(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.