Laban's Choreosophical Model: Movement Visualisation Analysis and the Graphic Media Approach to Dance Studies

Abstract

This paper explores the impact Rudolf Laban's graphic approach has had on movement analysis and an analytical approach to dance-movement based on an understanding of human motion as a collection of fixed points in a movement continuum. Central to this approach is the idea that movement can be captured graphically for its analysis via different techniques of graphic representation: including drawing, 3D modelling, graphs, diagrams and notation. The article also argues that graphic models play a key role in the development of Laban's theory of harmonic space. Based on a series of geometric and topological models Laban was able to develop a material method as part of his creative research on movement analysis. My claim is that Laban's graphic approach encourages the use of visual media and technologies of graphic inscription as inventive methods for the better understanding of movement, which is why Laban's thinking can be adequately reconceptualised using technologies like video and motion capture. As a unit of analysis, this article explores one of Laban's most fundamental and yet least known material models: the spheric form. I argue that this model presents us with a much broader understanding of Laban's movement analysis as a form of material thinking, and not only within the context of dance-training, but as part of a vision of the dance that is complete in its philosophical perspectives, and which Laban called choreosophy. This article finishes with a brief examination of C8's choreography ‘Solid Sense’ (performed in 2011), which in the author's opinion exemplifies, as creative research, some of the central preoccupations of Laban's choreosophical studies.