Troubling the Frame: Laban Movement Analysis as Critical Dialogue

ABSTRACT

Laban Movement Analysis is a common resource used in dance education curricula in the United States. When used to analyze dance forms that are created outside the Eurocentric lineage, the application of this system must be contextualized as a perspective stemming from beyond the mores of the cultural creators of that dance form. This article examines the effects on student learning when Laban Movement Analysis is promoted as a universal tool for all dance forms rather than as a particular cultural perspective on how to perceive dance. Clarification of terminologies and their biases, the cultural context in which Rudolf Laban developed his principles and system of movement analysis, and ramifications and potential solutions for how best to apply Laban Movement Analysis across dance forms are detailed in this article.

KEYWORDS:

• Laban
• movement
• analysis
• people of color
• culture
• race
• privilege
• oppression
• critical theory

Notes

1. Dance education is being defined for this manuscript according to Koff (2000).

2. In addition to adhering to Chicago format, we choose to capitalize “Black,” “White,” and “Whiteness” when referring to racial classifications as their meaning is no longer referring to skin color but to a social construct (Foster 2003).

3. The development of the terms “marginalized majority” and “dominant minority” began with a keynote speech from Brenda Dixon-Gottschild at the 2019 Women in Dance Leadership Conference. There Dr. Dixon-Gottschild shared the terms “people of the global majority” to refer to people of color and “people of the global minority” to refer to White people as the terms operate in varying ways around the globe. From that contribution, then we modified the terms to be specific to the U.S. context of this article and also to name the sociopolitical power dynamics of race in the U.S.

4. Haraway defines “the god trick” as “seeing everything from nowhere” (1988, 581). This refers to the illusion of purported objectivity of experts and scholars in knowledge and content production.

5. While citation etiquette dictates we cite the source we as authors used, it is curious to note that Kealiinohomoku first published this in Impulse in 1970, a half century ago. This significant assertion still needs to be made a full fifty years after its initial publication.

6. Rudolf Laban was Austro-Hungarian, born in what is current-day Bratislava, Slovakia (Vertinsky 2004).

7. For example Space Harmony; dimensions, and planes, Effort Shape; qualities, Motif Notation, polarities are titles of elements of LMA employed in dance education.

8. There is one caveat here, Mary Wigman. She is now under the same scrutiny that Laban is for her support of the Third Reich, as well as her marginalization of Jewish dancers and dancers who did not embody the ethos of the government (Manning 2017).

9. Also of note is the ethnographic work of E. Jean Johnson Jones, certified in Labanotation and LMA, who used her expertise in Labanotation and Laban Movement Analysis in her ethnographic research on the Nama Stap dance of the Nama people of South Africa (Johnson Jones 1999, 2007).

10. The Teachers College statement continues: “ … however, we are not erasing his name or memory from TC’s history. We will relocate his commemorative plaque to a suitable venue for learning on the TC campus. And as a community of scholars and learners, we will continue to assess his work in its entirety and his life in all of its complexity. Many will continue to respect his positive achievements.”

11. A notable exception is scholar E. Johnson Jones (1999, 2007) who models a dialogic, critical process with Africanist dance artists and the application of LMA.

12. Not sharing historical context of a dance or the creator of a dance aligns with colonialist social mechanisms of silencing marginalized majority dances and people as well. While this is a worthy conversation to be had, it extends beyond the scope of this article and is owed its own treatment.

13. Any codified (i.e. the codified Sanskrit manual on performance, the Natya Shastra), or certified by a certifying body, dance technique such as Horton, Dunham, Simonson Jazz, Umfundalai, and the several codified ballet training programs requiring certification such as R.A.D. or Vaganova, also systems of notation or analysis such as the Benesh Movement Notation System, various strains of yoga philosophies and numerous yoga certification programs, somatic practices such as the Feldenkrais Method®, the Alexander Technique®, the Franklin Method® Continuum, among several others.

14. “A Lynching Memorial is Opening, the Country has Never Seen Anything Like It,” The New York Times, April 25, 2018. Accessed April 8, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/us/lynching-memorial-alabama.html.