Laban Resources
Warren Lamb
Interview on December 8th 2008
[Discussion of a book on Alain Berthoz’s book Emotion and Reason: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Decision Making, 2006.]
WL: I would be fairly confident in meeting somebody like Berthoz with his scientific background with all respect for academia because such people aren’t usually derisive of what movement is, they often find it fascinating. But they do, as you say, find it difficult to make the jump [between movement and decision making], maybe there’s too much of a gulf. But at least they would appreciate it. And I would think that a man who used the term movement in the title of a book … I would like to understand what he means when he uses such a term, what’s going through his mind when he visualises. I would like to confess my distance from what he’s doing, from his learning, but would like to try to develop some sort of dialogue just based on movement, since he uses the term so much.
[DM: observes just how complex WL’s approach is. 1stly people don’t actually see the movements that WL can see, and 2ndly they don’t have the vocabulary to describe them.]
On Motion Factors Rather than Effort Actions
WL: People do see the directing of Effort especially when it’s focusing. They can recognise accelerating and decelerating, and opening and closing. You can give illustrations of movement and of a movement phrase. It’s really dawned on me over the years how long it takes to get an understanding. You’ve confessed that it took some years for it to make sense to you. I am trying to debate, ‘Should I do this? Are people going to understand anything?’ Do they think, ‘Oh he’s quite active for his age’, but that’s about all they do.
DM: The moment that you start thinking in a bipolar way with the three Motion Factors with Flow as a separate Factor, it privileges the see-saw polarity of each Factor. It seems that your method is less based on Effort Actions than on the Motion Factors. Is this an accurate definition of your approach?
WL: Yes, definitely. The complexity is there and it has to be faced. Jean Newlove has a group which meets the first Sunday every month and I was invited to watch them work. There was a man there called Phillip Hedley [formerly Director of Theatre Royal, Stratford East]. All she does is ‘We Float and Punch and Glide’ and when she teaches them she always uses music and it is basically the same as she did with Laban in 1942. I was intrigued by the dedication of the members of the group, Hedley included. They didn’t talk about movement, always ‘Laban’. It’s very difficult to have a conversation with Jean, she’s very dogmatic and translates everything in her own experience. It’s all ‘Well, Laban told me’ and she’s quite overbearing and dogmatic. I am trying to get more recognition of her work because it does seem to be effective. Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop people were completely impressed by Jean. What she does is just the basic Efforts and that’s what she does with the actors and that’s what she did with Theatre Workshop. Maybe she goes into the individual Efforts. She was talking about incomplete efforts and that’s something that …
DM: Drives and States; Drives is three Motion Factors and States is two.
WL: An incomplete Effort is a question of degree. You could have a moderate Direct Effort or an accentuated Direct Effort or a very accentuated Direct Effort. If it was accentuated you put a comma by the Directing sign, and if very extreme, two commas. I don’t believe that that can ever be observed accurately, and anyway it’s not a process. What we want to do is look at the process relatively from less directing to more directing. Maybe it does go to an extreme or maybe it doesn’t, but you do have to take that into account. So incomplete efforts are … okay you can observe them, but more importantly, it maybe important for the actor to say, ‘Do I want to be really, really focused or just casually focused?’ So the concept may be helpful. But just hearing these people talk, while I was impressed by their dedication to and recognition of what she’s taught them, the do seem to be impressed by the basic efforts. Bernard Hepton [taught by GS at the Northern Theatre School, Bradford], he remembered from what he learned from Geraldine was the basic efforts. So what they get from Jean is simple. Good for Jean or anybody else. But I have taken on, and so have you, of really dealing with complexity and we have to do this if we want to get it into the mainstream of any sort of recognisably scientific study.
DM: Before we started our dialogues I did realise that if you don’t consider the polarities together, like light and strong, you can’t make any adjustment to a movement. I think it’s more important to be able to be more or less focused. You could use Michael Chekhov’s terms Staccato and Legato to describe Sudden and Sustained, but I think it’s more important to understand to change the ‘dose’ of the Motion Factor. A scene in a play develops over time, if I started the scene shouting then I would have nowhere to go other than getting quieter. I need to judge the contour of the scene, with peaks and troughs. At a recent Laban conference I saw actors Floating for an hour. To me that was a waste of time. To a certain degree your approach is very simple – the elements are basic. It can be explored in the Dimensional Scale, one which everyone can do. So, I think that thinking about movement in terms of ranges rather than efforts is the way forward. Laban’s Efforts are basically about Factorial analysis. In Carpenter’s book he identifies 168 different permutations of Motion Factors…
WL: But that’s just arithmetical
DM: Precisely. It’s the same with the kinesphere – it’s not just a question of geometry, it’s also about social codes of distance, proxemics. Laban’s choreutics seem to generate an unnecessary complexity.
WL: Are there aspects of my approach that you have difficulty with or that you think are wrong?
DM: I don’t understand how you observe Flow, but that’s something I’m working on. I am really glad that you consider Flow to be a completely different Motion Factor.
WL: Talking about complexity, of course, Kestenberg has made that immensely complex. There’s a lot in what she does. In Germany the Kestenberg work is really catching on. All my files have gone to the NRCD. I don’t have anything on her now. [Discussion of the fate of his archive in NRCD and when funds will be found to sort through the materials.]
I said a few years ago that you have a fresh approach to the field. You’re not an old Laban fanatic. You have an immense knowledge now, more even than Jean Newlove. Laban would say ‘This is what you do’ and they would have this picture in mind. Jean knows nothing of Space Harmony work and no idea whatsoever about MPA and what I do. Nor did Geraldine.
DM: No, and she was very frank about this and very readily confesses it. But she does understand interpersonal space through ideas like Pin, Ball, Wall. That is basically about shapes of kinesphere. Look at how men expand laterally.
WL: But what you’re doing is growing in terms of Shape Flow within the polarity of Bound Flow. It is a growing but a concaving at the same time. You have to make the differentiation between Shape Flow and Shape. Returning to our discussion of Alain Berthoz, I do think that we can present the complexity to him. These people are ready to recognise that something is complex. They can see the complexity which is still too far a distance from where they are. But given the number of times people like Gibbs and Berthoz use the term ‘movement’, then I think they might say, ‘Hey, we’ve got to work with this man and try to bridge the gap.’
DM: I have been thinking about your see-saws and spaghetti waves of increase and decrease over time, and if you flipped the see-saw so that the horizontal became the time axis, and the vertical the polar variations of Shape and Effort, then you would have a classical graph. Presented in this way I think scientists would be able to readily read the process of variation in the changes in range. Your see-saw graph captures the movement rhythms of any particular individual. You don’t think of putting people into categories such as a Floater or Flicker, or whatever. You think of trying to capture the range of their movement within a given set of polarities of Effort and Shape. Rather than talking about Effort Actions we are talking about two sets of related polarities, three being Effort and three being Shape initiatives. In my mind this is so much more useful than the mathematical generation of Effort Actions. In theatre, maybe it is more handy to have generalised characteristics, such as Dabbers, Flickers, and so forth. But in everyday life things need to be more particularised. You’re not talking about characters but someone’s unique character.
WL: Yes. I think it might be useful to an actor to understand his or her own pattern of movement.
[Discussion of a possible meeting with Alain Berthoz with a view to him participating in a future conference.]
[Discussion of the Laban conference at the Laban Centre in London and James McBride’s passionate challenge to Karen Bradley’s presentation. An example of Movement Observation dumbed down for popular consumption.]
WL: I’ve had two long conversations with her and she defended herself by saying, ‘Well we have to be superficial because of our contacts with journalists who only understand about body language. And I said, ‘You’re confusing body language which relies on fixed images and you are using words that have nothing to do with movement and this makes the integrity of Laban’s ideas more and more confused in people’s minds.’ She said, ‘Yes, yes, but we have to do this. And then we work with them on the depth.’ She kept repeating the word ‘depth’. She is just motivated to get any publicity they can. I know they say that all publicity is good publicity…
DM: James was very upset and he was quite exposed. I was very proud of him. He was articulate and passionate. Yes he was a bit aggressive, but in situations like that it is hard to a avoid, especially when he was against the whole room. Bradley’s address was very entertaining. But hers was precisely show business rather than movement analysis.
WL: They are doing a similar thing with LIMS that Marion North did with the Art of Movement Studio when she turned it almost completely into a dance forum.
DM: She wanted to create a replica of London Contemporary Dance School. She wanted to have a company, a school and the space.
WL: Did you see Diane Dulicai or Marion North?
DM: I didn’t talk with her but did attend a talk by her and she was really quite funny.
WL: She is a good teacher. I did find her lectures dull, but she does understand movement. She is an intelligent person and she did get a lot from Laban and she does have this special sort of view that she was the one chosen by Laban to … although all the other women Jean [Newlove], Geraldine [Stephenson] … But she, had she not been obsessed, along with Bonnie Bird, to create this dance conservatoire and company that would be bigger and better than London Contemporary Dance... But she failed. Have you seen their company Transitions? They are getting good reports for their reconstruction of Laban’s The Green Clowns. It was like a museum piece.
DM: Well it wasn’t. It wasn’t notated so the reconstruction is based on an imaginary, what might it have been like? Valerie Preston Dunlop created a DVD documenting the process and demonstrating precisely that there was nothing of Laban in it, other than what she thought Laban would have done. ‘Reconstruction’ suggests that you have elements that you know were original, and that you are putting it back together again.
WL: Anyway, Transitions Dance Company has not achieved anything like the recognition achieved by London Contemporary Dance Company. I’m not really sure about the situation at London Contemporary Dance.
[Further discussion of LCDT and its history.]
Anyway Bonnie Bird and Marion North really were committed to building a company, but they do have a bigger school than LCDS.
Dianne Dulikai is doing scientific research with Martha Davis. They break up movement into very small facets and then they do quantitative analysis. It is very, very broken up and reductionist. They do mix up fixed images and movement. Martha David once published ‘hands held still by the side’ as an example of movement observation. And that kind of mix up seems to be continuing. But they get funding and it does seem to be going.
DM: I found the way that they described what they were doing really boring and I didn’t find the questions that they were asking really interesting. The area I am interested in is that between brain and movement. I’ve been reading books on Neuroscience for the past 7 or 8 years because it really fascinates me. And then you pose the question of how the brain relates to the body. Yours is a really precise research question which I have been ignoring up until recently. In pursuing your question I hope to finally arrive at my research question. Up until now I have only been generally interested in the field of Neuroscience. In my work on you I am finding out so much about my own area of interests of theatre and learning. I suppose that my question would be something about creativity and learning. So, I didn’t find them that interesting because what they were talking about was so narrow. Berthoz does suggest that breaking things down into the tiniest bits gets you away from the brain’s movement intelligence. It doesn’t work by breaking things down into the smallest bits.
[There follows a rather inaccurate account of brain function by McCaw.]
Certainly it seems that research into brain and movement is going away from a reductionist approach. At a certain level, you are thinking at a pattern level.
WL: Oh, yes indeed! When the split came with Pamela Ramsden, Carol-Lynne suggested that it was Movement Pattern Analysis that we should be doing. I had already started about what we were doing was a pattern. Pamela actually did publish a book called Action Profiling [1993]. It was just at the time of the split and she did say in the book that we had disagreed. She showed me an early draft of the book which I did criticise as having a flawed framework. I didn’t record her use of the word pattern at all. And then when the book was published the word ‘pattern’ was all over it. This is what LIMS is doing right now: ‘Okay we’ve got to talk about pattern now!’
[WL feeds back on a conference on Neuroscience that took place at the Anna Freud centre in London and which featured Kestenberg practitioner Mark Sossin.]
WL: I was pleasantly surprised by some of the presentations. But not Kedzie Penfield who was a Movement Pattern Analyst [trained by WL]. She has got into the Martha Davis, Dianne Dulikai stuff. Her presentation consisted mostly of a film made by Martha Davis which consists of observations of Gorbachev. It’s just showing Gorbachev at a meeting with the first Bush. He’s making an impassioned speech and they are interpreting this as stress. ‘Now Gorbachev is circling his arm and he’s becoming really stressed.’ There was nothing at all new. There was no great claim in what they were doing. ‘Now he’s slumped, now he’s raised.’ It didn’t really do a service to what we’re supposed to be specialists in, and that’s movement and what you can learn from movement. I was very disappointed in what Kedzie did. Apparently this Mentalisation and Embodied Intentionality was started by Peter Fothergy [spelling?]. There was a session on the definition of Mentalisation. He said in the 1986, or whatever, that then they originally called it ‘mind reading’. After a few years that was dropped and they went for ‘A Theory of Mind.’ That’s as far as it’s got. It’s vague and they seem to want to keep it vague.
DM: Laban’s use of very everyday vocabulary certainly means that his terms are understandable by a lot of people. He eschewed technicality, and I like that. But it does means that you get into problems because terms aren’t precisely defined. When you write about timing, or about ‘directing’ rather than ‘space’, these are huge steps towards clarity. These aren’t small tinkerings, they are important distinctions.
[Discussion of a 2nd edition of Eye for Movement. DM proposes writing two new chapters, one on the effect of WL’s MPA both personal and in the boardroom, the other on the way forward for MPA.]
[Discussion of DM’s talk on Geraldine Stephenson. Further discussion of the Laban conference.]
DM: I was so impressed by Rosemary Brandt. Her teaching was inspiring. She made such sense of Laban’s ideas of impact, impulse, swing, rebound.
[Discussion of care homes for Geraldine and the progress of her dementia.]
WL: Did you know that Karen Bradley has written a book on Laban? [In the Performance Practitioners series by Routledge.] There is quite a strong possibility that she and Regina Miranda [of LIMS] will be invited to teach at Creekside [i.e. The Laban Centre], there is quite a strong possibility that they will be employed to teach what they call Laban Movement Analysis. Apparently Anthony Bowne [CEO, Laban Centre] has said that within the objective to teach more Laban at the centre, that it should only apply to dance. He doesn’t want to get into any other field.
You know that they [i.e. LIMS] have publicised for years their framework as consisting of
Body
Effort
Shape
Space
They are annoyed with me because since 1984 when they had a conference in California, I gave a speech saying, ‘Okay, if these categories are helpful for teaching, then fine. But do be clear that you can get into difficulties because it’s like saying, if you were studying Gender Studies, and had the framework: Body, Male, Female and Biochemistry. They can be categories but there are only two sexes, though there can be various mixes of the two, basically, male and female. But you have to recognise that for Laban there are two, if you are going to be true to Laban’s teaching, it has been substantiated that it’s a duality of Effort and Shape. I then got them moving to demonstrate that in any Effort there’s a Shaping. We did the A Scale and I said if we’re doing Space Harmony then you can’t escape doing an Effort. If you are doing the A-Scale the pressure may diminish or it might increase. You have to recognise that there is Effort and Shape in everything that we do and I would say that I have proved it. But, as I discovered later, they had already decided that they were going to retire me from having anything to do with LIMS. They gave me awards they sort of fêted me and had a special dinner and showed a film featuring me. Since then they want to say, ‘Keep quiet, we don’t want to be bothered.’ This book [i.e. Bradley’s book on Laban] is just trivial. It gives very inadequate definitions of the terms they use. They more or less say that I invented Shape which is … I can’t find anything in the book which distinguishes Space and Shape other than that they happen to teach classes under these two headings. This is something that is weighing with me more and more. Not only have they gone in directions that are different to the foundations on which Irmgard Bartenieff set up LIMS which was after she had worked with me and which was then called Effort Shape. Effort Shape was really an awkward term to use, but it got a lot of currency and was used in advertisements in departments of dance and dance therapy. Then they changed it to Laban Movement Analysis. Effort Shape diplomas ceased and you first of all got a Laban Movement Analysis diploma and now you get a certified diploma. But I am just concerned that with the proliferation of terms which is inevitable, but there is some damage because they mention me in this text but really in a way which is doing damage to what I believe.
DM: You could say that the 2nd Edition of An Eye for Movement is your right to reply. It needs to be tightened because it really was a documentation of your work. It needs to be sharpened into an argumentation. We didn’t know it was going to be a book. We just had so much stuff that what we wanted was some edited conversations.
WL: It was more of a journalistic thing. If it had occurred in episodes in a newspaper, that would have been its proper use. It would be very worthwhile to tighten it up. It does have a structure. This [Bradley’s book] has no structure.
DM: Felicia Sachs in her interview [with JH] talks about the 12 Swings. Do you know what these are?
WL: Laban did talk about swings a lot but what he means by 12 swings I don’t know. The Diagonal Scale, and this is what Jean still teaches, that was taught as swings. I can only assume that it is the A and the B-Scale taught as a swing. I certainly recall that being done. So the 12 swings would be those of either the A- or the B-Scale. And of course I basically define the swings as emphasising flow variation, certainly flow of Effort. It’s adding flow of Effort variation to the space harmony of the A- or B-Scale.
DM: You used to talk about Action Profiling and then you went to Movement Pattern Analysis. Laban talks about the Efforts, sometimes as movement and sometimes as actions. Can you help me out as to whether in your mind they are the same or different?
WL: I always understood that when you were recording effort observation, and this was primarily or exclusively an effort, because all the industrial work was … although I am convinced that Laban also thought of shaping. He got me and others just on Efforts. When you use the Effort diagonal, and then you used … that was strength and this was directing or whatever, then that was an action. And therefore if you did a punch and then into a glide, you were doing two actions. You mentioned ‘bounce’ just now. Resilience was the thing. If you did punch and glide, then you had three actions because there is the main action, the subsidiary preparatory action for the … or it could be looked upon as both a sort of bounce away from the punch, and it could also be looked upon as the preparatory action for the gliding and that would really make four actions because you would have punch, and that was an action, and glide, so we would use ‘and’ for these preparatory actions. It seemed that whenever you made a change in the Effort, and mostly Laban referred to it as ‘basic efforts’, and action came whenever there was a change. And I thought, ‘Well, you may do a punch which goes just into a directing and the punch first of all, of the components of the punch, the strength changes into lightness (using the terms of those days), the directness is maintained, but may perhaps diminish or the directing may weaken and get a bit more flexible, and the time variation may get slow. It seems the sustainment might happen and then there might be … in the way that someone performs it. The way that Laban describes a punch into a glide, it could almost never be just two actions, it could be 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 because the change in each of the components wouldn’t happen simultaneously. So the definition that I follow is a strict one of looking at what is happening to the individual components, not the generalisation of what’s happening more or less when all three components happen together. Writing a phrase and putting it on the effort diagonal, whenever you see a change in any of the components.
DM: Whether you use the term action or movement wouldn’t change the meaning at all.
WL: Yes.
DM: In theatre there is a categorical difference between movement and action. Action, for me, is an intentioned thing where as movement is more abstract. An action sets up a series of possible reactions.
WL: I think it’s analogous to music in that if you have a phrase of 10 notes and if an additional note got in, it would alter the composition. Then if you have a sequence of notes and then a chord, the chord has a greater intensity. It’s the same as having a punch followed by … [he demonstrates a lighter movement].
DM: It’s about phrasing.
WL: You can almost say that whenever we have a note we have an action.
DM: Might it be that Space could be understood as a geometrical form outside the body? And you can make shapes within that geometric framework. Always the geometry will be the same. The icosahedron is invariable. The different shapes you can make within it are of infinite number. The spatial configuration is defined by an array of equilateral triangles. It is completely unique as a solid shape. The shapes you make are utterly personal. That’s how I would distinguish between Shape and Space, would you agree?
WL: Well partly, but the shaping doesn’t necessarily happen within all those points but it is a shaping of the points in relation to each other. I don’t get up and say that this room has a geometric shape and I am going to shape myself in relation to that shape. When I move I am really going to make a shape of the geometric conditions that exist. Therefore I will exaggerate the upwardness, or I will exaggerate the forwardness, so you could say that I am distorting the form, distorting that frame. The frame remains as a term of reference but the movement is not remaining geometrically precise or exact according to the frame. You may try to make it so but in doing so it’s the shapes that you are creating. Consider that you are a sculptor and you want do make a sculpture of me to put in Trafalgar Square. I do this and this [demonstrates movements] and you say ‘Stop, that’s a great shape.’ One obvious distortion is when we try to do shapings that take in the space behind us. It is very difficult. You are talking about qualities of shape in the framework. Some people can move in the backward space very much easier. You can train yourself to do that, if you’re a contortionist. I think we should not attempt to make a distinction between Shape and Space. The icosahedron, the tetrahedron, are all shapes themselves. The dodecahedron is a different overall shape to the tetrahedron. And of course the dimensional scale is shapes too because we can never be two dimensional because we are three dimensional beings. Rather than talking about movement within the icosahedron I would say the movement of the icosahedron. It is my movement which is changing the shape of the icosahedron. I can be inspired by the perfection of the shapes, I can’t ever perform that perfection, therefore my shaping of movement is distorting (perhaps I shouldn’t say ‘distorting’ because it’s no necessarily bad) is moulding the icosahedron as we move, and we don’t move within it. I can’t see it. I am more sensitive to the space I can see around me. I could create a geometrical shape out of sticks to encapsulate how I am moving now, it would not be an icosahedron by far. I can never … I can move so it looks like there’s a certain harmony to what I am doing. Have I made the case for this duality, that shape is space? I can’t see how Karen and the LIMS people can continue with the categories that they have if any of them has read Effort and Recovery. I have only learned from it through you. I was surprised but delighted at the extent to which he talked about shape. It’s called Effort and Recovery but he brings in Shape at almost every point.
Interview on January 12th 2009
Summary of the Interview
WL is concerned that MPA might be considered mystical. DM argues that while he couldn’t actually detect the movements WL observed him making, this was not because of anything mystical, simply a lack of skill on his part. Irmgard Bartenieff: her studies with WL in the ‘60s, her introduction of the concept and practice of Effort/Shape at the Dance Notation Bureau in the ‘70s. The conversation focuses on the failure of teachers at LIMS (Laban Institute of Movement Studies) to understand the nature of Shape and how their notion of Space is misconceived.
The Interview
A discussion of the learning of children in their early years. They learn things like object constancy, and depth. Mostly DM sharing his recent reading.
When you say ‘movement behaviour’ we still have a job to get people to understand what we mean by ‘movement’ when we are going through these stages. Let me approach this from something that you said a few months ago that concerned me. You were talking about how accurate the MPA was and how the movements were ‘so small’.
That’s right.
I got the impression from what you were saying, and that people who heard might think ‘oh well, this is something that I will never be able to see’ and that I can see things that other people can’t see. Therefore you’re introducing some sort of mystery. When I demonstrate the PGMs of waving goodbye people can see when the gestures merge into a postural movement. People can see that and they accept it. But looking at the tape that you made, my observations of you, people cannot what I say I have seen. Now that’s really worrying.
Hold on, you’ve missed out the second half of what I said. When watching the videotape of movements that you had selected as demonstrating my Movement Pattern, Peter Hulton and I couldn’t see any movement taking place. But after you’d pointed it out, then we saw and couldn’t not see it thereafter. So if you tell the story again you must include the second half. It’s about skill. What you provide is a conceptual framework to perceive. Think of how much time you spent agonising about finding the correct terms for your framework. We could not see the movements that you detected because we didn’t have the skill or the vocabulary.
I must say, in my own experience, going back decades, nobody has ever condemned MPA as nonsense. Originally, when I was a young headstrong enthusiast, Laban people would say ‘This is nonsense’, but that hasn’t happened for forty years or more. There always seems to be respect. But in some cases I thought I could detect, ‘This is not something I can take up, it’s a bit too… perhaps there’s a mystique about it.’ I’ve been a bit concerned that Carol-Lynne in her Movement Harmony work and pursuit of Laban’s own mysticism, and trying to understand it and what was he meaning, and so on, that she might herself be accused of going in for mysticism. In actual fact the skill, and it’s a skill that has to be very hard learned, and she is brilliant in how she teaches people. If she disappeared as a resource for teaching MPA, James McBride, I’m glad to say, is progressing, and one or two other people are. So I am feeling more confident now. Now that he book is completed I think she will be able to devote more time to teaching MPA. If we can get ourselves established at some institution and raise some money then that is really … If there’s anything that I can do to bring it about then I will do.
I’m never going to do MPA. I want to continue learning my Feldenkrais practice. What I want to do at the ideas end of it, is to provide a very simple vindication of your ideas in the wider sphere of current brain science. Essentially what we’re trying to do is what Bartenieff was trying to do, is giving an account of how movement and cognitive are interlinked, maybe even, co-determining.
Irmgard Bartenieff: her studies with WL in the ‘60s, her introduction of the concept and practice of Effort/Shape at the Dance Notation Bureau in the ‘70s.
The use of MPA seems to be spreading and I am getting feedback from people and how they’ve used it, and how they’ve used it in the theatre, in their creative activity. It does have a very wide application. Bartenieff started the Effort-Shape department in the 1970s after training with me. I trained her here in London in the 1960s. In the late ‘60s or early ‘70s she opened the Effort-Shape department and it was all based on my framework which was published in 1965 in Posture and Gesture: the duality of Effort-Shape, the three Efforts and three Shape orientations, and Flow of Effort and Flow of Shape. So that’s what was taught. Carol-Lynne was one of the first students at that time in the ‘70s. On two or three of my visits to the Effort-Shape department of the Dance Notation Bureau as it was then called, Pamela Ramsden was with me, so I recall both of us working with Irmgard. So it started off as primarily therapeutically oriented, and when she wrote her book she called it Coping with the Environment. Particularly in recent something similar has happened to LIMS as happened with the Laban Centre; it became dominated by dance. The present director who is still very influential, Regina Miranda, who has a dance school, but that’s all she’s really interested in. They are keen to run, I mean everyone wants to survive, but seem keen to be promoting LIMS more as a commercial organisation offering any sort of course that people will enrol for. They are following the trends, they are promoting Body Language, they are very unclear as to what is a fixed image and what is movement.
In Body Movement: Coping with the Environment she uses photographs to demonstrate movement. The still image is used to teach movement.
Well, she didn’t get that from me!
What interests me in the photograph is that it is often the destination of movement. You once me the story of an Italian woman at the Art of Movement Studio who demonstrated the A-Scale purely by counting the points visited from 1 – 12, rather than the passage between them.
Although they might name it as such, what is the Laban Movement Analysis taught at LIMS? Is this different to MPA? What is it based on?
They have four categories: Body Effort Shape Space. BESS. I have been telling them for years that’s alright as a categorisation that is used for teaching. But to be clear from a theoretical point of view there is a duality of Effort and Shape. It’s like if you’re doing Gender Studies and say it consists in Body, Male, Female, and Bio-chemistry, then there’s is nothing organic in those four headings.
Body in Bartenieff means the Fundamentals, which is comparable to the Alexander Technique or, say, Feldenkrais. I think it would be better to say that, ‘We have a course in Body, in Effort, in Shape, in Space-Harmony’. They are trying to differentiate between Shape and Space, and it’s ridiculous. Karen Bradley in her book [Rudolf Laban: Routledge Performance Practitioners, 2008] really exposes the ridiculousness in the definitions that she offers. Each individual is different in the patterns that he or she has established. But the use that is made in any teaching institution, is going to be different if you want to understand what that pattern is and their decision-making preference. The use of that understanding is different if you are working with dancers and creating some sort of artistic creation. But you are still working with the same understanding of movement. But, as dancers became more dominant in LIMS they wanted to see Space-Harmony as something different from making assessments of people from movement. This is just my theory as to how it happened, that led them to create Space-Harmony as a whole separate field theoretically. And they started referring, much to my indignation, to Shape as ‘Shaping in the Planes’, so there was a … [file ends]
The explanation given by Karen Bradley makes it seems as though I’ve invented Shape which is ridiculous. I’ve been asked by Carol-Lynne and her husband and one or two other people who think that I should write to Routledge and say that this needs to be corrected.
In terms of Space an Icosahedron would be understood by a geometer who would understand the inclination of the equilateral triangles in terms of sines and cosines. In terms of what you’re looking at in terms of [movement] observation, the Icosahedron is totally and utterly constant; it will always consist of equilateral triangles whose lines always meet at 60º, otherwise it would not be a equilateral triangle, and the Icosahedron will consist of 20 equilateral triangles set at a certain angle to each other, otherwise it will not be an Icosahedron. One can study the shapes dancers makes for aesthetic purposes, or the habitual places within the given geometrical shape that a person would tend to go.
Yes, but those ‘places’ are actually shapings of the kinesphere. You shape your kinesphere, I shape my kinesphere. The shape of the Icosahedron is a constant whether you are performing a dance or opening a book.
You can understand the shaping of a person’s kinesphere relative to the constant which is the Icosahedron. The Icosahedron is there for purposes of gauging the nature, the patterning, of a person’s three-dimensional movement.
Is Spatially harmonic movement something that is divorced from everyday movement? In other words is this an aesthetic category? We are dealing with the same body that is moving and we are still talking about Shaping. What is happening is a muddling of the categories of aesthetic and everyday movement.
I think that’s a good explanation. Is it important to you to understand what LIMS is doing? Is it part of your overview?
It is in terms of what is happening in the world concerning Laban. While you’re alive I want to learn from you. When I was talking with Regina Miranda and Karen Bradley I didn’t at that time realise that what they mean by movement observation is not what you mean by that phrase.
There is a point of synthesis between MPA and the Feldenkrais who talks incessantly about patterns. He talks about us understand movement in terms of certain patterns (particularly spirals), and action patterns (he mentions them a lot in his book on Higher Judo). In Judo the naked, the untutored eye would just see a student suddenly landing on the ground without understanding what happened, what moves the master made. Just like you the Judo master can see and understand movements that untutored people can neither see nor read. Feldenkrais could read Judo movements, he could see the patterns within them. We are certainly dealing with Shaping, but maybe also with PGM. Basically, it’s about understanding where their weight is and moving them around that organisation.
Interview in May 2009
Summary of the interview
The interview concerns WL’s contribution to the Laban Sourcebook (a chapter that introduces passages from Laban and Lawrence’s Effort, 1947). WL had not fully understood the brief and wrote about the book rather than introducing passages from it. More on his disagreement with Karen Bradley about the meaning of the concept of Space in the context of MPA, and on the necessity to understand that Effort has to be considered in connection with Shape. He insists that one only needs to talk about Shape. He demonstrates how the ‘B-Scale’ (in the Icosahedron) is diminished if performed without a degree of Effort. Jung and Freud, the Withymead Community and Janet Kestenberg. Effort, ‘Inner’ Effort and Shadow Movements. Using the example tennis to understand the relation between Effort and Shape: Roger Federer’s balance between Effort and Shape. Yat Malmgren, Drives and Inner Attitudes. William [Bill] Carpenter and his dialogue with Laban about ‘movement psychology’. The limitation of the Effort Cube as a representation of combinations of Movement Factors.
The interview
Discussion of WL’s Contribution to the Laban Sourcebook and the overall shape of the book
This is absolutely fascinating, not what I want, but absolutely fascinating. What I need is a long extract from Effort with a short Preface from you.
Just one extract?
Just think: what passages from Effort should a student absolutely read? You do suggest that Chapter 8 ‘probably encapsulates the genius element in Laban’s concept of Effort’. So maybe that?
Because I am doing Mastery of Movement on the Stage, you and I do need to look at the passages together that we are selecting. The three of us who are doing Modern Education Dancer (Anna Carlisle), Mastery of Movement on the Stage (I am working from the first edition of 1950 not the later ones edited and amended by Lisa Ullmann) and Effort. I think we all need to know what each other is doing. Apart from anything else I’m having great problems establishing what Effort is.
All of this is fantastic, especially the passages you have selected showing the relation between Shape and Effort.
I have acted on your suggestions to invite Janet Haylo, Vera Maletic and Geoffrey Longstaff to make contributions to the Sourcebook. Vera is working on the creation of the Dance Centre in Wurzburg in 1927.
Remember that this is a Sourcebook of texts by Laban.
I wasn’t aware of this and was really promoting my own views.
It seems to me that you had a moment of illumination when you were re-reading Effort that there was so much reference to Shape in it?
That’s right, exactly. It’s my hobby at the moment to say that we should as much as possible look at Effort in conjunction with Shape; that every Effort changes the Shape and every Shape has Effort in it. I’ve also speeded it up because of the argument with Karen Bradley because they are looking at Space as being something separate from Shape. This is bad for MPA because they are trying to make it appear that I have invented Shape as something which is nothing to do with Space. It is very important. The whole of MPA is based upon looking at Effort in conjunction with Shape, only we call it Assertion and Perspective. Also to promote Space as they do in BESS (Body, Effort, Shape, Space) is leading them to just relegate me to some sort of after-thought. But it’s also bad for a proper understanding of what Laban created because Eukinetics and Choreutics were a duality. He may not have chosen always to acknowledge that. He seemed to be saying at the same time, ‘Industry is Effort, we observe worker’s movements and mental Effort thinking, and all the time he’s thinking in terms of Shape as well. I mean I suffered from this because I was trying to emulate him and the accord he got. The genius element in his assessments of people and yet I was using only Effort observations and it was a revelation when I realised that he was incorporating Shape and using the incorporation of Shape observations in his judgments, his assessments of people. I could never hope to be as penetrating as he appeared to be unless I did the same. What I am doing now in workshops and in lectures I have been giving, I do some of the Space Harmony scales, the B-Scale in particular, and I show how it’s normally done. There’s obviously some Effort in it, but the Effort is minimised. I do it in slow motion because that seems to be popular and show how it limits the amount of movement and it limits the vitality and life of the performance, and then I do with equal emphasis on the Effort, so I do it with Efforts that go with movements of the Scale. And this has been causing quite a sensation. And then, finally, I do, emphasising the Effort and trying to minimise the Shaping. So this has been remarked upon quite a bit.
[Returning to his contribution to the Laban Sourcebook. Making it clear that it must have more of Laban, less of Lamb.]
I am just discovering that Lawrence (who produced the revised second edition) had a lot more to do with the book. And therefore I think that any amendments of his – he hasn’t rewritten it or anything, only a few amendments – will be improvements.
So, we will work from that edition. In your Preface a paragraph on Lawrence’s co-authorship would be really fantastic because nobody mentions that. It seems to me that that collaboration with Lawrence was quite a revelation to him about movement and dance. I think there’s more of a correlation between the two, and I think that’s where you are coming from.
I absolutely agree.
Always have in mind that there is a student who is meeting Laban for the first time and who needs their own experience of Laban’s writings, and this is what Warren Lamb recommends them to read. There is going to be a Glossary and I would invite you to offer your definitions of key terms: there will also be contributions from other experts like Vera Maletic and Valerie Preston Dunlop. I want the book to be practical, to be of practical use.
[There follows a long discussion mostly featuring DM who describes the aims and contents of the book. Some of the material is gossip about major figures in the field of Laban studies.]
One of the big problems I am finding is the concept of Effort. I remember you telling me how you struggled with the concept of Inner Effort.
Jung and Freud, the Withymead Community and Janet Kestenberg
Yes indeed. I am glad that you have invited Janet Haylo. The reason that I recommended Janet is that I think that she is particularly appropriate to Laban’s work on therapy. There is no book on him?
There is a book about Withymead where Laban worked, but there’s no more than a mention of him.
I think that there is a lot of information that Janet is uniquely establish to contribute because she is a Jungian and has studied Jung. Champernowne, the Withymead place, [Irene Champernowne established the Withymead Community which was run on Jungian principles] was entirely Jungian, and there were Jungian psychiatrists floating around. Joan Carrington, my first wife, and I worked together. She actually adopted one of the Psychiatrists, she lived with him and his wife, as a substitute father (her own died when she was a child) – that was Culver Barker. And a friend of family, Lottie Roseburg. We saw them very, very frequently. There’s a lot of association with Jungian psychiatry and Joan and I taught movement to the patients of psychiatrists, quite a lot of them, and all of this was Jungian. There was no connection of Freud with Laban at all. Then, of course, I got introduced to Kestenberg, I taught movement to Kestenberg, she was very influenced by this, but she would never budge an inch from her devotion to Freud. Whenever I talked to her about Jung, and I also tried to include [Abraham] Maslow and she wasn’t interested, she wouldn’t … she was really rude in dismissing any connection. All that exists in the therapy field in Laban work is dominated by Kestenberg with no reference or content at all of Jungian work. They have departed … they are not as slavishly Freudian as they used to be. Susan Loman has broadened … she is the main teacher of the Kestenberg work, she has broadened quite a bit. All the therapists currently working in Germany who do seem to have developed a professional activity to a greater extent in Germany than exists in America, though the American Dance Therapy Association is quite a strong organisation in America, and it does incorporate a lot of Laban, but it does tend to be deriving from Kestenberg. Janet actually did a Masters thesis on a Jungian and she has written articles and had them published on Jungian things that connect with his work. Does that sound to you that qualifies more than the Kestenberg people?
It’s a Laban Sourcebook, so we need to find something by Laban on therapy. I shall ask the NRCD if they have any idea of anything that Laban wrote about therapy.
Effort and Recovery was his therapy book. There are lot of therapy books that mention Laban but it’s only in passing. Then there are the Kestenberg books themselves, but you know about them. There was a man called Culver Barker who wrote a book with a woman called Bach.
I want the Laban Sourcebook to have an index and then a website with links to Laban practitioners, indicating people who have taken Laban work further.
Effort, ‘Inner’ Effort and Shadow Movements
I am having great problems in The Mastery of Movement on the Stage when he talks about Effort. He seems to shift constantly between Effort being an observation and notation of an action done and its constituent motion factors of Weight, Space, Time and Flow and these Mental Efforts, these Inner Efforts which are expressed outwardly in movement. Our reading in neuroscience shows that empirically that is not true. True movement is a response, but not one that is often conscious, so it’s not a thought. If we had to think of everything before we did it we would be robbed of speedy and spontaneous action. Can you help me understand this notion of Inner Effort and its relation to Shadow movement? I am having great difficulty even describing what he means by Inner Effort.
I think it’s probably apparent from his writing that I have difficulty going through the book. How does he use a word like Exertion, what does he mean by Mental Effort, what is ‘thinking in terms of Effort’? Does that imply that there is movement going on or not going on? It is typical of everything that Laban did, there seems to be brilliance and genius about it and yet to get a real hard and fast definition is very, very difficult. It is certainly easier on the Choreutics or Shape side than on the Effort side.
I think in the arts that there is a necessary fiction of their being an inner impulse which is then ex-pressed. Of course, an actor does think about movement, whereas a person in everyday life doesn’t. To do so would fudge the movement.
I would like to emphasise that in seeking definitions you do recognise that it is movement that we are talking about. This is my pet theme! We are moving all the time. We make an effort and we are also incorporating it with shape. Whenever I see someone who is dead what staggers me is the impact of their stillness. With someone who is alive […] there is never any question. Just in breathing we are making an effort and it certainly isn’t a conscious effort. All of our movement can be said to relate to or derive from our breathing which is essential to keep life going. And that is a reason that I keep drawing these seesaws; we can understand there’s something like the carpenter’s bubble [in a spirit level?], a little bit of movement going on. As we emphasise an Effort then we can see that it goes with a little dither to something which you can observe more readily. So, I think that definitions should be within this context of what Laban was always saying, that movement is flux and that we have to understand Effort as a flux, and the flux is there, even when we sleep, until we die. How it relates to conscious thought, I don’t know. Maybe that will eventually emerge when we have more understanding of what consciousness is, when brain research has much more understanding of what’s going on.
You make an association between one aspect of being a human being which is decision making, or making choices and another aspect which is their movement patterns. You are saying that there is a correlation between those two patterns of behaviour but you are not saying that there is the kind of correspondence where one would talk of a Floating or a Wringing thought. You don’t talk about thought being ex-pressed in movement.
Using the example tennis to understand the relation between Effort and Shape
Everything that I try to understand is derived from what I observe, and I haven’t observed thoughts. I have observed that Roger Federer plays differently from [Andy] Roddick. And it’s very obvious when Federer does a backhand but Roddick will respond to the same ball by grasping the racket with two hands and doing a great swipe at it. It doesn’t look ugly but it doesn’t have the grace and form that Federer applies. If one of my colleagues had done an MPA of Federer and Roddick and I didn’t know the identity of the players I am quite sure that I would be able to judge from the style of play as to which MPA applied to which player. What I just mentioned as ‘style’ has an influence on their decision making. In fact for a tennis player not to incorporate PGMs in his playing would create stress and although somebody might be able to succeed up to a point I doubt if such a person would ever be able to survive for long basically playing in a way that was contrary to what we call his decision making preference. Just as in management where my main experience has been, people who read in a textbook they have got from business school, ‘This is what you do in management’, and try to apply it, don’t get very far unless that behaviour does match the profile. You can go against the profile, but my experience has been that when people go against their profile, then they do suffer stress, they tend to take xxx badly, and don’t feel at home. So any definition that I am able to tell people about decision making, I don’t know whether it is a thought or not. [He returns to Federer and a recent match he was playing.] Something is going on, there is a form of decision making. I’m going to hit the ball so it just goes over the net and Roddick won’t have time to run fast enough to be able to hit it. Can we call that thought, or instinct, or is it just layer upon layer of patterning that enables a player like him? Even in lesser players, it’s the same thing. Even in the bits of sport that we do, we don’t have to be top of the class in order to have the experience of why you’ve hit the ball or whatever the sport might be, in that particular way. I am saying all this because of the problems of defining what we’re considering as what might and what might not be thought.
Maybe every movement is a decision or a thought but not one that we are conscious of. Being conscious would take too long. It isn’t to say that there isn’t a decision making process, but it is one that is being made non-consciously in thousandths of a second. I think this preoccupation with conscious thinking is a hang-up and hangover carried over from Cartesian thinking. Every movement is a decision, just not a conscious one.
Yat Malmgren, Drives and Inner Attitudes
There’s no consensus now about what consciousness is. I keep getting brochures for a huge conference that is taking place every year on consciousness. But there’s no consensus. Per Nordin [who gave a workshop on Yat Malmgren’s approach to acting that WL attended] is an amalgam of Stanislavsky, Laban and Malmgren. He spent the whole two days, except for a couple of hours, no, probably less, writing on the board. And then after putting a lot of these terms together he would rub them off and then write some more. We had all been asked to be familiar with [Strindberg’s play] Miss Julie and I was disappointed that he spent only the last hour and a half actually applying Malmgren’s principles (and he referred to them as ‘principles’) to one short scene in Miss Julie. I would have preferred much more illustration from Miss Julie. However, what he was writing on the board. First of all he said there are six inner attitudes. This comes partly from Laban but not entirely. Near and Remote, Mobile and Stable, Awake and Adream. Do you recognise these?
They are used an awful lot in Effort and Recovery.
Then there are the externalised drives. I am familiar with these, except that I can never remember quite which is which. Passion drive is no space, Spell Drive there is no time, Vision drive there is no weight, and Malmgren calls the Action drive the ‘Doing’ drive. These, the Drives, are regarded as the starting place of action, the root. It is like a tree. It’s from the root of your approach to your performance comes from the Drive. Drives can be linked with Attitudes, so Near can be linked with each of the Drives. So this is what he was doing in making these links. Then he looked at the constituent Motion Factors. Intending came first, then Attending, and interestingly he used the term Commitment. And then he would link with one of the Jungian Sensing, Thinking, Intuiting or Feeling.
Did he explain why Attending was associated with Thinking?
No he didn’t. Malmgren does have this as an interpretation, apparently. When you’ve got an association of Weight Time with Intending and Feeling you have the interpretation Materialising. Punching Slashing and Intending and Thinking you have got Human. So Materialising, Human, Warm, Cool. With each Inner Attitude you’ve got four different links. He just spent all the time writing these links on the board. Unfortunately I didn’t have the right glasses. I was trying to see myself as an actor using this interpretation and I can see that it is certainly helpful in getting an understanding of the role. But the logic of it … different links I think could be made. I don’t think there’s anything sacrosanct about these. He or Malmgren would probably claim that there was.
It was very disappointing that there was only one stage when he did finally around to Miss Julie. He asked for two volunteers to come out, then took the bit in Miss Julie before they have sex. It’s building up to it. Jean gets a speck in his eye and Julie says she will take it out, and gets a handkerchief and gets it out. There is dialogue during this of course; it’s only several lines. During this dialogue he made a few comments ending up eventually whether they were Near or Far. And if they were Near then there would be some association with the Efforts. Incidentally, when they start, when they come up from the roots, being Near or something, then there’s a choice, and this is where it spreads to the leaves of the basic Efforts. The example in Miss Julie was when he asked them to be aware of whether they were Near or Far, what happened was that Julie and Jean established an expression of greater intimacy, and he saw that as a great victory for applying these principles, that the actors had established what was obviously intended by Strindberg. This was almost pre-empting the sexual content that followed by establishing between this aristocrat and this servant an intimacy. You can’t really get a speck out of somebody’s eye unless you get close to them, so you’ve got Near. Certainly when the actors did it the first two times it didn’t look very intimate but when they used these terms, Near, then it was clearly more intimate. Whether the Inner Attitude of Near needs physical proximity… I don’t think it promoted anything about how people behave but perhaps it’s a stimulus for creative building of your role. At the University of Stockholm Per Nordin teaches this and may intervene in rehearsal, but he does no movement. There is another Tutor who … and apparently this other teacher is not particularly wedded to Malmgren. It seems remarkable that a professor of drama doesn’t get involved at all in movement teaching. This is all derived from movement, from Laban.
This seems very complicated in principle. And it doesn’t open itself to being challenged because these principles are declared as having some kind of a priori status. So it cannot be changed through creative practice, it can only be applied and repeated. I find it all so undynamic, so static. States and Attitudes seem to have no sense of timing and pacing.
[There followed a broad discussion of Stanislavsky, acting, and how Nordin’s approach could be useful to an actor.]
William [Bill] Carpenter
He (Carpenter) would express his views [by saying], ‘Well you see this is what it is.’ Anything that I would try and contribute really didn’t rate.
So Carpenter wouldn’t listen to you? He had his schema all laid out.
It was the same with Malmgren, only Malmgren was much more forceful. He was ‘Flicking is different from Floating’, and it just seemed to me all so general. By that time – it was the early nineteen fifties – I was disaffected with attempting to use basic Efforts. In the Diagonal Scale you can have all the Efforts, but to use the basic Efforts to understand behaviour was I felt it tended to create more problems than it solved because people cannot be summarised as a Flicker or a Presser, which Malmgren did, and took that from Laban. Laban did see a lot more than he would appear to communicate that somebody was a Flicker. He wasn’t just grouping an eighth of the population of the world into being Flickers, because he could see very distinct individual differences and would take that into account. It was just more a surface …
The limitation of the Effort Cube as a representation of combinations of Movement Factors
There was one little passage in the Mastery of Movement where he was talking about the relations between Effort qualities. You know how many diagrams there are – for example the Dynamo-sphere which is an abstract cube which Malmgren makes huge use of. Basically it is just a convenient projection of relations between three factors. My contention is, and it’s something that I noticed early on, and at first I thought it was me being curmudgeonly, Laban absolutely adored spatial permutation, especially of the Perfect Solids. But the Dynamo-sphere is not only a perfect solid but also a representation of the possible relations between three factors. These are mathematical permutations and are not based on empirical evidence. This is theoretically generated by the affordance of a cube. It seems to me that this is the Hermetic side to Laban’s thinking where he was just fascinated by these internally generated permutations.
Because you choose to think of understanding movement in terms of range, you thereby generate an infinite range of possibility for movement. You can account for the uniqueness of every individual. You are responding to an individual’s unique movement signature. You use the descriptors, the gauges, to account for this uniqueness. You start with the human being and use your eye to account for their their-ness. Carpenter and Malmgren start with a grid which is deductively imposed.
Malmgren’s whole inspiration was that he wanted to fit things into a grid. That inhibits the range. It confines.
The difference is that yours is based on observation: Malmgren’s isn’t. Rather it is a matching of literary figures with his abstract grid. You deal with actually existing human beings, they deal with literary types. The example you gave was ‘What types within the Malmgren system correlates with the character of Julie?’ The complexity of Malmgren’s system lies in having to remember all the different terms and their relations.
It does give a set of choices.
Yes, limited and structured. There are only certain possibilities for association which are limited by the given structures.
In my system the sky is the limit. Thank you. I do understand now, and it’s very helpful to have that way of understanding the difference. It sums it up neatly.
The thing is that Malmgren’s structure offers no possibility for change. It is a fixed structure and therefore its generative possibilities are limited by the parameters of that structure. It has been elaborated through abstractions. It is a closed system. Yours is a system of observation and notation. The conclusions are drawn from those observations.
You have to recognise that it is a limited notion.
Interview on October 8th 2009
Summary of Interview in October 2009
Warren Lamb recalls people who were interviewed by John Hodgson. Long passage about Martha Davis, a psychologist who worked with Irmgard Bartenieff. What did Laban Read? Lamb notes that Laban had no bookshelf in any of the places he lived. Reflections on Effort and Recovery [The Laban Sourcebook included two chapters from Laban’s unpublished book.] WL’s critique of chapters from E&R – there is much mention of Shadow Movements and Shape is constantly being discussed in relation to Effort. ‘If we look at Effort and Shape as a duality, they always go together, you can never make an Effort without also creating a new Shape and you can’t Shape without an Effort.’ Shadow Movement and functional movement, a distinction that Laban used to make. A return to Bill Carpenter, Yat Malmgren, and movement psychology. Drives and States. An interesting reflection on the Spell Drive (which excludes Timing). There was an attempt to match the Drives with the Commedia dell’Arte characters. Reflections on Laban’s theorising and his desire to be thought a guru.
The Interview
Warren Lamb Recalls People Who were Interviewed by John Hodgson
Willi Soukop
He was a sculptor who made at least two sculptures of Laban, one of which is owned by the Laban Guild, the other is at the Laban Centre, next to a slightly larger one of Marion North.
Hanya Holm
She was a pupil of Mary Wigman who became critical of Laban primarily because her heroine was Mary Wigman who Laban treated abominably. She didn’t go along with adulation of Laban, or fall in love with him. She took an opposite. She was successful in America developing Modern Dance and had several pupils including Alvin Nikolai. She choreographed a successful show called Kiss Me Kate and it was the first, almost the only time that a theatrical production imported from the US was notated, and the notation was used to teach the dancers recruited here in London.
Martha Davis
Was a friend of Irmgard Bartenieff, was active in the early days of LIMS. She is a psychologist and she has always pursued a very strict, I would say almost rigid, scholarship. Non-verbal communication was discussed a lot in those days by people like Schiller, Birdwhistell, Condon, and she was always saying that we would never impress those people unless we could be more scientific in our studies. She is now working with the police and lawyers in New York using movement analysis to expose whether an accused person is lying, that sort of thing. She did some work with Irmgard Bartenieff and I got involved at one time with a man called Alan Lomax. He did some very good work on the analysis of movement and music. He was really in the field of anthropology and incorporated some movement people to observe the rituals which accompanied the music that he was interested in. Something was published about that and I think it was a very worthwhile study.
Martha Davis I knew quite well. I actually invited her to come and work with me at Warren Lamb Associates when I had the office in London. I wanted to recruit a psychologist and wanted one who had a movement background. She revealed that she was about to get married within a few weeks’ time, and that put paid to it. How it would have worked I don’t know. She has pursued an ultra-academic tack which has diluted the movement content of what she is doing. I have quoted hundreds of time, and people moan when they hear me say it again, she has referred to non-movement using movement terms. She published an interview with a mental patient. It was headed ‘Movement Observations’ and she cited fifteen observations, one of which was ‘hands held still by the side for long periods’ and most of them were in that category. Those are observations of the body, not of movement. And she has continued on the tack. I think I may have succeeded in discouraging her in describing such things as movement. In the work that she’s doing now she makes a lot of those observations, and how much movement she’s observing I just don’t know.
Professor Levitan
That name sounds familiar. It’s based in this country. I think he’s one of the people who were interested in Laban, as people were interested Alexander. I remember that Laban and I went to meet him, which was unusual for Laban. He didn’t like to put himself out and meet people and give the impression that he was wanting to learn something from anybody else. And that applied to Jung. He would never admit that he did meet him. I think that he did, but he would never admit it. In his work with Bill Carpenter he acknowledged Jung, particularly his Sensing, Feeling, Thinking, Intuiting which a lot of people have tried to relate to Attention, Intention, Decision, Precision. I have never had much interest in that connection. And of course the Meyers Briggs test was founded on those four concepts. I only mention Alexander and Jung because he was probably one of these people attracted to Laban, but it was probably brief.
Annie Boalth
She was a stalwart of the Laban field. She was originally a dancer and a teacher of dance. There were a number of women who came to England as refugees and then took up with or got in contact with Laban when he came to England.
Annie Fligg
Not only taught at RADA but also at Bedford College of Physical Education where they knew quite a bit about Laban before WWII. Teachers from there in the 1930s went over to attend courses where Laban was teaching. And of course it was Bedford College of FE that got the Art of Movement Studio in Manchester going. Geraldine was at Bedford College.
Felicia Sachs
I can tell you a true story of her. In 1952 I went to New York, and as has happened on other trips, Laban asked me to look up Felicia Sachs, give her his love. I visited the apartment of Felicia Sachs and lo and behold she was living with Wilhelm Reich, the man to developed the Orgone Box. She was full of ‘Oh! You’ve been with Laban, Oh!’ And there was Wilhelm Reich sitting in the background, so I had a talk with him. He very much knew about Laban. He cannot not have been influenced by him. Felicia Sachs wanted to come and visit him in London, so I tried to organise. And Lisa … She did put the break on him in some respects. She was so protective of their relationship. Sachs didn’t seem to be doing much more than looking after Reich, and it was only a few years after that that he was incarcerated.
What did Laban Read?
I did give a very preliminary reply to this in an email. It made me think and recall when I visited his home, in the rooms in which we sat and talked, in Addlestone and I cannot ever recollect every seeing a book case or a row of books. Most people have a row of books somewhere, bookish people have them all around the walls. I can’t recall anything. And he never came with a book, saying ‘Warren, you’ll be interested in this.’ He mentioned books like [Piotr] Ouspensky In Search of the …. He mentioned books sometimes, quite often he would refer to artists. He was interested in Dadaism. He met up with one of the original Dadaists. He happened to discover that this man was living in the Lake District. I can’t remember who. He was quite excited about this. Whether he had books on art, I don’t know. This is an interesting question and I have thought about it a lot because it does seem surprising that a man like him would not have rows of books around the place. Even if he had lost all his books when he left Germany, I met him after he had been in England for seven years and you would have thought that by then he would have acquired some. So in reply to your question, Was he a bookish man? Absolutely not!
Reflections on Effort and Recovery
Do you think it’s a profound book that offers insights that will be of interest to psychologists?
I think it is a rather beautifully written book. I think not only in his drawings, but also in his writings, he can conjure up a portrait or even a cartoon very, very accurately. As a piece of thinking? I like the way he offers concrete examples in a way he doesn’t do in other books. It is therefore more accessible to readers. As to the thinking, I don’t think it is hugely more developed, but I was interested to see how he was developing his decision-making model, and also how he was bringing together shape and effort. I liked how he insisted upon the fact that his was a qualitative rather than a quantitative approach, but generally what I really liked was the humanity of the book in the portraits of these working people. I found the portrait of his father quite moving.
After reading all the articles by Laban in the Guild magazine you said, ‘I recognise the Melody of his ideas’. In a sense Laban is like a Jazz improviser. He riffs on certain theoretical themes, and each time he comes up with a slightly different version. Your phrase really rang out throughout my reading.
I agree that the descriptions are really quite beautiful and if the book was going to be used as an inspiration to any group of people, it should be a poetry society rather than psychologists. I kept asking myself that as people read their descriptions of the baker, the soldier would they really learn about movement? There is constant reference to movement, but there is also a constant resort to mystery, it seems to me. Particular to shadow movements. Whenever he is trying to give an explanation then it is shadow movements. Would someone who was new to movement understand what shadow movements are? They are never explained anywhere. To what extent is it a book about movement, which is going to promote the thing that he is most concerned to achieve – a recognition of the value of movement?
What is particularly interesting to me is that he has pursued this idea right from the time that he started working in factories with operatives, training them, and giving them movement classes, helping them. The basic theme was to discover their individual rhythm and to apply that and incorporate that into the work that they were doing. That theme has continued over the years always on Effort. He wrote a book with Lawrence called Effort, and a lot of articles. And here he is writing a book about Effort and Recovery and yet he is talking about shape all the time. And that’s what he did, and I had to struggle for years with this. I would observe movements and wonder why I couldn’t refer to shape, but always he was referring to Effort. And here is writing about shape.
I can only talk about the time when I came on the scene in connection with his work, and shape was confined to dance and to space harmony. They only really came together in the Dimensional Scale where you Floating and making this shape [He may mean the Diagonal scale]. So this book came as a revelation to me. If we look at Effort and Shape as a duality, they always go together, you can never make an Effort without also creating a new Shape and you can’t Shape without an Effort. You can as we know emphasise one more than another but they are always together as a duality. That’s what I have been jumping up and down and preaching for all this time since. So it’s confirmation and support to discover that he was not only writing about Effort and recovery, but Effort, Shape and Recovery. I think the title of the book should be changed.
And of course, as you point out there is more poetry here than science, and obviously quite a lot of it is actually fiction. He gets carried away, but carried away so beautifully.
Shadow Movement and functional movement, a distinction that Laban used to make.
Returning to your critique of Shadow Movements being a reflection of an inner impulse. I think that this returns us to a mind (that which is inner) and body (that which moves). I would say that the movement is the thought. You have constantly been critical of the concept of Shadow Movement and think this is related to the notion of inner impulses. However, I should add that when Peter Hulton and I were looking at the movements you observed me make during the interview that was the basis for our DVD ROM on Movement Pattern Analysis, one of these movements we could not see. We couldn’t see a movement! If the definition of a Shadow Movement is that of a movement that is barely perceptible, I am wondering if, because you have such a wonderful eye for movement, as did Laban, maybe these would be described as Shadow Movements whereas you would simply say that they are movements, and ones which you can see. There aren’t two kinds of movement – working movements and psychological movements – there is just movement.
I have said that there is posture movement and gesture movement. I struggled for years with this differentiation between functional action and shadow movement. To jump over all the years of anguish over this distinction - because Laban talked about Shadow movement so much – I had to come to the conclusion that there was movement, and the distinction between movement that was so small you can’t really see it, or describe, and movement that you can see. It’s attractive to have this notion that there are movements that reveal the innermost pars of our mind: you do a little flicker or a twitch, that sort of thing used to be described as a Shadow Movement. But you can’t look at a twitch, at least I can’t, and say that this is strong, and direct and quick. They are mostly quick, but I suppose you can have a slow movement of the eyebrow. Now I have always believed that these can be highly significant. A favourite example I always give is from a film where a general gives a twitch of his eyebrow and it sets off a revolution. So it can be highly significant. This can come within my definition of a gesture. Okay you make the distinction, but as long as you admit that it is going to be very hard to describe what the Shadow Movement is. You can only say that something has happened. The definition that I heard Laban give at one time is that ‘Shadow Movements are movements which flip across the surface of the body.’
Returning to the video recording of me when Peter and I, who have both seen quite a lot of recorded movement, couldn’t actually see a movement where you could, surely this would be considered by some a Shadow Movement, because it is so small?
Yes, well there are degrees of smallness. Because I have been observing so much movement, perhaps I have developed a faculty for observing finer degrees than other people. That is now rapidly being lost with old age. There’s no question. Because it requires speed of reaction. But Laban, and you yourself have almost said this, uses the term Shadow Movement in an almost guru type fashion, so that the reader gets the impression that here’s a man who through his understanding of Shadow Movements and observation of Shadow Movements, he gets an understanding of their innermost being – especially if they are women. Of course I have resisted that guru-type thing, but Laban rather liked being a guru. ‘So, Laban understands me better than anybody else.’ It’s nothing something that I can ever remember that he taught. It’s not on record. It’s something that he retained for himself. That’s reprehensible in my opinion. It gives him control and power over people.
I have always, emphatically, said that I never base a judgement on one single movement. I take pages of movement description which I analyse, before making any sort of interpretation. And of course, coming back to Shadow Movements, Laban would say that because of somebody’s Shadow Movement, he recognises that they are this, that, or the other. He’s doing it on very, very little, I mean, no analysis at all, it’s just on one expression. But maybe he is able to judge that one particular Shadow Movement is contrived, another Shadow Movement is spontaneously revealing of the innermost being.
Michael Chekhov believed that certain gestures – what he called the Psychological Gesture – summed up a particular character [does this extend to personalities in real life?]. But he was an actor and acting teaching. Also, he drank from the same well as Laban – Ouspensky, or Steiner, for example. But the fact is that mostly unconscious activity [i.e. movement] can be read through a more conscientious and objective scanning. It may be that sometimes Laban and you would have agreed exactly, him being intuitive and you being more objective. But the fact is that your implied picture of how we act and think is totally different. You allow for the possibility of a neurophysiological account whereas Laban operates from the assumption of a body and of a soul and I think that that is a really huge difference between you both.
I think that is an elegant way of expressing the difference. I must remember that.
[…]
Bill Carpenter, Yat Malmgren, and movement psychology
…which I think are of value to actors. I doubt whether the Drives are of any use to Psychology, for example, or understand the meaning of anything to do with personality. I keep forgetting what they are.
Carpenter uses them an awful lot, as does Yat Malmgren.
I can understand the effectiveness of that just by reading the first page of Vladimir Mirodan’s PhD Thesis on Yat Malmgren: ‘Yat Malmgren devises a simple way of using the working actions in order to arouse the inner tempo of a character.’ That’s fine, I can see the usefulness of that. The definition of the Drives as Laban has given provide a working basis that you can … And then I think it’s up to the individual actor or director to use it in order to arouse whatever it is he is wanting. And then to recognise that ‘In this case I am minimising the flow.’ Perhaps how different would it be if he turned on the Flow and cut out the Space? With some overall… Of course it’s a highly generalised meaning of Passion, Vision, Work [Infuencing – the Four Drives]. That gives the actor something to work with but I can’t ever see it being part of core theory.
Carpenter in his manuscript and Laban in Effort and Recovery, do seem to think of Drives and States as being part of a psychological analysis.
I have never understood that. But maybe there is some justification for it. ‘Spell’ is the other one. [This is the term used in Mastery of Movement for Influencing.] Laban was very good at expressing Spell Drive. Spell is lacking time. There is an argument that that makes good logic. If you’re in a Spell then you are neither accelerating nor decelerating. You aren’t getting urgent. So I think that’s sensible. I don’t think the one where you lose Flow, that that is supposed to be what in my time was called the Action Drive and now is sometimes called the Work Drive. To suggest that in omitting Flow in some way rules out work or action is a very mistaken interpretation of Flow in my opinion. If you are going to work and don’t have a Flow of movement you are going to be very inhibited whatever it is you do either physically or in decision making.
I think you have to think of Laban as a Jazz improviser. He is riffing on terms, and the moment you start examining him with methodological rigour you immediately get into difficulty.
I’ve never thought very much about the Drives and when anyone has mentioned them I’ve always thought that maybe it provides a base where you can develop … But just where we’ve got to study and think about them. ‘Well could there be some value here?’ I’ve already seen how you could use them. They are a very good practical aid in many circumstances, particularly I would think for an actor. But again, how to relate it to any core theory? But of course Carpenter was seeing parallels with anything to do with Laban and probably the Drives too, and Jung’s work.
There is a passage in Effort and Recovery where Laban makes a very conscious correlation between the Motion Factors and Sensing, Intuiting, Feeling and Thinking.
Unfortunately Carpenter died
In 1954
So I don’t think they were together for more than a couple of years, it was very brief. What might have developed if he hadn’t died is …
The problem of this psychology is that it is based on certain assumptions about realism in acting or fiction. It is about narrative and the building of character.
There was an attempt to match the Drives with the Commedia dell’Arte characters. The Captain represented the Action Drive. Pulcinella was Spell Drive. It didn’t get very far. It is a sort of aid, a provocation to make you think. Any application which can be justified in every situation is not possible. But maybe Malmgren did find such a method. People find these rather loose connections that Laban creatively comes out with one day, and probably he thinks of something else the next day. People can seize on and it suits their own particular way of working. Malmgren was probably quite a loner. My impression of him was being very, very intensive. He put you under great pressure, a great sort of intruding sort of gaze. I felt to a great extent that I was being attacked by him. I never got particularly friendly, but I respected what he was doing. You mentioned him being secretive about everything he did, interesting he took actually took that to the point of getting students to promise not to share his method. That sounds a bit paranoiac. When I try to get an image of him now, that’s the sort of impression I have.
Another example. Laban was so creative that he would come out with ideas that anybody who was still fairly open and had not become set on what it was that Laban was doing and they should follow could just latch onto things that he came out with which they thought had some potential. Shadow Movements is an example of this. Shadow Movements really appealed to people who liked this rather secretive, guru-like image of themselves as someone who understands more than you can possibly see. They are obviously of value to an actor in the sense that a flicker of an eyebrow, which would be classified as a Shadow Movement, can have immense consequence in the context in which it’s done. So for an actor to be aware of how that particular eyebrow movement and be very careful not to do other movements which could take attention away from it – and that sort of thing. So awareness of that could be helpful. But I think that Laban was unscrupulous in maintaining his guru-like attitude. He would come out with these insights which would be very deep and penetrating and have a lot of merit. Probably because of his charisma people would receive them and, ‘How incredible! How remarkable, how important!’ But Carol-Lynne with a group that she was working with, did spend some time on it trying to give a definition of Shadow Movements. The group did go pretty thoroughly into this and they said in the end, really they could only define them as gestures. Really there was no difference between a flicker of an eye and a flick of the arm in terms of the nature of the movement that it was. People know that I classify Shadow Movements as Gestures and so this has confirmed my definition, apparently. Whether it’s Drives or Shadow Movements and probably quite a lot of other terms that Laban has created that other people have seized on, I think they can all be valuable depending on how they are used and the context and by whom.
I think that a lot of Laban ‘Psychology’ is based on the notion that an inner movement is a thought which is given outer form or expression in movement. I feel that it’s wrong to consider a movement as the outer expression of an inner something-or-other. There are so many processes that constitute movement of which we are unaware and over which we have no conscious control, so to put so much stress on conscious movement is to misunderstand how we move. It also relies on the notion that the inner person is the mind and the outer person is the body. I think Laban’s ‘psychology’ relied a lot on the Cartesian conception of mind and body.
It was also to do with Laban expressing his mysticism. He like to be a mystic. You can be very mystical about your inner sense of something. It seems to me you’re confirming what I have been saying. This is very encouraging that now in my dotage that a lot of the things that I have been claiming for decades are getting some confirmation.
I think that you would find that a lot of the principles underpinning your method are now being verified by independent, evidence-based research.
If you do come across something that contradicts your understanding of what is the case and needs to be refuted you will say that too me? I rely on you to give me a kick and say, ‘This is all bloody nonsense!’ I look upon Carol-Lynne as being very bright and this work she did on Shadow Movements was very pleasing with the result she came up with. She conducted that pretty strictly.
I would like Motus Humanus to grow in respect and become something of a world centre for ordering … This was in its founding charter; it exists to improve and develop standards and professionalism within the profession of movement, and not only Laban movement study, with the aim, which is very dear to my heart, of establishing movement study as a discipline in its own right, not tied to dance or physical education or to psychology. It would never become part of neurophysics [sic] but neurophysics does see itself as one part of an interdisciplinary study.
One of the biggest things that the brain has to deal with is movement.