What Laban Means to Me...

A great gift is given to any dancer who studies Laban Movement Analysis. LMA has given me tools and a vocabulary that I could never come up with on my own. Without Laban this contribution to the dance world would not exist. I take his work quite seriously because it enables me to look an analyze movement in a specific way and in a language that any dancer who has studied Laban's work could understand. Hardly any of the language has changed over the years, meaning that Laban was ahead of his time. Anyone can dance but not every dancer understands how and why they move. Laban's work should be understood, at least at an rudimentary level. All of the dancers that surround me in class seem to understand corrections differently, in a more complex nature. They use their understanding from LMA and use it to their advantage. It becomes more internal. All of this is knowledge, plus much much more, has come directly from Laban's work. As dancers we should appreciate all of the knowledge he has given us.

Shows how dancers transform Laban's ideas and generated movement material.

A Movement Choir

Consists of 100 dancers and 400 university students.

College Demonstrates Movement Choirs

Laban's Contribution

Rudolf Laban made enormous contributions to dance. He not only gave descriptions to movement and changed the way we talk about it but he also gave a way to notate movement. Today his language is still used in order to describe movement and to train dancers without much of it changing. His notation system is called Laban Movement Notation. This has been used to reconstruct dances that were never recorded on video. Without Laban we could not see some of the works that existed before video was around. Today educated dancers usually undergo some kind of training in his studies. Some of his students used his work to develop something of their own such as Bartinieff Fundamentals. Others have used his tetrahedron to develop other ways to organize compositional techniques to create movement. Another one of his major contributions was the movement choirs which is discussed in the above Youtube video. There are countless contributions he has made to dancers around the world with the work he did.

There is an App for everything! You better believe it!

This shows Laban's dimensional scales in both the cube and the tetrahedron.

Living Architecture: Rudolf Laban and the Geometry of Dance featuring Valerie Preston-Dunlop (an extract)