I’ve illustrated would lead to them both taking different decisions, even though the situation might be similar.  The first person might spread, might go into new things, might diversify.  The strategy of the second person might be to stick with what they’ve got.  Overall within the whole management field fashion might dictate how you’ll act. There was a fashion twenty years ago when every company wanted to become a conglomerate.  In more recent years things have changed and people like to stick with their core business.  You can say that there are big trends overall which tend toward the reactive rather than the proactive element of what how responsible CEOs will react; but within the overall trend, each will apply their individual motivation.  And these trends are of course created by people in the first place!   

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Is a decision the result of a mental action, of mental effort made in a certain field?  

 

As I have already said I feel that mental and physical are really one and the same and therefore any mental activity is not the result of bodily action. One is always influencing the other.  The way I would prefer to express it is that the two are basically the same, it is a unity.  As to whether your movement is intelligent, this should be evident.  I have talked to psychiatrists who were interested in intelligence, and there was some agreement that people can move with or without intelligence.  Some move like a hulk, in a King Kong way, and this is assumed to have little intelligence.  However, I think that we struggle in our definitions of intelligence.  Intelligence testers will say, ‘Intelligence is what I measure with this test.’  Other people would have different tests.  Then it seemed that intelligence was measured by the speed of response to a stimulus.  Other people might be able to do other intelligent things but not at the same speed.  I know one intelligence test included how quickly how one could look up an entry in a telephone directory.  I don’t think that the issue of what intelligence is has ever been settled.  But if you align intelligence with some sort of perceptivity, with some kind of brain activity, something linked with the neurones, and how that is linked with the actions with the rest of the body then we can make a differentiation between someone being more physically active or more mentally active.  Or is it a question of not making it a dichotomy in the first place and seeing that all physical and mental activity are interlinked, it’s only that the degree of perceptivity may vary.  

 

I think all action is about how you are motivated to act in the world.  There are many variables involved which is why I am so keen to identify what is constant in our movement.  Emotion, temperament, recent events all have a bearing upon our movement.  It is the patterning of movement that is more constant, and that applies to a much longer period of time which is the significant element upon which to get the sort of understandings that we’ve been talking about.  On what can I rely in this particular person?  Even then, we have to take into account the question of how much scope one has to act according to that pattern.  Are you so desperate to maintain some particular activity that you may not be acting according to your pattern.  

 

What we have done with our understanding of a person’s unique way of going through a decision-making process.  Whatever a person develops in that respect can be understood as a motivation to act according to that person and that will lead that person to an initiative that that person will take.  This is only a small part of the total picture of which you will be taking an account.  If you are wondering why did that person show that emotion, that anger; why is this person so joyful at the moment, why has this person changed his views?  These sorts of changes in emotion, temperaments, attitudes, beliefs, opinions, are constantly be influenced by all sorts of factors – what you read in the news papers that morning, what your wife said to you – and I am not suggested that these sort of things are trivial, they are not.  They can be very, very influential.  These things do have importance.  However, out of all these variables we can differentiate a certain patterning of activity which remains more or less constant – but it’s not the be-all and end-all of everything.  I’ve never made this claim but some people choose to make this claim on my behalf.