Laban Resources
Warren Lamb
Interview on March 16th 2011
Summary of Conversation
A discussion of the relative merits of understanding movement through the 8 Effort Actions, or through more subtle combinations of Movement Factors. WL points out how thinking in terms of the Efforts ‘can be a concept of the role which can give some cues as to how the actor can translate it into a performance.’ Then he later adds ‘But it is not something that you observe.’ How Laban conceived of the body in space – solid geometry rather than living environments. Further discussion about the nature of Weight and of Flows as defined by Laban and Feldenkrais. For WL Flow is about either yielding to or going with the pull of gravity. He returns to a discussion of the Diagonal Scale and how Flow is never included as a Factor [c.f. his discussion of a twisting movement from the Diagonal Scale in his conversation with Larry Goldfarb]. On the Process of Decision Making: Attention, Intention, Commitment and how conscious we are of factors that influence our decision-making process.
The Conversation
DM: The first question concerns the degree to which you find the Motion Factors more useful and how useful you find the eight Effort Actions and how much you use them in your own work.
WL: It’s not really a sensible question. They both relate to each other. Effort Actions happen to be the simultaneous performance of all three Effort components. Laban would say four, taking into account Flow. We can do that too. I’ve always primarily based how I work with movement on what I observe, and you don’t observe basic Efforts, other than very rarely. You never see anybody do a pure slash or a pure punch – they are convenient generalisations which actors particularly seem to find useful. But if you’re going to work on movement with any precision and objectivity, then what’s going on is a phrasing of Flow which is associated with Focus, Pressure and Time components of movement with one going into the other and often overlapping. This is what you observe and when all three components come together you can say ‘oh a Punch or a Float’, or whatever.
DM: So it’s not so dumb a question since one never sees Effort Actions in real life.
WL: If the question is why don’t I refer more to basic Efforts? Then my answer is that you don’t see them other than very rarely.
DM: They have been generated through Factorial Analysis, that is, the total number of combinations of a given set of Factors. (Walter Bodmer explained this to me.) That is pure mathematics. I much prefer your approach where you look at a number of factors and see how they help us understand movement as a process of variation. If you go down the other route you are asking students to generate sequences of movement that do not exist in everyday life, and then thinking that you are actually acting.
WL: But actors may get some inspiration by reading the character in their play as someone who starts off as a ‘Floater’ who then becomes a ‘Slasher’ and ends up as a ‘Presser’. That can be a concept of the role which can give some cues as to how the actor can translate it into a performance. I think that they can have that value. But what you said a moment ago very eloquently, about the Factorial Analysis is much more relevant into research into what Laban has come up with.
DM: On the one hand he was a gifted mathematician and geometer. On the other, contradicting that completely, he seemed to be an absolutely pragmatic observer of movement. So when he wrote things down he created to a certain extent when you start talking about states and Drives, I think that is driven purely by theory. He starts by considering what one would call combinations of two Motion Factors, and then three Motion Factors. Again it is purely combinatorial.
You think chordally, in other words, you have eight see-saws, but you see movement as consisting of ever-changing rhythms of variation on each of the scales. Sometimes one Factor may predominate, and at another moment another.
WL: Yes, and we’re looking at the association of different components of movement within the process of variation.
[DM uses the example of the movement sequence of lighting a fire with a match given on page 181 of Training the Actor’s Body.]
WL: In the Drives of the components WSTF there was always one missing. Again, this is a convenience. It is not something that you see. Whether an actor is really helped by perceiving that the role he is playing is passionate and therefore he should leave out the appropriate movement component [Space] … that is to say that the component will not occur, while the other three will occur… perhaps that does give him a sense of performing a role of that passionate nature, whatever you perceive passion to be. But it is not something that you observe. Whether people who may who by common consensus are deemed passionate do leave out the Space component I would very much doubt. It’s just an interesting concept that I think is typical of Laban’s thinking, but you don’t have to take it too literally, which I think people do.
DM: I saw it taught at the Laban Centre as if it were Holy Writ.
WL: Well I don’t think it is Holy Writ. I think it is worth giving attention to as to whether it is a useful concept. It is just part of the remarkably creativity of Laban and the things he came up with. In the Drives he doesn’t take into account that Flow is of a different nature from the other Effort and Shape components. He hasn’t explained, for example, why he has ignored Flow when creating the eight basic Efforts but does take it into account with the Drives. There are all sorts of inconsistencies in Laban’s thinking.
DM: Laban’s approach is almost the opposite of observation. He is deductive and you are inductive. And yet when he looked a movements he appeared to be completely inductive.
WL: He was an incredibly good observer. Very quick and very able to observe a lot very quickly. And was also able to see the whole person, so eliminating quite a lot of the movements going on in order to focus on what he believes to be important from his point of view. ‘Editing out’ is a good way of looking at it. He also spent hours and hours, often on his own, or with someone else, Kurt Jooss, me on occasions, Peter [Bill] Carpenter was another … he would spend a lot of time closeted in a room perhaps with various polyhedra around, as he is often photographed, not observing anything at all, but looking at what has been recorded, discussing ideas, and writing. Sometimes it seems as if there is no link between the two: very, very penetrating observations when he’s with people, and as a teacher, for example, as distinct from when he is really working on ideas and themes.
DM: So his Space notions didn’t have much to do with Shape, they had to do with abstract geometry.
WL: Yes, indeed.
Anatomy
WL: Nobody ever thought that he had a good understanding of anatomy. But on the other hand in his hundreds of drawings, and his paintings, people have commented that they are anatomically correct.
DM: What I am realising is that he thought of the body in space, as an artist would think of the body in space. It has shape and dimension, but in terms of real weight, in terms of how force transmits through a structure from the floor… he thinks of energy as projected from the body. In Mastery of Movement he writes about muscular force, but this needs to be seen in relation to contact with the ground. If I were suspended from a rope and tried to punch you then I would push myself away from you with that action. It’s not really the arms muscles that deliver the punch, but rather my shift of weight, weight that is anchored with a good stance on the ground. An effective punch is the result of good organisation in relation to the ground. Laban thought of the ground as the thing on which a figure rests but there is no functional relation between ground, weight and movement. By choosing the term ‘pressure’ you don’t bring into question where this comes from, it is simply observed.
WL: You can’t see weight, but you can see a variation of pressure.
DM: And you can measure it. Weight is such a complicated phenomenon. Firstly one needs a solid surface beneath you: while I am pressing down on the ground with my weight, the floor is pressing back through my feet. If the floorboard was rotten or the ice thin then my pushing down would result in my falling through the hole it made. Trying to understand these lines of pressure bring me to my second question.
I am trying to understand the concept of Flow. It seems to me that it is about allowing a force to travel through your structure with the least possible resistance from tense muscles, from unnecessarily contracted muscles.
WL: I don’t think that it has anything necessarily to do with force. Primarily, it is more predicated on our capacity to fall or prevent ourselves from falling. I am talking about the Flow of Effort. If I fall on the floor I can’t fall any further. Our Flow of Effort has to do whether it is floor or some other surface which we are actually …through which we can’t fall any more.
DM: So, it has to do with gravity?
WL: It has everything to do with Gravity, yes. It is either giving in to gravity which is the indulging polarity, as Laban put it, or binding of the Flow which is controlling. That is going on all the time. Our breathing is to some extent … we fall as we breathe out and binding as we breathe in. This variation of Flow is going on all the time. When you were demonstrating a successive movement just now there were two or three variations of Flow. As to whether it is a big swinging movement or whether it is a transitory movement, these flow rhythms have to be looked at differently to SWT rhythms. I have never joined in the arguments about Weight. If you want to know what I think of weight then of course the body has weight, when we are observing a person’s variation of movement, whether the person weighs 20 stone or 10 stone is not really relevant. There is a sense in which a very heavy person will move differently from a lighter person, but it depends on all sorts.
I am interested in what I can see. When a person is exerting pressure, I can see that in terms of movement.
DM: I think Laban confuses gravity, vectors and weight. For human strength one needs to appreciate torque – that is, twisting power: the exertion of a force around a central axis. One needs to consider how and where a person’s weight lies. Critical is our weight over base. It is about considerations of distribution and organisation.
I am so interested in your definition of Flow. Is this your own, or is it derived from Laban? Could you express it as yielding to or resisting gravity?
WL: I am just trying to think whether I expressly have used those words. I have certainly related Flow to falling, and set the extremes as abandonment and rigidity.
DM: In 1926 Laban defined Flow as Flüchtigkeit, which is the quality of flying, of not resisting falling. I am astonished at the similarity of terms, especially as you came up with your definition independently from Laban.
In the human body you have forces of compression which tend downwards and forces of elevation which tend upwards. There are muscle groups (contraction and extension) which move the body in these directions. Our upright position is determined by the balance between extensors and contractors, there are muscles which resist gravity and those that go with gravity. For me the shaping of movement is knowing where to soften and where to maintain a degree of tension. If you were to lift me and I maintained a certain degree of structural tension then this would aid your lift. If I were dead you would find lifting me more difficult.
WL: If a dancer is very tired and you try and lift her you will find it quite difficult. I recall this quite poignantly because I can still feel the back pain that that caused. Ballet dancers have to train to make it seem like they rise in the air at a touch. It is the result of mainly concealed effort on the part of the male dancer.
DM: It is funny that Laban seemed to understand the forces of extension and of compression, because [in Die Welt Des Tänzers] he talks about turgor, the force that propels a plant upwards towards the light and its rooting in the ground. The prose style in Die Welt Des Tänzers owes much to Nietzsche, a philosopher who influenced Laban.
[DM demonstrates the difference between miming pushing (where the back leg can be lifted) and real pushing (where the front leg can be lifted).]
WL: In both cases what we observe is pressure, without distinction. Often people have difficulty in differentiating between the process of binding the Flow and increasing the pressure. Very often the two go together.
DM: We haven’t mentioned momentum which is mass plus velocity and I would have thought, again, is to do with Flow.
WL: The Diagonal Scale doesn’t take Flow into account but I think is a very good association of Effort and Shape. Mostly the Diagonal Scale is regarded as an Effort scale, but it’s not; it’s equally Effort and Shape. And the association of … you know what Laban called Lightness and flexibility with sustainment creating a Float. It becomes easy and natural, however you define that particular HRF zone of space. It is the opposite of a Punch. I think that is enlightened. In many ways it can be helpful. Certainly it could also be taken into account in manual work. But it is also significant in respect of our relationship with the kinesphere and how we want to relate the kinesphere to Shape. It doesn’t mean … I remember Gerard Bagley, who’s just died, saying ‘My brother is a boxer and he says you’d lose the fight in the first round if you thought [an advancing movement was slower than a retreating one]. Laban never made any suggestion that you could only do these basic Efforts … as I was saying earlier we don’t really do these basic Efforts anyway … the fact that there is an inclination towards wanting to do the Efforts according to the orientations of the Diagonal Scale, I think it is something worth being aware of. I think it helpful towards greater harmony, greater matching between the Effort and the Shape if we get that sort of sense in our bodies.
DM: You would say that because you have always argued that Effort and Shape are a duality. I see so many people who focus only on Effort with the result that their movement is, in the words of Laban, Miserable.
WL: Or Lopsided.
DM: If you don’t pay any attention to Shape then the movement becomes quite staccato. [He demonstrates some examples. Especially Gathering and Scattering.] If you don’t have a sense of Shape then the movement is going to be miserable, effortful – blighted, really. I am finding that more and more I am taking Shape initiatives. I think it helps you address the space and actually live in it more fully. [More demonstration] You need Shape to give the sense of going somewhere.
On the Process of Decision Making: Attention, Intention, Commitment
DM: Most decisions are taken non-consciously, we are not aware of them, they are procedural. Warren and I have just been discussing the fact the decisions that Warren is interested in are very much conscious. There is a deliberator who deliberates, a presenter who presents and a researcher who researches, and a decision maker who knows at exactly what moment to commit to a decision. I am now going to pass over to Warren how certain people are more suited to activity in the different stages of the decision-making process, guided by their movement patterns.
WL: The decision making process that I’m interested in is not conscious but in making a consciously-deliberated decision I think that we are influenced by our preferred pattern of movement. We are not conscious of that influence but we are using our consciousness in order to come to a decision. Whilst it’s true that influences that are non-conscious or don’t relate to consciousness are happening all the time, we are unaware of those influences, unless you have an MPA and then you are aware in retrospect. We tend not to be aware before actually making the decision. But we can. It can be a two-way process: your conscious deliberation may lead you to say, ‘This is too risky, I want to more know about the situation before I commit.’ And then you might think, ‘Oh my movement pattern profile, it does seem to link. Are the circumstances such that I had better act contrary to my profile?’ So I think that it can be helpful that we are aware. There can be an interplay between the influences and the consciousness, but it is retrospective. When you are initiating consciously that ‘this is too risky, I am going to back out of any commitment on that’, you’re not aware of your profile, you can’t combine the two. So that’s how in my ignorance I see the decision making process relative to consciousness.
DM: If I could paraphrase that, which seems to be my job: you aren’t aware of those guiding hands in terms of how you make a decision. So it’s an unconscious guidance. You are quite good at getting information in, you are good at mulling it over, and you are absolutely rotten at making a commitment. That pre-set, let’s say, that guiding hand is actually, you’ll find that in how you move. Put like that there isn’t a distinction between movement preferences and decision making preferences. You find things that are common to both. There may be a way of speech that would indicate that there are certain patterns in how you do things and your making of movement can be considered as just another facet of how you do life. Another facet of how you ‘do life’ is how you approach making decision making. I have tried to ‘flatten’ the description in order to avoid the distinction between decision making (mental) and movement pattern (physical) and one can leap from one to the other. If you look at the person and how they do life, you would then be looking at different manifestations of this person’s behaviour. Because you behave with all of yourself. Does that make sense to you?
WL: Yes, but I would like to envisage, and this may be very elementary or not really having any support from what is known about the brain, but I see the neurons in the brain are all oscillating at some particular velocity, that they have what we call a rhythm, and there are millions and millions of what we could call patterns, if you like, of oscillations going on. The way in which they do can be looked on as a dance. In fact several neurosurgeons who have written books on the brain do refer to the dance of the neurons. I think that’s a good illustration, a good image because they probably are doing something of the sort. I suspect that one day we will find that we can get more information on the dance all the various patterns of neurons are doing and how that relates to how we are moving. I suspect that there is some sort of relationship but I can’t imagine it being substantiated for quite some years to come. That may be a figment of my imagination but at least it’s an understanding based on that sort of theorising that I think justifies me saying that the mind takes the decisions and the body implements them. There’s not even that distinction. In fact the mind exists in terms of movement.
DM: I think the movement happens between the fixed neurons. It is a movement of chemical ions between the neurons. I think that the movement is less an oscillation but a firing across two points when a charge is exchanged between two neurons. I think it’s almost certain that there are parallel firings. This is going on here either in sequence or in parallel, while things are going on in other parts of the brain.
I heard someone say that they couldn’t understand why you can the stage of deliberation, that surely it is a question of an environmental stimulus and then a somatic response. I would argue that it is a uniquely human facet that we do deliberate, we do not always do things automatically. If there is only stimulus and response then there is little space for creative response, i.e. not responding in the way you always respond. You could make a different response based on a difference in how you perceive the situation. And you can get a more nuanced response. I think it is incredibly important that you have a three-fold sequence in your model of decision-making, otherwise we are no better than a bee which is clever but can only respond in a fixed way to certain stimuli.
Interview on November 13th 2012
Summary of Conversation
The conversation has already begun and concerns the military valuing more Effort than Shape initiatives. This is prompted by WL having been invited by a branch of the American military establishment to make a presentation about MPA. A continuing conversation about the relation between Flow and the anxiety in older people about falling. WL: ‘I am now concentrating on the fact that a lot of the Laban heritage has been lost because people almost don’t understand what movement is, certainly not in the dynamic sense that Laban used to mean.’ Why Warren Lamb describes Effort and Shape as ‘Initiatives’. WL: ‘I was challenged to explain what it was that we were measuring and, instead of coming up with ‘actions’ which is much more an umbrella term, I came up with ‘initiatives’.’ Lawrence talked about those who don’t engage in Effort suffering from inertia, they are inert. WL: ‘To break out of that it is certainly true, we have to exert ourselves and make an effort and do something.’ ‘I think what really happens with The Movement Pattern Analysis profile [is] that we are relatively inert in some of these initiatives and in others’. Feldenkrais as a Method of helping people with movement problems and Laban as a ‘healer’. A return, yet again, to the diagonal scale, this time in connection with the teaching of Jean Newlove.
The Conversation
DM: I can see how the military would consider muscular effort, hard work is more rewarding than spatial initiative. That said, they do spend a lot of time on strategy and tactics. Surely that’s to do with the Shaping side of things.
WL: Strategy, certainly yes. But maybe they don’t do strategy with as much perspective Shaping as they should do.
DM: I use the word organisation a lot, but it has a particular meaning in the Feldenkrais training. It has a very particular meaning relating to how and where one places one’s weight. If I were to pull you from your chair I would pull you over to the left because you are sitting more on your right side than your left, so I would going for your lighter side. And I would have to have a stance that allowed me to do this with the maximum participation of my pelvis. So Shaping for me is very much a question of deploying my weight intelligently, and getting a good reading of somebody else’s weight distribution.
WL: Doesn’t this fundamentally relate to balance? The most fundamental balance that we can get is between Effort and Shape. That’s why so many old people fall, because they don’t shape their movement and physically become incapable of doing so adequately. They may climb on a stool to reach something, they have the wrong Shaping and they cannot correct themselves quickly enough and they fall.
DM: The other thing I have noticed is the Flow of their movement. If we’re talking about a quality of Flow, that you could stop something if you wanted, a certain operative Bound Flow … I’ve notice that my Mother’s movements have a certain Free Flow but they stop suddenly. Her movements are very brittle.
WL: Well this leads people to paralyse the Flow because they are afraid that any little movement of the Flow will make it impossible for them to adjust. That is counterproductive because we need movement to constantly maintain adjusting to things. So it’s particularly in a modern age there are so many more things to give attention to – cars and streets. There are so many more things than used to be the case. I would imagine that up to the Industrial Revolution people could manage their Flow much more effectively than is the case now.
DM: One could think of a history of the everyday body in this light.
WL: Laban used to talk along similar lines; that we have lost movement awareness and sensitivity and that it was all the fault of the Industrial Revolution and the abuse of workers. I am sure there is a lot to that. I am now concentrating on the fact that a lot of the Laban heritage has been lost because people almost don’t understand what movement is, certainly not in the dynamic sense that Laban used to mean. I have spoken of classes which consist of a lot of standing and talking and being on the floor. There’s nothing wrong with being on the floor if that’s the intention. I mentioned the new book about Bartenieff who was an original pupil of Laban’s, and I’m sure I certainly recall her movement having this dynamic element that Laban taught in all his classes. And this was the exception feature of what Laban contributed in his day and age. And to do so much talking in a class on movement. Laban would hardly talk at all if he took a class. Giving a lecture is quite a different thing. He would never allow anyone to take a notepad in.
DM: Just the same as Feldenkrais!
WL: The vital thing for Laban was really to get the sense of movement and I feel that a lot of people who are teaching under the Laban name don’t really move very much. I think it’s a bit different when they are working on a choreography, although when Laban choreographed, when he did movement choirs, it was a constant process of movement all the time. If he talked he was getting people moving, to reform, or attempt this or that. It was never a case of ‘Sit down. Now we want to achieve this, that, and the other.’ He never planned in that way. Sam Thornton spends more time talking and planning than getting to move. So when you do move, you move in a very clockwork way. By the end many people do enjoy it quite often. But it has lost any element of dynamic quality. Can you confirm that from your own experience?
DM: I don’t have much experience of other people teaching. When looking for teachers for the International Workshop Festival I would not engage people who would only talk. The problem with Laban studies is that discussion of a static model like the Effort cube is mistaken for movement study. You are one of a number of thinkers now who are thinking dynamically rather than statically. [DM elaborates on this theory and goes on to discuss the idea that practice very often isn’t simply an application of a theory.]
[…]
DM: We are talking about a kind of knowledge that we know, but don’t know that we know. So, while a skateboarder knows how to perfectly shift their weight according to complex laws of physics, this doesn’t make them experts physicists. However, if one was teaching GCSE physics it might be interesting to take the example of skateboarding to understand some basic facts about motion, vectors and momentum. If you were trying to think of physics while skateboarding then you would probably fall off.
WL: Like a tightrope walker…
DM: You really don’t think about why you’re putting your arms out. There are different types of knowledge, one of which can be put into words and the other which is manifested through doing. And there is a difference in the status of these two forms of knowledge. Knowledge through Doing is seen as less intelligent than knowledge through writing. So, just to be clear, when one is skateboarding one is not put into practice the theoretical propositions from physics. Your excellence does not lie in the application of physics. If it were then all physicists would be great skateboarders. We need to get this message across more generally to people.
[Another very broad discussion that covers ideas already discussed earlier.]
[…]
Why Warren Lamb describes Effort and Shape as ‘Initiatives’
WL: Effort was always described by Laban, and other people took this up and still do it, as the inner impulse that originates movement. I have always been leary about anything ‘inner’. I’ve always wanted to be able to see the movement happening, rather than deduce or interpret whether it is inner or outer, or anything on the side of mystery.
There are two influences that I recall, and I am just exploring now as to whether they had an influence or not. The first, F.C. Lawrence, suggested inertia as a state of being. The difference between being inert and being in action was Effort. And if you didn’t make any Effort you were inert. I like that word, ‘inert’ and it seemed a lot of people with responsibilities tended to be inert or overcome by inertia. To break out of that it is certainly true, we have to exert ourselves and make an effort and do something.
Secondly, when working with managers and developing the framework it seemed that some managers seemed get along and take their salaries without really doing very much: they try to avoid action rather than to take action. They would keep out of the way when something was happening. So the people who make their way in life and do really good work did tend to overcome inertia, they wanted to overcome inertia, inertia for them was really deplorable. I was challenged to explain what it was that we were measuring and, instead of coming up with ‘actions’ which is much more an umbrella term, I came up with ‘initiatives’.
The items in the six Efforts [and Shapes] in the framework, along with the two aspects of Flow, are all initiatives. You can be inert in all of them or not. And in fact, that is I think what really happens with The Movement Pattern Analysis profile, that we are relatively inert in some of these initiatives and in others, action becomes much more motivated because it’s linked with a concept of action motivation which we tried to theorise. It came and it stuck. People seemed to understand it, so it’s now part of history.
DM: What date was this?
WL: Probably the late sixties, early seventies. You seem to take a lot of initiatives and that is partly the definition of dynamism. You take more effort relatively than other people. They just can’t be inert at all. And then of course they can be overactive.
DM: I must look up inertia and its possible antonym exertion.
‘Inert, without inherent power of moving. Active resistance to motion. Passive. Chemically inactive. Sluggish.’
WL: Yes, it’s used in Chemistry.
DM: What is the etymology of –ert, as in exert and inert?
‘To put forth, to bring into active operation. To do or perform.’
WL: I talk of exertion in order for an Effort to become visible.
DM: I have been thinking of the relation between Daniel Stern’s Forms of Vitality and your work.
WL: I have been reading the notes that you kindly gave me. I find your notes more helpful than coping with the whole book!
DM: I think his concept of amodality is really useful. The baby picks up the idea of more or less force, more or less amplitude, more or less acceleration, whether it is to do with movement, musicality. It might be to do with the morphology of something. A child would understand the up and down-ness of a shaping. This is how it starts making sense of the world and it’s in that degree of formal recognition. Not actually the substance – whether its music or movement – but actually the form that these take. I am starting to realise that that \is a very interesting idea. For him these forms of movement or activity are prior to whether it is movement or not.
So when you are saying that you don’t like the notion of ‘impulse’, he is purely descriptive. But he is talking about how we use these descriptions of a baby’s movement in order to understand what’s going on inside them. To understand their state of being he starts with a description of movement. States of comfort, unease, curiosity – all of them have certain rhythms. This very empirical approach I am finding extremely useful.
WL: I am trying to revive the emphasis that Laban, and Lawrence also on his own initiative, talked about rhythm. I am talking about an Effort harmony being complementary to a Shape harmony.
DM: I think that people tend to think of rhythm purely in terms of Time, but this is so abstract. So many of Laban and Lawrence’s pamphlets were about Effort Rhythm. When you think about it, rest and work is about the most basic rhythm of all. But when you start thinking – and this is just a paraphrase of what I’ve learned from you over the past ten years – about the effort and recovery phases of a movement, all the tiny regulations are aspects of rhythm. If you don’t rhythm-icise your action you are going to exhaust yourself. Federer’s forehand continues its shaping well after the ball is struck in order to create a recovery phase.
WL: It’s like watching a dance for me. It’s interesting that he never gets injured. All the others have injuries, and he’s never been injured to my knowledge.
DM: it is the perfect balance of Effort and Shaping. This is where I am starting to find that the Feldenkrais work comes in. You talk about Shaping, Feldenkrais from a very functional point of view, talks about organisation. Ultimately, your interest isn’t action how a movement can be done better, but rather how somebody does their everyday movement because there is a correlation between that patterning and their decision making preferences. I am interested in the functional aspect of movement, hence my being a Feldenkrais practitioner. The way Federer organises himself, you would say ‘Shapes himself’. We are talking about the same thing. That organisation is simply about recovery. You must have been aware of him talking about recovery because his book was written in the early 1950s.
WL: It goes with the view of him as a hands-on therapist, as having the healing touch. He believed that he was a bit of a Jesus Christ, telling people who couldn’t get up, to get up, and they did.
DM: ‘Arise, take up thy bed and walk.’ (John 5: 1 – 18).
WL: I think it starts from that discovery. He liked to do that with people. Mary Wigman has written about that, giving one or two examples. The organised approach to therapy was when he went to [Irene] Champernowne’s Withymead [Community] in Devon and got aligned with Jungian therapists. Janet Kaylo is spending quite a lot of time developing that actually. She is lecturing at a conference in Bratislava, which will be my last conference where I lecture. It is attractive to me that if it is truly going to be the last thing that I accept, that it is in Laban’s birthplace. She is giving three sessions actually at this conference about Jung’s anima and animus, linking them with my ideas about how femininity and masculinity are expressed in movement. Laban just happened to get tied in with the Jungians. People are always asking whether he was influenced by Jung or not. He would never reply. So I think that was really how he got into the therapy world. It is a great shame that Effort and Recovery is lying dormant because I think he had something to say.
DM: When I was talking about recovery I was simply thinking about it in terms of effort rhythm; recovering one’s forces sufficiently enough to be able to exert them again. I think you understood in terms of recovering from an illness? I had not picked up on the meaning of the word at all. I think you absolutely correct to point out this sense and I am stupid not to have seen it. I am sure that is an important dimension of the book since so much of it is about therapy.
Geraldine [Stephenson] has an Effort étude called Press Glide Float Flick that could well have been devised by Lisa Ullmann. Many of her studies were constructed around a diagonal or a lemniscate or both. Very few people can find 45º.
WL: I was interested in the documents [transcripts of taped interviews] that you discovered in Leeds [Special Collections at the Brotherton Library] when Jooss was being interviewed by John Hodgson he was critical of Effort Shape because he’d heard of my use of it. He focused on central and peripheral. So that was closer to Feldenkrais, I suppose. Laban talked about central and peripheral as well, I suppose.
DM: It seems that any serious student of the human body is going to come across these fundamental principles of movement like posture and gesture, central and peripheral, or Delsarte’s terms excentric and concentric (out from the centre and in towards the centre) movement which map onto Laban’s terms gathering and scattering. Any animal has to draw stuff into its mouth from the environment, and excrete waste from the body. We have to understand the rhythmic regularities that each person develops in their everyday behaviour.
[DM demonstrates and discusses the connection between Tai Chi movements and Lamb’s idea of Effort Shape.]
There is actually a practice, there is a wisdom of to create a Posture-Gesture-Merging (PGM). In other words, how not to be ineffectually gestural. That is at the heart of the Martial Arts. If you thought of PGM as an integration, and I know you fought against the term ‘integration’.
WL: It’s just that it can mean so many things and people get emotional about the concept of integration. So it’s just an unreliable term.
DM: I am finding physics helps a lot. If you say ‘Hi’ [demonstrates with a movement which comes from the elbow], then the lever is here [the elbow]. The moment other joints become involved (i.e. the pelvis), more weight becomes involved and more muscles become involved. My interpretation of ‘integration’ concerns directing forces (of gravity and of muscular activity) through the skeletal structure such a way that the body as a whole moves in as effective a manner possible. If there is a force acting upon you (like somebody pushing against you) it is to allow that force to transmit through you into the ground, so effectively they are trying to push away the ground. When it comes to your own weight, and this brings us back to inertia, you want to reduce inertness as much as possible. If I slump in my chair a lot more effort is required to come to standing than if I feel my weight in my sit-bones and the soles of my feet on the ground. This organisation of the structure means that you are ready to move without an unnecessary amount of muscular effort. When I talk about movement it is usually physics that is at the bottom of it. I have nothing to do with discussions of ‘impulse’.
WL: I just think of the impulse buy that you do at a supermarket.
[Discussion of Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind]
DM: I like what he has written about Spatial Intelligence, I/Other Intelligence and Kinaesthetic Intelligence, and while accepting that they are separate forms of intelligence would argue that they are deeply connected. I would also say that he focuses too much on conscious forms of intelligence and makes little reference to non-conscious intelligence and tacit knowledge.
[DM talks about on neuroscience.]
[…]
On How Jean Newlove Uses the Diagonal Scale
DM: You say that Jean used to use the Diagonal Scale for training in the factories in the 1940s and 1950s?
WL: Yes, that’s right. I was intrigued and did a little research into this. She had a little place in Ealing where she taught, and she invited me to be a Director of her thing, and Joan Littlewood was alive at that time. I went to see what she did and a couple of years ago she took over the Laban Guild day. It’s all the same, over and over again. Although she’s quite creative in developing themes like the one you demonstrated earlier [Press Glide Float Flick] that you attributed to Lisa Ullmann. What is interesting is that the actors seem to imbibe the experience of movement and movement as a process of variation in doing the diagonal scale in this way. Actually, it’s a very similar transference that the workers did in the factories. They kind of incorporated it into the movements of their acting.
DM: So it is effective, then?
WL: It was certainly effective with Theatre Workshop, but Theatre workshop were very, very creative people. They had some good people working for them. They got the message that without the diagonal movement and the range of diagonal movement then you are movement-uneducated. So they took it seriously. I don’t think she worked on roles with them, that was left to them.
DM: I have talked with Murray Melvin, the archivist of Theatre Workshop, and all he talked about was the Efforts which he misremembered. But he did find Laban’s distinction between the Centre of Levity and the Centre of Gravity immensely useful. It’s interesting that you say that actors got a lot from her classes in the Diagonal Scale. I wonder what they learn?
WL: They don’t remember much judging from what you say about Murray Melvin. But there’s no doubt that she had an influence. The whole company became much more movement-aware.
DM: Both you and Geraldine have told me a story about how Laban had drilled you all in the Diagonal Scale at the Art of Movement Studio in Manchester and the following day your legs were so stiff you couldn’t walk up or down stairs.
WL: I do remember it. It went on for three hours. Laban must have stirred himself to teach that class because he was very vigorous, much more than was normally the case.
DM: That an actor should understand diagonals is crucially important.
The reason that I like your notion of Movement Initiatives is that it avoids this generalisation of Effort. How often is there a pure Slash?
WL: Never! You can’t do eight variations [of Movement Factors and Flow] together.
[…]
Discussion of Bartenieff’s Development of Laban’s Ideas
WL: Some of them do good work, especially in the therapy field. But it’s a very subjective interpretation of movement terms that suits them and presumably helps the patient, but really theoretically it is a nonsense.
DM: This seems to be a limiting theory that does not account for all the possibilities in the field. Because of your seesaws, there are limitless possibilities.
[DM repeats his praise for WL and how his approach has theoretical integrity.]
WL: Laban’s name is being used as a cover for a lot of this irresponsible stuff. It must do a lot of damage depending on what books people happen to get hold of and what they hear. People don’t necessarily take the trouble to differentiate between the amateur and the professional.
Interview on March 24th 2013
Summary of Conversation
About the value of Laban – a creative mind if not a creator of systems. His legacy is diminished by his unquestioning admirers. Further discussion about the nature of Flow and WL’s increasing awareness of its importance in relation to the movement of older people. Fear of falling. Some very useful detail about how one manages one’s flow of shaping when walking. WL: ‘It’s my belief and my experience of having been with him [Laban] that he was always looking at movement as a process.’ DM describes the rhythms of the eight movement factors and how in each person’s movement profile they fall within a certain bandwidth. WL very much likes the term.
WL: … When you establish the direction, where it’s aiming would be a better term, then you are quantifying.
DM: The problem with Laban talking about the eight Efforts … I think it is hugely appealing to actors, as are Michael Chekhov’s four Movement Qualities – Moulding, Floating, Flying, Radiating – in other words, the elements. They appeal to the actor’s imagination. They are easy ways in. But if you want any subtlety, you must include Shape. Every Effort has to have a Shape dimensions to it.
WL: It’s both ways round, every Shaping has to have an Effort.
DM: By isolating these elements into these eight Efforts I think it becomes reductive. As you said, and as Laban said, it is about the changes between these Efforts.
WL: When Laban used the terms … Is not how his students succeeding have interpreted them.
DM: In a very brief answer to your question I would say that I am a researcher who is researching Laban, because he is a very interesting man. I said to Eden when I saw her last Wednesday that his movement system that cannot differentiate between pulling and pushing.
WL: That’s because he’s a bit ambiguous about how he relates Shaping to the basic Efforts. Although he does incorporate a lot of Shaping in his own perception, as in much of his thinking, he often is ambiguous.
DM: You generously say that he was acting the Guru, I might say that he is bullshitting.
WL: Absolutely.
DM: I would like, finally, to write a book about him. Early chapters would detail my problems with him, and then I would get on to why we need Lamb. I would not include Geraldine [Stephenson] because she doesn’t contribute much to an understanding of Laban. She was a great movement teacher and is the reason you and I met. She liked the Efforts and Floor Patterns, didn’t like notation or choreutics, and hated the fact that he would stop a piece of music in the middle of a phrase. You can account for each human being’s unique movement profile, and he can’t.
[Discussion of Geraldine’s worsening dementia]
WL: I think we do more of a disservice to Laban with this passionate obsession with him and making a cult out of him, treating him like Chairman Mao who can do no harm. He do quite a lot of bullshitting but he also had remarkably creative ideas which perhaps, which if it hadn’t been for some bullshitting as well, he couldn’t have produced.
DM: That’s fascinating. It is almost as if the matrix in which these gems were held was this bullshit. You needed something to hold it together.
WL: He was very egotistical and thought a lot of himself. Buoyed up with this drive and revelling in these admiring, devoted, dedicated students… It wasn’t just women; men were ready to recognise that he did have remarkable creative faculties. And of course his achievements, when he organised the [1929] pageant in Vienna which was 7 miles long. He was incredible at being able to organise that sort of thing as a choreographer. Men could not but help … but they were concerned about their wives at the same time.
[Discussion of Laban’s womanising.]
DM: Do you remember me sending you an MS of Laban’s How to Establish a German Dance Theatre? Do you think it would be an idea to publish a 10,000 word extract from that MS? I can see how he wouldn’t have been upset by the idea of a German Dance Theatre. The idea of it being German. He did consider much black dance in America as a bastardisation of European dances. Jazz dances were an appropriation and misunderstanding of European dance.
WL: Do you agree with him?
DM: No, I think it’s tosh. There is a genius in him, and I’m trying to find out what it was.
WL: He was prepared to distort his genius for expediency. That is evidenced in his preparedness to go along with the Nazis and serve their interests. But I think he always retained some pursuit of a dream of personal understanding gained through movement. If he ever need to justify what he was doing to himself, he could always feel, quite genuinely, I think he was trying to influence the Nazis to a more human way of treating people.
DM: He choreographed the ceremony for the opening of the Dietrich Eckhart Stadium for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Goebels hated it and sacked him. A look at the programme completely confirms what you’ve just said, which is that Laban thought he could somehow humanise through movement. This programme was like a death wish because it talked about the realisation of the individual through movement.
WL: He thought, ‘If I march with them to some extent then I will be able to influence them. If I don’t associate with them then I will be in a concentration camp in no time at all.’
DM: After doing two interviews with John Hodgson, Felicia Sachs still hadn’t managed to offer a satisfactory account of her feelings about Laban and the Nazis. They had both been in Berlin at the same time. She wrote a 4-page letter to Hodgson where she related how, having had dinner with Goebbels and Hitler, Laban rang her late in the evening. He said, ‘I need to see you now’ and told her how these people were mad and murderous. She wrote that he had never thought for a moment whom he was talking with, her a Jewish woman much more in fear of her life than he. He was such a titanic egotist that he didn’t notice.
The question that I’ve been thinking about a lot is Flow. You’ll have read Geoffrey Longstaff’s article about Flow? It’s fascinating, but I don’t think it gets to the bottom of what is Flow. Have you come across Csikszentmihalyi’s book on Flow? Flow is the zone between anxiety (where action is rendered impossible) and boredom (where action is rendered impossible). In this zone the task is just sufficiently challenging for you to be able to do it. Then I think of Tai Chi where one is learning how to achieve fluency in a learned movement. How do you detect Flow? Is it just a feeling that you have, is it kinaesthetic empathy on your part?
WL: No, I have always militated against Flow just as feeling. You notice that somebody … the best way to notice it is somebody at the extreme. If you see somebody who is falling a bit then then is the person going to fall, or will he or she be able to reverse the process of Flow so that they collect themselves? I am more interested in Flow now than ever because my own balance is very suspect and I really feel vulnerable to falling.
[WL: Personal recollections of recent falls.]
WL: It has never got back to how it was before. All this was last September. So I am constantly reversing the Flow much more than I ever did in the rest of my life. Quite often you would try and maintain a free Flow but now I am binding. I had never realised there were so many old people who had walking difficulties in the country. Many of them have a stick, but I find a stick an impediment and do much better without a stick. I think it breaks up the Flow. Basically, a reliance on the stick does restrict the Flow of the movement. It’s the same if the pavements are icy then of course people like me have concerns for falling. They actually get to the bound, rigid extreme of Flow and let it go just a little bit, so they preclude any mastery of rhythm of Flow. I find that if I can get into a rhythm co-ordinated with my breathing, then I do much better. So, these you can observe. You can see people rigid and allowing hardly any reversing into the opposite Free Flow. Because once you are very close to the rigid paralysis, but once you start to be less bound you’re doing Free Flow in a sense. Don’t you think that these things can be seen?
DM: I’ve not heard you explain this to me before. I suddenly see how important your loops are. It’s not that a point on a scale is maintained, but there is a constant going towards the limit of one of the poles and then reversing the movement.
WL: I don’t think anybody, I’ve not known anyone publish see-saws with a representation of these patterns of Flow. Carol-Lynne referred to it as my spaghetti.
[WL: Another personal account of a fall.]
DM: You’ve always taught me about the relationship between Effort and Shape. And I know we did Flow Shaping, but when you’re talking about walking, I realise the Saggital implication of what you’re talking about. That is a Saggital Flow with a certain up and down-ness and a certain turning.
WL: I do try as I walk to activate the up and down-ness, and the lateral variation, to a small degree, but just try to … because I think that the more I remind myself of the total framework of movement, rather than just specialising in one particular component the better.
DM: I am thinking a lot about ‘non-conscious cognitive activity’. The kind of cognitive activity that is necessary, say for sportsmen to make about speed, distance and direction. But it’s also the same for us when we walk. When we think about walking it binds our Flow. I think it is about control to a certain extent and Laban was right there.
WL: I agree
DM: He’s also right, and he doesn’t say this in his English, but does in his German writings, that Flow is about balance. Two years ago I said this to you, and you said, ‘Yes, of course!’
WL: Control is rhythm and it’s having a positive and maintaining rhythm that gives you control. If it’s only bound, well it’s more or less bound in its rhythm. That might be appropriate to some tasks. Usually you need to have some sort of balance of Free Flow with the Bound Flow, if only as an intermediary movement.
DM: You need a balance between Rest and Effort.
WL: Laban said that, but he also gives the opportunity to say that Flow is control. It’s my belief and my experience of having been with him that he was always looking at movement as a process. But writing about movement is difficult, so it’s understandable that lots and lots of readers don’t get that understanding of movement as a process from reading the books that he writes.
DM: And maybe spending too much time reading books rather than being in a studio moving and watching people move. You have made attempts to communicate your ideas through books.
WL: It’s always dissatisfying but I think it’s worth making the attempt. But then you can try with pictures and accompanying videos or whatever.
DM: But you need Warren Lamb’s eye to be able to pick up the movement from the video!
When I teach movement I try and deal with very simple principles and then after five years they may start to make sense. It doesn’t come immediately.
WL: I think what you teach in movement is extremely rare.
DM: I am starting to see the possibilities in Laban’s choreutics. Much of it I still don’t think is useful to an actor, though maybe it is to dancers. But the Octahedron is a very imaginable space, because it is the peripheral of the Dimensional Cross. The more I explore the Octahedron the better I find I am oriented in space.
[…]
DM: The Warren Lamb Trust is now part of Motus Humanus. The practitioners of MPA all seem to agree that because MPA is a general term and can’t be registered in order to the intellectual property of MPA, the use of my name would good. So my name will be used in connection with MPA.
[Discussion of the committee of the Warren Lamb Trust]
My son Tim wrote a thesis on Action Profiling as it was then called for his Masters at Imperial College. That is quite highly regarded. And then the Harvard people have done two research programmes which have had very positive results. I don’t quite what will develop. I have always been a bit worried about the woman who runs it, Brenda Connors. However, an article has been accepted in a magazine, a bit like Nature. It is a respectable journal. And the Professor at Harvard, Tim Coulton, he likes to refer to it as the Laban-Lamb technology, system, or whatever you like to call it. Do you think that’s a good idea?
DM: I think it’s fair to say that you couldn’t have got to where you are now without Laban.
WL: That is true to say, definitely. So that’s the situation now. There are lots of talks going on between Carol-Lynne (Moore), James (McBride) and Ritu and lots of other people and I feel quite happy that a lot of this is happening without any involvement from me.
[DM talks about his own archive and its chaotic state]
DM: I’m glad I’ve come up with the concept of band-width [to describe the limits in the polarities of any person’s initiative], because it’s a term that everyone understands. It describes range. I might write something on band-width and then you could comment on its applicability to your framework.
WL: Oh yes, please do. I’d be very pleased. I will be a very avid reader.
DM: I think it would start off as a correspondence, with you telling me whether it makes sense or not. Then the graphs would look less like spaghetti and be more about ranges.
WL: No one has ever picked up on the spaghetti and used this in their own publications.
DM: It took me so long to understand what was meant in the phrase, ‘Movement is a process of variation.’ And the band-width is the degree of habitual variation for any particular person. Obviously it will change in moments of anxiety and excitement, but it still describes this process of variation.
WL: it’s a great process.
DM: I will meet with my friend [the physicist] David Wolfe to get a technical definition of band-width. I hope that it might give recognition to one of your concepts, because the spaghetti diagrams were the only things cut in An Eye for Movement.