Practically Applying Analysis

Laban Notation is a way to accurately pass dances down from generation to generation in a written format. It can be used to help understand subtle nuances in the movement that can be missed by the eye when learning from a video or from an instructor.

Through our semester learning different aspect of analysis and Laban notation the idea of effort qualities and motif scores equally caught my interest. The idea of effort qualities consists of four major opposing principals; light, strong, free and bound. These all made sense to me, and I was able to start applying them in my other course work, through technique classes and through learning choreography for shows. These effort qualities gave me a whole new prospective on the subtleties of movement that I had never considered before. How a simple hand gesture could be completely changed based on the effort you put in gave moving another layer that I had always previously dismissed to some extent: the subtle qualities of my body as it moved through space.

Towards the second half of the semester we started to actually read scores. At first, all those symbols lined up on the page were daunting. Then we got to motif scores and everything fell into place for me. Motif score righting is a less specific from of notation. It doesn’t give specific steps but instead gives basic movements that the dancer then mist fill in for themselves such as moving forward in a counter clockwise circle. That could mean anything you want as long as you move forward in a counterclockwise circle of some kind. From then on reading scores became exciting to me, what had started off as an intimidating task now became fun. I was excited to see what these shapes and lines, that would make no sense to most people, would come to be.

In my future I plan on working with dance therapy as well as integrating other dances and cultures into my work through either choreography or performance. Thanks to this class I have been given a tool set in which to make my goals even more attainable. I can use the ideas and terminology of effort qualities when working with patients in dance therapy. It is a new way for them to understand what I am trying to say and it is a different form of wording that will lead away from triggers. For example, in patients with Parkinson’s disease, it is better not to say freeze, because for them freezing is a bad thing. When they freeze they can’t move even if they wanted to. Instead of freeze you then could incorporate bound or heavy as an idea. As for learning different cultural dances, the dances that have been written down are full of information about those cultures. Of course that will not be all, there is nothing like learning about something you are unfamiliar with first hand, however it will again give a deeper understanding of the movement and the ideas of the steps that would otherwise be lost.

Through this semester we have all been instilled with new ideas and tools to help further our corers and our lives as dancers and movers. Even if you aren’t a dancer, the techniques and formats we have learned can be applied to other things such as research on lost cultures. This class has made a big impact on me and has created a love for something that, before this semester, I knew nothing about.