LABAN

Sepanjang proses eksperimentasi gerak bersama Aida Redza selama hampir sebulan lebih tempohari, usaha kami bertolak daripada parameter yang digariskan oleh tokoh inilah yang dikenali sebagai 'Laban Analysis' oleh Rudolf Laban. Jadi, aku rasa wajar untuk dikongsi bersama serba sedikit mengenai latarbelakang tokoh ini.

Rudolf Laban (1879-1953)

Rudolf Laban (1879-1953) was born in Austro-Hungary. Laban was a dancer, a choreographer and a dance / movement theoretician. One of the founders of European Modern Dance, his work was extended through his most celebrated collaborators, Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss and Sigurd Leeder. Through his work, Laban raised the status of dance as an art form, and his explorations into the theory and practice of dance and movement transformed the nature of dance scholarship. He established choreology, the discipline of dance analysis, and invented a system of dance notation, now known as Labanotaion or Kinetography Laban. Laban was the first person to develop community dance and he has set out to reform the role of dance education, emphasising his belief that dance should be made available to everyone.
At the age of sixty, supported by Lisa Ullmann, he started a new phase in his career. He worked in industry, introducing work study methods to increase production through humane means, and greatly influenced the movement education culture in Britain opening, through Lisa Ullmann, The Art of Movement Studio in Manchester in 1946.

In 1953 the studios moved to a donated country estate in Addlestone. In his last years he concentrated on movement as behaviour, studying the behavioural needs of industrial workers and psychiatric patients. This enabled him to lay the technical basis for what is now the profession of movement and dance therapy, and a basis for the expressive movement training of actors.
Rudolf Laban's ideas were influenced by the social and cultural changes of the time and the contexts that he worked in. The traditional constraints against showing feeling were beign questioned, opening the way for a freeing of the feeling body.

Rudolf Laban believed the best way to advocate this freedom was by mirroring it in dance and the movement arts. Freud’s discovery of the psyche, opened a previously closed door and the body’s sexuality need no longer be hidden. The movement arts were thought to be a great medium to express this new freedom, by men and women dancing barefoot and in little clothing.

In Paris and Munich (1900 - 1914) Rudolf Laban acquired his spiritual attitude and unique value regardless of gender, social status or educational standing. He interpreted this as valuing individuals own choice of movement , and self initiated vocabularies.Rudolf Laban spent twenty years understanding movement sufficiently to create signs on paper that could represent body parts moving in space and time dynamically.