ACCESSING THE MYSTERIOUS

Laban’s mysticism merged with his passion for clarity, especially preverbal clarity, of communication. While much of theater relies on text, Laban’s contributions are in helping performers find that part of themselves that predates language, reaching back to experiences from one’s early years to find nuance and clarification of qualities.

He saw a continuum of the telling of the human story that ranged from primitive rituals to highly evolved abstract ballets, especially as the audience’s active witnessing informed the work. He felt that any play was like a ballet in that it is an arrangement and guidance of the action.

The actor needs the readiness of as many viewpoints of the audience as possible to merge into a common receptivity, because it is from this intangible but powerful stream that he receives his own power to make the spell always more convincing and irresistible. This is today, as it was in the ancient religious rituals and ceremonies, the essence of that freeing of the human spirit from the bondage of personal worries and everyday considerations, fears, and preoccupations

(NRCD notes) In this sense, theater as well as ballet is “irrational” (Laban’s word) because the audience is partly responsible for the success of the experience. The performer in a ballet represents a person or a character “driven over the stage by a storm of willpower or emotion, like an autumnal leaf is driven over the ground by a real gale.” Laban saw the

embodying of a sequence of Efforts that resonate with the audience member’s experiences of change and constancy and the struggle with both as the essential aim of the artist.

In that sense, every performance is a kind of hero’s journey, one in which the character must truly live through the internal shifts and pulls of the context of the story or setting. One way to experience the depth of what Laban suggests is to extend and expand on the dance or staging, removing any text, and discovering the dance of emotions underneath the surface of a scene or section. Once the underlying “storm” is revealed, the performer can return to the appropriate level of telling or revealing, with all of the unpacking under the surface, but newly clarified.

“Dance is Effort training. Where dance is weak, scanty, rotten, there Effort training is weak, scanty, rotten,” he wrote, thereby placing himself in the realm of the expressionists, who valued such specificity and clarity of particular qualities. “A man is not important through his symbol (his name) nor through his appearance (body-mind presence) but through his life-story (sequence of events),” he wrote in his personal notes (NRCD). These two beliefs in combination reveal the essence of Laban’s philosophy and training-practice of what he called the “god-man-dancer,” or the fully human performer who transcends the everyday behaviors and achieves a level of universality.

In order to achieve such universality, Effort qualities must come from deep inside the history and the understandings of the human body in motion: “All living creatures are constantly consummating their own internal rhythm,” he wrote. Movement behavior is therefore both summative and formative; it is a result of experiences even as it forms those experiences.

In The Mastery of Movement, Laban articulated the differences between artifice and authenticity, and explained why he developed and explored the nature of what is true and essential:

The value of characterization through dance-like mime movements lies in the avoidance of the simple imitation of external movement peculiarities. Such imitation does not penetrate to the hidden recesses of man’s inner Effort. We need an authentic symbol of the inner vision to effect contact with the audience, and this contact can be achieved only if we have learned to think in terms of movement. The central problem of theater is to learn how to use this thinking for the purposes of the mastery of movement.

(Laban, 1971, p. 20) Laban did not separate applications of Effort work to business and industry from Effort work for the stage. He was, as we have seen, interested in artistry and effectiveness in all of human movement. In notes at the NRCD, he defined the broadest range of applications of Effort work:

• Business

• Labour/industrial man • Agriculture

He went on to write that in observing the movements of people more closely one gets the impression that they are representing a kind of description of some experiences of man, which cannot be told in any other way. The possibilities for cross-cultural communication, adapting and understanding become evident and, indeed, the emerging field of peace studies recognizes the value of observing such “writing in the air.”

As an example, Deborah Heifetz-Yahav, a Laban movement analyst in Israel, has analyzed the dance of interactions between Palestinian and Israeli generals in the post- Oslo Peace Accords period. The differences between the cultural patterns and Effort life are as apparent as they are heart-breaking. The analysis reveals how close the two cultures were in their yearnings for peaceful resolutions, but how their inability to adapt to each other’s patterns kept them from finding common ground.