Dance, Movement & Spiritualities - Current Issue

Through discussion and vignettes, this article shares the author’s application of Rudolf Laban’s Effort framework – the four movement dynamics of Weight, Space, Time and Flow, and the States and Drives that result from various combinations of these – to the freeform, nature-based practice of Amerta Movement, developed by the late Indonesian movement artist/teacher Prapto Suryodarmo (1945–2019). By bringing these culturally different perspectives on the language of movement together, the author discovers ways in which they are mutually supportive. The Effort framework helps to crystallize the author’s recognition of States and Drives as they emerge and change in her Amerta practice; and because Amerta depends on a receptive attitude to what one is experiencing, it re-orients the focus of Effort from doing to receiving, which broadens and refreshes the Effort framework. Also discussed are thoughts arising from this process about the effects and the different ways of ‘naming’ nonverbal experience.

This article explores an unpublished and so far unarticulated aspect of Rudolf Laban’s spiritual thinking which focuses specifically on a diagrammatic sketch drawing by Laban found in the Rudolf Laban Archive at the University of Surrey. In this sketch Laban depicts planes of consciousness and movements of the material and subtle sensory bodies as they relate to his notions of Space, Effort and consciousness, mirroring Rudolf Steiner’s ‘ladder’ of spiritual consciousness. The article further discusses (using this sketch as a stimulus) Laban’s interest in the unconscious, ‘unseen’ aspects of embodiment and his Rosicrucian thinking alongside Steiner’s acknowledgment of the importance of the body as the site of, and portal to, spiritual knowledge and the processual nature of material and subtle existence which has movement at its heart.

This article discusses the author’s experience as a Certified Laban Movement Analyst (CLMA) teaching Laban Movement Analysis and Bartenieff Fundamentals to Dance BFA, BA and Dance Education majors at Brigham Young University (BYU), a private religious university sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, located in Provo, Utah. Reflecting global trends, Latter-day Saint Millennials and Gen Z-ers are increasingly disaffiliating from organized religion. Drawing on teaching observations, lived experience, interviews with other self-identifying Latter-day Saint CLMAs, I reflect on this trend in the context of polarities, doctrinal polarities commonly upheld within Christianity and embodied polarities articulated through the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System (L/BMS) system. Change, Knowing and Wholeness frame the reflection. Pedagogical practices, including assignment descriptions and guided movement explorations, provide some contour around the relevance of Laban’s theories within the context of a twenty-first-century religious education.

Although Rudolf Laban is primarily identified with the analytical frameworks he developed for studying and recording human movements, he remained deeply concerned to understand the complex synthesis of body, effort and space that occurs, seemingly spontaneously, in normal as well as skilled actions. Laban perceived a deeper meaning in this miraculous synthesis, noting that ‘every gesture and action of our body is a deeply rooted mystery’. This article traces how Laban used the metaphors of geometry and harmony to penetrate the physical reality of human movement as well as its metaphysical significance. Discussion centres on two Platonic Solids – the icosahedron and the cube – illustrating how Laban used each respectively to model spatial and dynamic patterns, to examine these elemental patterns in relation to each other and finally to place the human body at the centre of a universe of universal movements, linking microcosm and macrocosm.

This article recounts the Rudolf Laban concept of space harmony, also known as choreutics, as imparted to Megan Reisel, a protégé of the renowned Laban educator and choreographer, Angiola Sartorio, during the latter’s final years from 1991 to 1995. Sartorio presented a fundamental aspect of dancer training, which offers a unique perspective on the interaction between the dancer and space. In this paradigm, space is perceived as an invisible matrix of interconnected lines that emanate from the body’s centre and extend into an intuitive sense of infinite space. By embracing this approach, dancers gain an enriching opportunity to fuse their physical experiences with a spiritual connection to the world we inhabit. This exploration enhances the dancer’s artistic expression while also offering the dancer an invigorating opportunity that blends the physical experience with a spiritual connection to the world in which we live.

This article discusses the complexities around movement dynamics and how the term ‘dynamic archive’ is understood in dance. Drawing from Andre Lepecki’s ‘The body as archive’ (2010), Rudolf Laban and F. C. Lawrence’s Effort theory (1947) and a choreological perspective to investigate the complexities of dynamics as an embodied phenomenon, I discuss the body as a dynamic archive of embodied experience. This article provides debate about how dynamics are learnt and recalled for the purposes of re-staging and how movement dynamics are stored by the dancer as a dynamic archive.