Review of Laban's The Mastery of Movement (1950)

Laban, Rudolf. The Mastery of Movement. 1950. 4th ed. Edited by Lisa Ullman. Alton, UK: Dance Books, 1980.

July 5, 2024

In the mid-twentieth century, Rudolf von Laban famously pioneered a kinetographic notation system known as Labanotation, which had as its aim the encoding of human motion in writing for the purposes of reproducing movement-based works of performance art and for preservation in the historical record. This notation system endures today as a leading system for recording movement in written form. While recent monographs have examined more critically Laban's collaboration with the Nazi regime in post-Weimar Germany, however, more critical analysis remains to be brought to bear on the racism and white supremacist ideation in works like Mastery.

One of the primary motivations of this text is to assist the reader in understanding the relationship between a human being's inner motivations and the outward expressiveness of movement: "So movement evidently reveals many different things. It is the result of the striving after an object deemed valuable, or of a state of mind. Its shapes and rhythms show the moving person's attitude in a particular situation. It can characterise momentary mood and reaction as well as constant features of personality" (p. 2). To understand the mechanics of human movement and to become adept at its observation and interpretation, then, is to better understand the hidden inner workings and motivations which drive human beings' interactions with and movement through their surroundings. By understanding the relationship between inner motivations and outward expression through careful and systematic movement observation, Laban aims to assist performance artists, namely dancers, actors, and mimes, in honing their expressive capacities.

Laban elaborates a methodical analysis of the essential elements of human movement and the "effort qualities" which give movement its expressive character, distinguishing robotic or "purely" mechanical movement from expressive motion, which he identifies as a defining and quintessential feature of the human species. According to Laban, these effort qualities arise from "an inner attitude" toward weight, space, time, and what Laban calls "Flow"—these last four falling undering the label of "motion factors". The author elaborates the connection between motion factors and personality: "The variety of human character is derived from the multitude of possible attitudes towards the motion factors, and certain tendencies herein can become habitual with the individual. It is of the greatest importance for the actor-dancer to recognise that such habitual inner attitudes are the basic indications of what we call character and temperament" (p. 22).

For those who are entirely new to Laban's concept of movement-thinking and method of movement analysis, this text serves as an introductory primer, detailing how Laban organizes human movement into archetypal categories, which he calls "basic actions", and how his concept of inner states finds its expression in movement through "effort patterns". Where The Mastery of Movement excels is in its discussions of dance, mime, and theater as expressive art forms rooted in movement and how practitioners of these forms can integrate Laban's conceptual framework into their practice. These discussions are supplemented by detailed examinations of how to develop one's movement imagination through the cultivation of careful observation and an understanding of how movement communicates intention and character for audiences and observers. Readers with a general interest in performance or in movement as a non-linguistic medium of communication will find a wealth of relevant material in this book.

On the other hand, those whose goal is proficiency in Labanotation and Laban's approach to movement analysis will find that this text lacks the thoroughness and depth that can be found in works like Laban's Choreutics and Ann Hutchinson's Labanotation, which are better suited to learning the notation system's symbology and syntax. While there is a limited introduction to the notation system in Mastery, there are only a handful of explanatory examples, most of which require careful attention and a substantial amount of cross-referencing with other tables and appendices to properly interpret for the uninitiated. These notations are included in the text to supplement discussions but are not essential to understanding the thrust of Laban's analysis. Those who are new to Labanotation and insist on making use of the kinetographs might find themselves juggling laboriously between explanatory tables which come in the later chapters or in the appendix.

One crucially important matter about this text remains to be noted here, which is the racism that threads through it and that arguably undergirds the foundation of Laban's intellectual enterprise and conception of movement. Starting in chapter four, "The Significance of Movement", race and racist distinctions come to the fore as a defining feature of Laban's analysis of movement typologies. A pair of dualisms that are common to white supremacist ideology is the primitive/modern and tribal/European distinctions, which Laban conceives as essential and absolute breaks. These take up a substantial portion of the opening considerations in chapter four and resurface in chapter six, "The Significance of Movement". That there is a racist hierarchy undergirding his descriptions of non-European forms is beyond doubt: Laban associates "Moorish" and other African dances with the "grotesque or disharmonious" (p. 84). Moorish dance forms are noted for their "asymmetric tortuousness" which later dance traditions "surpassed" (p. 84). He goes on to posit the "harmonious" and the "grotesque" as mutually exclusive oppositions: "We can connect bodily attitudes with either harmonious or grotesque transitional movements" (p. 84).

Ballet, on the other hand, is, in the Labanist framework, faultless. Indeed, ballet, even when it shares certain fundamental movement expressions as the retrograde, "primitive" dance forms, manages to always do so better—entirely consistent with a racialized supremacist framework: "The fundamental urges of possession (grip) and repulsion (punch) which find expression in primitive movement are in ballet dissolved into a varied scale of harmonious forms that possess only an evocative character" (p.85). In chapter six, this racial essentialism turns toward notions of "deep-mover" and "high-mover" dance types, which break along the traditional Africanist/Europeanist divide, which Laban takes as fundamental. There is much that remains to be said about the racism that pervades Laban's conceptualization of movement expression, but I will end with one particularly disturbing comment from chapter six, recalling that "deep-mover" is in Laban's usage coded as Africanist or Black while "high-mover" is overtly associated with ballet: "If the deep-dance types would move in a deep-dance style, such as are seen in certain primitive or folk dances, they would be more at ease, since they would express what nature has predestined them to express" (p. 127, italic emphasis added). Analyses of Mastery specifically or of Laban's framework in general that fail to touch on the racism apparent in his analysis are actively obscuring the supremacist analysis that Laban himself centers as foundational and essential.

Whatever the merits of Laban Movement Analysis or Labanotation, there is a tremendous violence which underlies the Labanist framework, and this issue has long been under-analyzed when it hasn't been outright ignored, although in more recent years works like Dancing on Violent Ground have sought to prioritize this analysis. An analysis of extant reviews on sites like Goodreads yields an unsurprising and yet nonetheless jolting recognition that Laban's overt white supremacy which Laban himself makes central continues to be passed over without comment. That contemporary readers, particularly my fellow white reviewers, would avoid discussing the racism that Laban himself so readily embraces is noteworthy although entirely expected in the fields of dance and theatre where white supremacy continues to operate in more subterranean forms than the boldly upfront racism of the mid-twentieth century when Mastery appeared.