Summary of the Interview

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Interviews from summer ’06 take the form of dialogues between WL and DM. They try and match the MPA and recent research in neurophysiology. They discuss the possibility of broader dialogues with others and a conference on the subject. During these wider-ranging conversations, occasionally WL offers illuminating examples and clarifications of his MPA. One such example is his discussion of Jean Newlove’s way of teaching the Efforts. Laban’s concepts: States and Drives. There is a discussion of a conference held in Trinity Laban which included a keynote speech by Karen Bradley which was then fiercely criticised by James Mc (an MPA practitioner). In connection with Karen Bradley, WL discussed the Laban Institute of Movement Studies’ insistence on BESS (Body Effort Space Shape) and its connection with Effort/Shape. There is also discussion of a 2nd Edition of An Eye for Movement. 

 

The Interview

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On Alain Berthoz’s Emotion and Reason [2007]. Bridging Neurophysiology and Movement Pattern Analysis.

My reading of the book is that, first of all, there is not a great deal more in the book than there is in The Brain’s Sense of Movement [2000], and secondly, his definition of decision is really so narrow that I don’t think it’s worth your while reading it. I’ll send you my notes on it, and you might want to read the pages preceding and following. I think it would be good to meet him, and that we should propose an invitation to think about our area of work. From what you’ve been saying recently, there seems to be despair that there is too great a distance between the disciplines of neurophysiology and movement studies. And neurophysiologists just don’t seem to be interested in your proposition that there is a correlation between a person’s movement pattern and their decision-making preferences. They really need to have read what you have been writing about. They would have to do some work to understand what you’re about. We need to put a two-page document together as a kind of invitation and a manifesto. 

 

I feel fairly confident in meeting somebody like Berthoz, someone with a scientific background and a professorial approach, a respect for academia. […] Such people usually are not critical, are not dismissive of hearing what movement is and how it can be studied and find it fascinating. But they do find it difficult to make the jump. As you’ve said, there’s too big a gulf. And yet they still appreciate it. I would think that a man who uses the term ‘movement’ in the title of a book, just what I’d like to learn is what he understands when he uses the word. What’s going through his mind while he visualises… I would like to confess my distance from his learning and what he’s doing, but to try to develop some kind of communication just based on the word ‘movement’ since he uses it so much. 

 

You put your finger on it with regard to Gibbs. [Gibbs, Raymond W. Embodiment and Cognitive Science, (Cambridge: CUP, 2005)] He started to describe a phenomenon that he started to recognise but didn’t have the vocabulary to be able to give it a full and accurate description. The problem is that there are so many different aspects to it. As I become more familiar with, even I fail to recognise how difficult it is. The first is recognising a movement – the problem of observation. This is intimately connected with analysis. The moment you have a frame by means of which you can grasp the moment. So for example you make note that you can see a movement that is rising but always to one side and never the other. A Feldenkrais practitioner would also describe this as a movement pattern. I would say the ability to notice is a mixture of observation and having a framework of description – one learns what to look out for. Would you agree with that?

 

Oh yes, I do. They do see directing Effort, for example, when it’s linked with focusing, and accelerating and decelerating, and they can certainly understand spreading and enclosing. So you can give illustrations of movements and of a movement phrase. It’s really dawned on me over the years how long it takes for people to get an understanding. You confess that it took years before things started to make sense to you. I’ve tried to struggle to recognise, or to really debate, should I really do this? Will they understand anything? Will they go away thinking, ‘well he’s very active for his age’ and that’s about all that they do.

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Laban’s Effort Actions and Lamb’s Notion of Movement a Process of Variation of Movement Initiatives

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Nine years ago I hardly knew who Laban was. I had never even thought in this area of reflection. The big question I have to ask today, apart from some minor questions, is that the moment you start thinking in a bipolar way, with the two sets of factors and flow, it privileges the bipolarity of these initiatives, say the application of force, or the focusing of one’s action, or the quality of one’s timing, the primary part of your method is about these initiatives and not about Effort Actions like Floating or Flicking, and more on the see-saw polarities. Could I say that as a generalisation about your approach? 

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Jean Newlove’s approach to teaching the Efforts

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Yes, definitely. It does introduce complexity and I think. The complexity is there and has to be faced. Jean Newlove, for example. Some of her students meet with her the first Sunday of every month. There was a man there called Philip Hedley, have you heard of him? 

 

Yes, he used to be Director of Theatre Royal, Stratford East.  

 

He used to work with Joan Littlewood. Because all that Jean has done is … ‘We float and punch and glide and slash’. When she teaches them she always uses music and it’s same as what she did with Laban in 1942 or 1943. I was intrigued by the dedication of the group, including Philip Hedley. They don’t talk about movement they say, ‘We use Laban’. It’s very difficult to have a reasonable conversation with Jean, she’s very dogmatic, and translates everything into her own personal experience. [She will reply to a question with] ‘Well, Laban told me,’ or ‘when I was with Laban’. She makes quite long speeches, is quite overbearing and dogmatic. But I am trying to get more recognition of her work because it does seem to have been effective. The Theatre Workshop people – Joan Littlewood, of course - were completely impressed by Jean. What she does is really just the basic efforts and that’s what she’s taught with actors and that’s what she did with the Theatre Workshop people. Maybe she goes into the individual efforts. She was talking about incomplete Efforts…

Laban’s concepts: States and Drives

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We’re getting into a discussion of States and Drives. Drives comprises three Movement Factors, and States two.

 

Yes. But an incomplete effort is more, the term used to mean, a question of degree, so you could have a sort of moderate direct Effort or an accentuated direct Effort or even a very accentuated direct Effort. In the notation if the directing is accentuated you put a comma, and if it is very extreme you put two commas. Now I don’t believe that that can actually be observed. Anyway, it is a not a process, a process of being relatively less directing to more directing. Maybe it nearly goes to an extreme and maybe it doesn’t, but you do have to take them into account. Incomplete Efforts are okay, you can observe them, but I think, more importantly, it may be more helpful to the actor who may feel ‘I want to be really, really focused here or do I want just a casual focus, just a little bit of focus’. The concept may be helpful. Just hearing these people talk while I expressed my dedication to Jean, and recognition of what she’s taught them, they do seem to be impressed with the basic Efforts. And Bernard Hepton all he remembers from Geraldine who taught him in Bradford, was the basic Efforts. What they get from Jean is simple and good for Jean and for anyone else who wants to keep it simple. 

 

But I have taken on the burden, as have you, of dealing with complexity. And we have to do that if we’re going to get it into the mainstream of any recognisably scientific study. 

 

Before we started our dialogues I had already realised that if you don’t consider weight, time, etc. as polarities, degrees of lightness or strength, acceleration or deceleration, you can get any shades of movement. I think it’s more important to understand that one can be more or less focused, the actor can gauge the right dosage of force or acceleration. If one starts a scene by shouting at the top of one’s voice then there is nowhere to go other than becoming less loud. If you choose just to Float, I can see that it doesn’t allow you to go anywhere. The scene cannot develop. If one thinks of ranges, that is, of peaks and troughs, which is about Effort and Recovery, unless you understand that, then you won’t make good theatre. I think Laban’s exploration of movement range is confined to the mathematical permutations of the three movement factors – what is called Factorial analysis. I would say that shaping and the social codings of interpersonal space are far more complex than the purely geometric complexity of the icosahedron. 

 

After all the conversations we’ve had, and your training and studies of other movement methods, is there any concept of mine that you find difficult to accept or disagree with? 

 

I don’t understand how you observe Flow. It is still something I’m working on. I am glad that you said it is a completely different movement initiative. I just don’t know how you see it. 

 

And talking about complexity, Kestenburg has made that immensely complex. But there’s a lot in what she’s done. A lot of young people are getting interested in her work: it’s really catching on. Can I just say something that I don’t want to forget? All my files on Kestenburg have gone to the NRCD. There were boxes, and they’ve all gone. So I can’t respond to your questions other than from memory. And Helen Roberts can’t begin work on archiving until she finds funding. Maybe William Elmhirst might be approached? All this stuff is sitting there and it can’t be handled unless there’s a grant. […Discussion of practicalities to do with an approach to NRCD…]

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About the Laban Sourcebook [2011] 

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I said this some time ago but you are fresh to the field. You are not a Laban fanatic. That’s proving true. Obviously you have an immense, a lot more knowledge really than Jean Newlove. […] Jean knows nothing about space-harmony work, and no understanding whatsoever of MPA and what I do, and neither does Geraldine.   

 

And she readily admits this. She has a little sense of space harmony in as much as she teaches Pin Ball Wall. I think this set of ideas has some application. I have notice how a lot of men expand laterally. 

 

You have to bear in mind that what you are doing is growing Shape Flow in the polarity of Bound Flow. It is a growing and a concaving at the same time. One has to make a differentiation between Shape-Flow and Shape. This introduces complexity. And I think they [Berthoz and Damasio] could see this. I hope that would make them say. ‘Hey, I’d like to work with this man.’ 

 

If you flipped your seesaw graphs through 90º they would correspond to the x & y axes of a conventional graph, with the fulcrum marking the value 0. The x axis would represent the value of the initiative (from -1 to +1) and the y axis would represent the time of the action. This captures the process of variation. I am just about to write about this and wanted to check with you to make sure that I haven’t got the wrong end of the stick. So we are not talking about Effort Actions but a range within two polarities. This sense of process and range is so much more important than the Effort Actions. I think the Effort Actions are useful in drama because one is dealing with generalisations, with generalised people. You are not talking about creating characters but observing the character of someone’s movement. 

 

Yes, yes indeed. That’s quite a good way of putting it. I think it can be helpful to an actor to understand that. 

 

[Sound quality of the recording is poor. Discussion is about the practicalities of meeting Raymond Gibbs and Alain Berthoz]

Report Back on a Conference on Laban 

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Is there more you can tell me about the conference? You mentioned that James made an impact and I’m very glad that you and he met.

 

He did make an impact and I think Karen Bradley [author of Rudolf Laban: Routledge Performance Practitioners, 2008] was very shocked. 

 

She needs to be shocked. I have had two long telephone conversations with her and she defended herself saying, ‘Well we have to be superficial because we have contacts with these journalists and all they understand is the body-language stuff.’ I replied, ‘But you’re confusing the body language stuff which relies on fixed images and you’re introducing words that have nothing to do with movement. It’s going to make the integrity of Laban movement more and more confused in people’s minds.’ She said, ‘Oh yes, yes, but we just have to do this. And then we can work with them in depth.’ And she kept on repeating ‘depth’. She is just motivated to get any publicity they can for what they are doing. There’s a saying that all publicity is good publicity but I am not sure.

 

If you’re in the public eye, then yes. But if you are a scientist then I am not sure that it is the case. 

 

Did you talk with Karen at the conference? 

 

Yes, but not about James. She saw that I was the first to be with him after he exploded. He was very upset and very exposed. I felt he needed the warm hand of support. I was very proud of him. He was articulate, passionate, yes, a bit aggressive, but it’s difficult in situations like that when you have to take on the entire room. Karen’s talk was highly entertaining. But it was more showbiz than movement analysis. 

 

Gena Miranda was there too. She is a showbiz woman completely. They are doing what Marion North did when she took over the Art of Movement Studio and made it into a dance forum.

 

She wanted to replicate what Robert Cohan had done with the London Contemporary Dance School and London Contemporary Dance Company. She wanted to have the space, the school and the company. 

 

She and Bonnie Bird saw themselves as being directly in competition and wanted to do something bigger and better. Did you meet Diane Dulicai or Marion North? 

 

I sat next to Marion. I did hear one of her addresses and she was quite funny. 

 

She is a good teacher. Her lectures were dull, but she does understand movement. She did get a lot from Laban and she does have this special view that she was the one chosen by Laban. As Geraldine had. It’s incredible the effect the man had. But she teaches well and had she not become obsessed, along with Bonnie Bird, to create this dance school and company, bigger and better than London Contemporary Dance. I think the school is bigger now, but they failed to create the company. Their company is called Transitions. They are currently giving performances of a reconstruction of The Green Clowns [Die Grünen].

 

It’s not a reconstruction because there is no notation. It is more an imagining of what it might have been like. They have produced a DVD ROM where Valerie Preston-Dunlop demonstrates that there is no evidence for any of the decisions taken. It was she thought Laban would have done. A reconstruction is based on elements that you know existed in the original. This is a recasting. 

 

Anyway, Transitions has not achieved anything like London Contemporary Dance Company. […] Diane Dulicai is doing scientific work with Martha Davis. They break up movement into very, very small facets and then they can do quantitative analysis – counting and comparing. What they do is very, very broken up and reductionist. Whenever I’ve seen them they do mix up fixed images with bits of movement. Martha Davies published an image of someone with their hands by their sides as a movement observation. That still continues, that mix-up. They are getting funding and it does seem to be going. 

 

I found it really boring when they described what they were doing. I didn’t find the questions they were asking very interesting. The area I’m interested in is that between brain and movement and that is you. That’s possibly why there was such a meshing between us. I’ve been reading all this brain stuff for the past seven or eight years because it fascinates me. And you pose the question which corresponds to one I had never thought of posing, even though I was asking the same one but in a broader way – how the brain relates to the body. Yours is a really precise research question which up until recently I had been ignoring. Ultimately my question will be something about theatre and learning. I didn’t find them interesting because their field is so narrow…

 

Reduced …

 

Berthoz argues that breaking things down into the smallest bits takes you away from an understanding of the brain’s intelligence. The brain doesn’t work in smallest bits, the brain works in using certain circuits or models. I feel that current research is going away from a reductionist model. Fundamentally, you are working at a pattern level. 

 

Oh yes.

 

I think that’s where research is tending. 

 

When the split came with Pamela Ramsden it was Carol-Lynne who suggested that what we doing was Movement Pattern Analysis [previously it had been called Action Profiling]. Pamela actually produced a book called Action Profiling at the time of the split, so she did say that I disagreed. That was a good thing. She did show me an early draft which I criticised for having a flawed framework. When the book was published it had ‘pattern’ all over it! But they are not doing anything different. 

 

At a recent conference I saw a paper given by Kedzie Penfield. 

 

Didn’t you train her in MPA? 

 

Yes, […] but now she is doing the sort of Martha Davis and Diane Dulicai stuff. Her presentation at the conference mainly consisted of showing a film of observations of Gorbachev.  Gorbachev is at a meeting with the first president Bush. She focuses mainly on stress. ‘Now Gorbachev is circling his arms and he’s really stressed. A lot of ‘stress’ and ‘relaxed’, I thought it was, nothing at all new, it didn’t tell people anything that they didn’t already know. There was no great claim in what they were doing. ‘Now he’s circling his arms, now he’s slumped.’ Everyone knows that. ‘Now he’s aroused!’ It didn’t really do a service to what we were supposed to be specialists in: movement, and what we can learn from movement. I was very disappointed. 

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A Second Edition of An Eye For Movement

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I think there should be two new chapters. The first would be ‘What’s it for?’ because a lot of people asked this question. Some of the material could come from the DVD ROM where I talk about how I was affected by MPA report you made of me. I would say that I think you’re right, and that it does make you think about how you do things. Then you could put me in contact with somebody with whom you’ve worked so that we could actually see the concrete application of your work. 

 

The other chapter would be ‘Wither Forward?’ That would explore the connection between the study of the science of movement and MPA. We would explore our understanding of movement intelligence as something which can’t be anything other than embodied. 

 

I was very touched by the talk you gave about Geraldine at the conference. It really was so considerate. Gordon Curl is always on the lookout for material for the Guild Magazine… 

 

I gave him a copy

 

Going to the conference was a real benefit for you, or a bit of a nuisance? 

 

I didn’t go away learning a huge amount. 

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Karen Bradley, LIMS – BESS and Effort/Shape

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She and Regina Miranda have a meeting with Anthony Bowne about whether and what they could teach at Creekside. There is quite a strong possibility that they will be employed to teach what they call Laban Movement Analysis. But apparently Anthony Bowne has decided that there is an objective to do more Laban at Laban, but this will only apply to dance, and will not apply to any other field. You know that for years they [LIMS, New York] have publicised Body Effort Shape Space. They are annoyed with me because at a conference in 1984 in California, I gave a speech saying, okay if these categories are helpful for teaching, then fine, but be clear because you can get into difficulties. It’s like saying in Gender Studies that you have Body, Male, Female and Biochemistry as separate categories. There are only two sexes – male and female – though there are mixtures of the two. In Laban, there is Effort and Shape and this is a duality. I got them all moving and tried to demonstrate how any Effort we do has a Shaping. In the A-scale if you’re going to do a movement there’s going to be an Effort. You have to recognise that there is Effort and Shape in everything that we do. I had already proved it.  But they had already made up their mind. I discovered later that this was the moment that they were going to retire me from anything to do with LIMS. They gave me awards, they fêted me, gave me a special dinner, showed a film incorporating me. Since then it has been a question of ‘Keep quiet, we are happy with what we do and don’t want to bothered…’ But this book is really trivial and gives very inadequate definitions of the terms that they use. They more or less say that invented shape. I can’t find anything in the book which distinguishes between shape and space, other than that they just happen to teach classes under those two headings. This is something that weighs with me more and more. Not only have they gone in directions different from the basis on which Irmgard Bartenieff set up LIMS which was after she worked with me, which was initially called Effort-Shape. Effort-Shape was really an awkward term to use but it got a lot of currency. There were advertisements on University noticeboards for courses on Effort-Shape and then they changed it to Laban Movement Analysis so Effort-Shape diplomas ceased and you first of all got a Laban Movement Analysis Diploma now you could get a Certified Movement Analysis Diploma. I am just concerned that with the proliferation of terms, which I think is inevitable, but because they mention me in this context, it does damage to what I believe.

 

I think that a second edition of Eye for Movement could be your right of reply.  I think we ought to look at a lot of Eye for Movement, actually. It needs to be tightened and focused. It was a kind of documentation. I think we need to make it into a much sharper argumentation. 

 

I think so too.

 

We didn’t really think of it initially as a book. It is simply edited conversations. 

 

It is more journalistic. It does have a historical structure and a definite theme. 

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Some Final Questions

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Felicia Sachs on the Twelve Rings

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In an interview with John Hodgson she talked about the twelve swings. Do you know what these are? I have come across two references to it so far. 

 

Laban did talk about swings a lot, but they varied. The Diagonal Scale, and this is what Jean still teaches, that was taught with swings. But twelve must refer to the A- and B-Scale. I certainly recall that being done, so the twelve swings would be of either the A- or the B-Scale. And of course I would define swing as emphasising the Flow variation. It’s really adding Flow of Effort variation to the Space harmony of the A- or B-Scale. 

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Action or Movement?

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You used to talk about Action Profiling and then went to Movement Pattern Analysis. Laban talks about the Efforts sometimes as actions. Can you help me whether in your mind they are the same or different? 

 

I always understood that when you were recording Effort observation and this was primarily, no, exclusively Effort, i.e. the industrial work. (Although I was convinced that he did also observe Shape.) When you use the Effort diagonal, so that was strength, and this directing, or whatever, that was an action, and therefore if you do a Punch into a Glide then you are doing two actions. You mentioned Bounce just now. If you did Punch and Glide then you had three actions: there was the main action, the preparatory action, and after a bounce away, which also could be seen as the preparatory action for the Glide. Or it could be that the Punch is a preparation for the Glide in which case there are four actions. You would Punch, one action, and (another action) Glide (the final action). We used to say ‘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, then that was a new action. Action came wherever there was a change. So I thought, ‘Well, you may do a punch which just goes into a directing. Of the components of the punch, to use the terms of the old days, the strength changes to lightness, the directness is maintained or it may diminish, it may weaken and become more flexible, and the timing becomes slow, it may become sustained. So what Laban calls Punch into Glide is never just two actions but can be as many as six because the change in each of the components would not happen simultaneously. So, the definition that I follow, looking at the individual components not the generalisation of what is happening more or less with the three components all together. 

 

But if you replaced the word ‘action’ with ‘movement’ it wouldn’t change the sense of your description? 

 

No, not at all. 

 

So maybe I am anguishing about nothing. In theatre there is a difference, and it has to do with intention. If I move towards you it has various possible meanings – a threat or a promise of friendship. Dance is movement because it doesn’t have this element of intention. But I am importing a problem from another sphere of study and am seeing a problem where there is none. 

 

I think this is analogous with music. If you had a phrase of ten tones, if an additional note got it would alter the composition. And if you had a serious of single notes followed by a chord, then that chord would have greater intensity. 

 

So it’s about phrasing? 

 

It’s about phrasing. You could almost say with analogy to music, that wherever you have a note in music, it would be an action. 

Space and Shape

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The only way I can make a distinction is that Space really translates as geometry with its defining points. You then make shapes within that given framework. Always the geometry will be the same – an Icosahedron is invariable. The shapes you can make within the Ico are infinite, but there are only twenty points to which you can go. The spatial construction from equilateral triangles is always the same, the movements within always different. 

 

I partly agree. The shaping isn’t necessarily within those points as much as a shaping of those points. I don’t get up and think that I shape my movement with the form of this room. I get up and say that I am going to get up and make a shape of the conditions that exist. Therefore I will exaggerate the upwardness or the forwardness. You could say, in a sense, it is distorting the form. The frame remains as a term of reference, as a way of understanding. The movement is not remaining exact according to the frame. You make try and make it so but in doing so, it is shapes that you are creating. 

 

You are a sculptor and you want to do a sculpture of me to put in Trafalgar Square. [He demonstrates various poses.] You say, ‘Stop, that’s a great shape!’ One obvious distortion is when we try to do shapings that take in the space that is behind us. It’s very difficult. I think that we should not attempt to make a distinction between Shape and Space because the forms of the Icosahedron, the Dodecahedron, and so on, are all shapes themselves. Even the Dimensional Scale has shapes too because we can never succeed in being two-dimensional because we are three-dimensional. 

 

You talked of movement within the Icosahedron; I would rather say 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 the shaping of movement is distorting, perhaps I shouldn’t say distorting because it’s not something bad, it is moulding the Icosahedron as I move. And we don’t move within it. All I can see is space. Therefore if you are going draw or to create a geometrical structure out of sticks or whatever to encapsulate how I am moving now it will not be a perfect Icosahedron. Have I made the case there is a duality, that Shape is Space? I don’t see how Karen and the LIMS people can continue with the categories as they have. I wonder if any of them has read Effort and Recovery? I was surprised but delighted by the extent to which he talks about Shape.