Diseño de experimentos

The theater, he wrote, is where we go to see life “in contemplations and through a magnifying glass” (1971, p. 107). To Laban, a person who has no interest in man’s strivings is hardly an actor, nor is he yet a human being. He described the connection between what happens on the stage and what human beings learn from engaging with performance as personal responsibility, what they come to understand about consequences of actions; and as a civilizing process.

Action and interaction are the baseline of learning about the world; in that sense, man creates his own fate. The constant renegotiation of inner and outer behaviors yields both character and values. Individual motivations vary greatly, and therefore, as interactions unfurl onstage, greater range and complexity of character and situation can be revealed.

Ageless struggles are the fodder of great drama and ballet, and Laban saw the Effort work (space-weight-time-flow in combinations that reveal intent and attitude) as the tapestry threads of human interactions, both dramatic and comedic.

All Effort action or reaction is an approach towards values, the primary value being the maintenance or achievement of the balance needed for the individual’s survival … the actor is the mediator between the solitary self of the spectator and the world of values.

(Laban, 1971, pp. 119–21) Therefore, performers need to practice extremes and the in-between; to have access to the essence and the complexity of many human behaviors. People do not stay in one pattern or one attitude. During the shifts some elements change, some remain and persist, others disappear. Humans manifest disharmonies and create dramatic tensions, and these are observable, replicable and revealing of deeper layers of the psyche.

An experiment from theater to understand how Effort plays out might be to take a scene—for example, the handkerchief scene from Othello—and remove the dialogue, but think the dialogue as the actors move around the room. The qualities of the glances, the juxtapositions, the pauses, and the unfolding of the story itself can reveal much about the layers of intrigue, love and betrayal that Shakespeare was writing about.

Laban’s basic understanding of theory-into-practice was best stated by himself: Man’s material body is like an anvil on which the blows of life incessantly beat … The power to make people believe in such almost ineffable things resides entirely in the artist’s well-cultivated movement capacity.

(Laban, 1971, pp. 158–60) In additional notes from the NRCD, he pointed out that “any activity is a sequence of Efforts—partly visible in rhythms of body movements or somatic indications of dynamics, partly audible in words.” He wrote further about the “rhythms of ideas”, including metaphoric expressions that are used in imagistic or symbolic sequences.

Laban directly addressed the Cartesian mind–body split in The Mastery of Movement. He believed and promoted the idea that somatic and mental Efforts are combined into

action sequences in which the flow is characterized by changes (the appearance and disappearance of phenomena) in the flow of the action. Some of these qualities serve the action; others are ancillary and idiosyncratic. Laban also understood that the ancillary and idiosyncratic qualities are the most revealing of personal style and character.

THERAPY

Effort study yields more than improvement of performance. Laban also understood that Effort practice reveals internal conflicts and struggles with the ego. For example, one can observe particular discrepancies between the postural qualities and the gestural qualities in some psychiatric disorders. Through the process of attuning to the underlying or latent qualities, a client or patient can be supported into and through a course of healing and reclaiming of the self. Laban himself worked with people in this way, most notably described by Mary Wigman. He was engaged by an extremely elderly woman to teach her to dance again. The woman was wheelchair-bound, but through his support and attunement to her, Laban managed to get her to stand and sway, and, ultimately, to dance with him.

In this sense, he was an early dance therapist, intuiting the possibility of intervention and developmental treatment. In fact, he understood development to be a process of selection via the elimination and acquisition of Efforts, a theoretical approach to therapy that was later developed further by Dr Judith Kestenberg, a child psychiatrist who developed the Kestenberg Movement Profile.

Laban noted that the tendency to consciously and conspicuously change qualities, to conceal and reveal Efforts, and to freeze expression in patterned and predictable ways is how humans identify and recognize the individual. He wrote in his notes that voluntary dissolution or masking of Efforts could be seen as a form of deception, whereas involuntary dissolution or masking of Efforts could be seen as states of dysfunction or illness. The attempt to mask is visible, just as the attempt to perform is seen as just that: an attempt. But it is also possible to see the struggle of an individual to drop a mask and to be freed from dysfunctional patterns as a struggle to heal.

Taking further the theory of how Effort reveals personality and the conflicts therein, he added that any living movement has the possibility of a countermove in itself. The countermovement might be something like falling backwards when one intends to move forwards, or dropping into passivity at a moment when direct action is required. Effort preferences can lead the body into having internal “arguments” about where one is heading. In such instances, one can literally find oneself coming and going, stumbling, tripping, or displaying a lack of commitment to any one direction. But when such counter moves are not restricted or confused they can also function as counter-flow, counter- space, counter-weightedness, or counter tension.

Countering is different from conflict in that give-and-take is inherently present; countering is, literally, the dance of negotiation. In inner conflict, the mind bounces from one pull to the other, and reconciliation between the two is often the challenge of the dramatic, onstage and in real life. In countering, the fullness of choices is palpable, and the tensions between them serve to enhance awareness of the degree of personal agency the mover has.

An exercise to illustrate this: Try walking forward, while imagining being called from behind, noting the negotiation that takes place internally in order to respond to both aims. Which direction wins out?

We have understood that Laban favored movement over position, dynamism over stasis. “Life is a special rhythmical case,” he wrote. “Existence as a polarized unit is not life. Life is full of organic radiation.” (NRCD notes) The study of Effort provides a way for living beings to become more conscious and integrated with biophysical realities and to utilize these for creative and healing purposes. He wrote that “we must distinguish between the psychology of thought and the psychology of adaptive acts. But in the end, there is no other function than physicality.” Our behaviors and their patterns reveal what we are conscious of as well as what we are not conscious of, and, through movement, the unconscious can be made visible, and recovered as part of the fabric of the self.