Laban Movement Analysis Bartenieff Fundamentals
Laban Movement Analysis
Movement Educator Natasha Martina leads classes based in the Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), developed by Rudolf Laban (1879-1958), who was best known for creating a dance notation system to record and recapture dance. Laban looked at both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of movement through four categorical lenses: Body, Effort, Shape, and Space (BESS).
Underpinning these four categories, LMA draws upon themes surrounding function and expression, stability and mobility, exertion and recuperation, and inner and outer expression.
“Body” dives into the anatomical and physiological principles of breath support, dynamic connectivity, grounding, and intention in movement.
“Effort” provides one with an attunement to their psycho-physical body through awareness of their feeling states and how such awareness gives rise to their use of expression.
“Shape” draws upon vocabulary with regard to one’s relationship to self, or through bridging to one’s environment, or connection to others.
“Space” encapsulates kinesphere, and how one negotiates and utilizes the full capacity of space surrounding them while also reaching out to the space beyond.
Bartenieff Fundamentals
Laban mentored many educators along the way, most notably Irmgard Bartenieff (1925- 1981), who took Laban’s work and delved deeper into anatomical structures of the body, deciphering inefficient physical patterning that occurs as a result of culture, injuries, and psychological trauma. Her methodology — Bartenieff Fundamentals — is a sequence of movements developed through her many years of observing infants as they learned to differentiate their gestures and postures through lifting their head, to rolling, sitting, crawling, standing, and finally to walking. Bartenieff later applied her observation of infant movement to the creation of sequences developed for adults. She focused on breath support, core to distal connectivity, and head-to-tail support, differentiating upper and lower body, left and right sides of the body, and cross-lateral support through incorporating diagonal pathways.
For more information about Laban Movement and Barteneiff Fundamentals classes in Vancouver, contact Natasha at 236-688-4475.