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(An informal monthly-ish gathering focused on Laban Movement Analysis. Attending: Peggy Hackney, Lisa Wymore, Brenton Cheng.)

Highlights:

• What is it possible to detect using motion capture technology? What limits are imposed by the technology? What limits are imposed by the LMA system itself? As noted before, it is difficult to capture Weight Effort and Space Effort.
• How is Strong Effort conveyed? Is it through a force which is actually applied, suggesting that you can’t actually manifest Strong Effort unless you have something to push (or pull) against? Or is it a *potential* for a force to be applied, such as a person pulsing with rage who is poised to act with all their might?

(An informal monthly-ish gathering focused on Laban Movement Analysis. Attending: Peggy Hackney, Brenton Cheng.)

Highlights:

• There is a desire among motion capture researchers to validate the Laban Efforts using their technology. However, this has proved difficult. Even among human observers, the only way to get inter-observer reliability with Efforts is for the observers to have trained together, using absolutely identical Effort definitions and observation subjects. Assessment of Space Effort and Weight Effort seem especially sensitive to the observer’s background. For me, this raises questions about whether one can really claim these qualities as objectively observable. If they are not objectively observable in any kind of consistent way, then we should certainly not expect a machine to be able to capture them. Perhaps this is the litmus test: if a machine might (one day) be able to discern a particular quality, then it can be included within the class of objectively observable qualities for which inter-observer reliability is possible. So what should we do with the other qualities that fail this test?
• LMA should have a collection of little videos online, illustrating Laban qualities, showing exercises, demonstrating hands-on interventions, etc. One example site doing this is Movements Afoot.

(An informal monthly-ish gathering focused on Laban Movement Analysis. Attending: Peggy Hackney, Lisa Wymore, Brenton Cheng.)

Highlights:

• In his 2011 ICKL paper, Raphaël Cottin proposes changing the Shape Action Stroke from two parallel diagonal lines to a single diagonal line with a filled-in dot at its lower end. By doing so, he attempts to address the current graphical inconsistency arising from the fact that the two lines of the current Shape Action Stroke vary by small amounts, depending on which Shape aspects hang off of it. e.g. Currently, with Rising, the two lines’ lower edges line up vertically, whereas with Enclosing, they line up horizontally. This effectively prevents standard typesetting, both physical or digital, because the Shape Action Stroke’s line lengths are constantly changing. Raphaël also thoughtfully addresses a number of other notation issues related to Shape. Is it possible to change a symbol that has become fairly established over time? Where might this discussion continue?
• We have had great feedback from doing “scale meditations”, going through Laban scales silently, as a group ritual, at the beginning of class in our trainings.
• Peggy teaches a “Foundations for Composition” class at UC Berkeley. It uses an Early Axis (i.e. playful, exploratory… see Creative Systems Theory) approach to exploring both sources of performance material and tools for deepening the sources and providing a language (i.e. LMA) for describing and developing the movement that results. A sample exercise: A improvises. B observes. When B sees a moment that feels particularly alive, B calls “repeat”, and A repeats the movement three times before continuing on in the improvisation. After 5-10 minutes, each person names what they liked using LMA terms.
• Exercise for exploring the meaning of movement: A improvises, crossing the room, observed by B. Then, each person does a free write on the meaning of the movement. A and B compare notes.
• Exercise for exploring Effort (from Lisa): Everyone repeats a simple rhythm together, e.g. a triplet that alternates with each foot, stepping into the center of a circle. Someone calls out an Effort quality (single Efforts or combinations), and the rhythmic movement continues using the specified quality.
• Idea: Scan all teaching hand-outs, including out-of-print books, into PDFs and parse them using OCR (optical character recognition) technology, in order to create an eternally preserved, tree-saving, cost-reducing, fully searchable archive of LMA resources. Students could optionally print them out. Copyrights would need to be respected.
• Idea: Create a compendium of the music that we LMA teachers use to convey a sense of each LMA quality in our classes.
• Idea: Create an open wiki for LMA or fully develop the existing listings on Wikipedia.
• Idea: The LMA Syllabus Exchange. Create a place where teachers can post their LMA syllabi.

(An informal monthly-ish gathering focused on Laban Movement Analysis. Attending: Peggy Hackney, Brenton Cheng.)

Highlights:

• Laban’s “Dynamosphere” is a visual representation of the various flavors of Action Drive and their relationships. It maps each variation to a location in space, based on its component Efforts. Collectively, they form the vertices of a cube. It has been noted by many (Geoffrey Longstaff, Peggy Hackney, etc.) that the use of space in this representation is metaphorical (or “formal” or “conceptual”) space; it facilitates visualizing the relationships among the Effort combinations and does not necessarily correspond to actual physical space. Confusion can arise because the Effort directions chosen in this visualization correspond to the directional “affinities” of the basic Efforts in physical space that were commonly observed by Laban, and so it is easy to assume that the Dynamosphere is making a statement about how these variations of Action Drive appear in physical space — e.g. that going to Right Back Low with the left arm will be a Punch. Laban’s writings suggest that the Dynamosphere was actually primarily a way to make it easier to see Effort relationships.
• Normally, the component Efforts on which the standard Effort Cube is based are Weight, Time, and Space — no Flow. One can create three other “Flow-ful” Effort Cubes by replacing each of the axes, i.e. each of the component Motion Factors, with Flow. So, instead of the Vertical axis representing Weight Effort, it could be assigned to Flow, with perhaps Free Flow in the Upward direction and Bound Flow in the Downward direction. Going Right, Forward, High with the right arm would then be  Indirect, Sustained, Free Flow. How would the Diagonal Scale feel using each of these altered cubes? 🙂
• Could the entire taxonomy of LMA terms be mapped to a tree structure? What would be the starting node, the root node? “Laban Movement Analysis”? “Unspecified Action”? And where would the “meta-themes” of Exertion/Recuperation, Inner/Outer, Function/Expression, Stability/Mobility, etc. be located? Perhaps the tree structure of Motif Notation symbols could provide a starting point.

(An informal monthly-ish gathering focused on Laban Movement Analysis. Attending: Peggy Hackney, Brenton Cheng.)

Highlights:

• 

  For non-stretchable symbols, how should one indicate that the action continues for some length of time? In Charlotte Wile’s “Moving About”, a wavy line indicates “continue freely in the previously stated manner”, but this is then clarified as being a “repeat” rather than an extended duration. Similarly, in the first edition of Anne Hutchinson Guest’s “Your Move”, repetition is addressed but not duration for non-stretchables. In the Integrated Movement Studies cert program, we attach the Unspecified Action Stroke to the symbol via a tiny bow to indicate continued duration. However, some feel this could be confused with the initial action happening momentarily and phrasing into an Unspecified Action.

• In the IMS program, when teaching the Modes of Shape Change, we often refer to a relationship aspect of each mode, saying that Shape Flow is “self-to-self”, while Directional and Carving are “self-to-other”. While these relational intentions may be a part of *why* the mover activates a particular Mode, I have stopped making them a part of the *definition* of the Modes, because I think they depart from observable, physical description and enter the realm of observer projection on the mover. Instead, I keep my definitions strictly about Shape: Shape Flow is “non-localized, often amoeba-like shape change”; Directional is “linear or planar shape change towards a destination point”; Carving is “three-dimensional voluminous shape change”. I’m still playing with these definitions.
• At times, the various schools of Laban debate whether certain qualities “exist”. e.g. Effort is completely absent from “Your Move”. Perhaps more useful questions are: “Does the particular concept serve?” or “Does adding granularity in this way enrich the discussion of movement?” Heck, the entire LMA framework is a conceptual fabrication. But it sure makes the experience of movement and movement observation so much juicier!