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In-Depth Information
the entire community. Early rock paintings discovered in India depict dancing
figures that date back 9,000 years. The study of dance and dance theory is a
broad subject and may also be linked directly to many other fields of study,
including anthropology, culture, gender, and ethnography.
The study and analysis of movement, choreography, and the language of
dance constitute an art in itself and is covered extensively and systematically
by Rudolf Laban. Born in Hungary in 1879, Laban became interested in
human movement in relation to space during his studies as an architect. He
established a systematic way of notating dance movement based around
four main categories: body, effort, shape, and space. Laban's system, first
published in 1928, later became known as Labanotation and remains in use as
a form of dance notation. His system not only found application for dance and
choreographed movement but also in industrial time-and-motion studies in
an effort to reduce wasted time, effort, and energy.
It is important that we see the kind of systematic approaches to the analysis
of movement as created by the likes of Laban and Ekman as tools for the
analysis and understanding of that movement and, in the case of Ekman, the
associated emotions to movement. These approaches
cannot
be seen to be
formulaic processes whereby performance through movement, as covered
within each of the systems, can be made. They are akin to musical notation
systems. Music notation provides a way of recording the
underpinning idea
of
the music, but it neither records the actual music nor provides a way to create
a Mozart.
