Eight Ways of Being in a Body

Rudolf Laban

Hold a phone in your hand.

No, not your real phone. An invisible one.

Now, with your other hand, tap open an invisible app. Let’s say you’re going to make a phone call. Press the invisible call icon, and enter someone’s phone number, all nine digits: tap tap tap, tap tap tap, tap tap tap tap. 

Good. Now enter that same phone number again, but this time, let the image of the invisible cell phone fall away, and simply watch the movement of your finger in the air as it repeats this movement.

Tap tap tap, tap tap tap, tap tap tap tap.

How would you describe what your finger is doing? What if I asked you to describe it by choosing one from each of the following word pairs:

quick or slow

light or strong

direct or indirect 

Return to your imaginary cell phone. (No, really — this will soon become indecipherable and boring if you don’t do it with me.) Open your invisible texting app. Now scroll down to find someone you haven’t texted with in a few days. Go slow at first, dragging your finger up the imaginary screen in a smooth, controlled motion. Now go fast, realizing you need to go much further back in your text history than you thought, letting your finger fly upwards and off the screen. Finally, in a fit of frustration, throw your invisible phone across the room.

Now, as before, let the image of the phone fall away. Repeat the gestures, but this time, just watch your hand in the air: first, a gradual, controlled scroll (slow, light, direct). Then a fast, more jerky scroll (quick, light, indirect). And last, a gesture of release, as you did when you imagined throwing the phone (quick, strong, direct).

What I’m describing is a system for analyzing movement developed by dancer and dance theorist Rudolf Laban. In Laban’s system, each movement has three qualities — fast or slow (sometimes called sustained), light or strong, direct or indirect. And each unique combination of these three qualities has a name.

Within Laban’s system, I would describe the movements we just made using the imaginary cell phone as Dabbing (typing in a phone number), Gliding (a slow, controlled scroll), Flicking (a quicker scroll), and Punching, or maybe Slashing, depending on how you throw. (Dab’s contemporary meanings, unknown to poor early-20th-century Laban, provide both amusement and distraction as I write this…)

If we were training as dancers or performers, I would now ask you to bring these movements into different parts of your body: What is a dab that comes from the knees? What about a glide of the low back? Can that glide that started in the low back take you all the way across the room? What happens if you take the flick gesture of scrolling and put it in your eyes? (I just tried this, and the effect was something like looking for a fly that you can hear but can’t locate in the room.)

Have I lost you?

Are you thinking, okay, this seems like a pretty niche subject, perhaps not one that’s really relevant to me… ?

I assume most of us have moments in our work — or a thing we devote ourselves to, whether or not we call it our work — where we think: This is so profound. Everyone should experience this. One of the first times I distinctly remember having that feeling was when I first encountered Laban movement.

Go ahead, laugh. I know, I know. Crazy theatre people. Always thinking our silly little games are so meaningful.

I was in college, taking a class called Movement for Actors. Acting was, generally, where I learned a lot of things about being in a body. I don’t think I was ever a naturally good actor, but acting required setting aside my often crushing amounts of self-consciousness about my body, and using it as a tool, seeing what it could do. What I remember particularly liking about this class was that it involved less interaction with other people than most. It was a relief to sidestep the awkwardness of partner work and just get to focus on how these movements played out in my own body. It was noticeable how some came easily to me, while others did not. I was an expert Floater (slow, light, indirect) and Gliding felt good too. Punching was the most uncomfortable, in a room of people certainly, but even practiced alone. Speed was uncomfortable, especially when combined with directness. Everyone was different, of course. Some people were naturally quick, and struggled to execute movements that required slowing down. Some people gravitated towards sharp movements, while other people’s edges were always rounded.

I was pretty shy as a younger pereson. I had trouble with decision making. I didn’t do well being put on the spot. Being asked to physically practice slashing, punching, pressing, I felt what it might be like to be a person who moved that way in the world. It was a way to imagine being more firm, more direct, more quick to act. That was the experience I wanted everyone to have: getting to embody the qualities or energies that felt inaccessible to them in life. 

***

I haven’t thought much about Laban in years. I’m not an actor any more, and actually, for better and worse, I don’t spend as much time thinking about being a body as I used to, in all contexts of my life. But this week I started thinking, somewhat out of the blue, about Laban as a way to describe qualities of attention. It’s been a bad writing week. I have a deadline coming up, and in order to meet it I need to be getting more written per day than I have recently. So I’ve been trying to ramp up my speed/productivity, and failing. It’s an old familiar problem: the more I try to work hard at writing, the less I get done.

Laban’s dab quite accurately describes the way I most often write: touch down briefly on the page, write a few sentences or paragraphs, walk away. Circle back and do it again. Sometimes I flick, as well — tossing thoughts quickly onto the page without letting myself look directly at them, and hurrying away before I can second-guess myself. There is a restlessness bordering on nervousness to this rhythm, and I tend to feel the writing that gets done in this way is not the “real” writing, even if, looking back, most of the content in the play was generated this way. When the deadline approaches and I decide it’s time to get down to business, the action changes to pressing. I feel that the effort should be continuous and muscular. I put myself in my chair, I put my hands on the keyboard, and I order myself to stay there. I keep thinking I will learn to funnel all of my energy directly through my hands so that I might, in one great push, finish the play.

Instead I get stuck, and cannot move. I can no longer write a word. We’ve been discussing the differences between Laban’s movements, but their similarity is that they all get you from one place to another. Unlike being frozen, they can all move you across the floor.

Does hard work have to be strong, direct, and sustained?

Or do those qualities just describe the cartoon version of work, the one where the lumberjack picks up an axe and chops until the tree falls down?

Have I so fundamentally misunderstood work as to think it requires one type of effort? Must that effort be hard and muscular like the abs of a lumberjack?

There are benefits to writing in dabs and flicks. It leaves space open for things to be unsolved, and keeps things from getting too serious, too logical. The drawback is it’s hard to gain momentum; there’s a little energy that’s lost every time I retract, walk away. It’s not that this rhythm of working is right or wrong; it’s that I’d like to have other rhythms available to me as well.

Sometimes giving an actor a physical instruction can get you somewhere that a psychological instruction can’t. Maybe you’ve agreed that the character’s behavior in the scene should be avoidant or passive-aggressive, but it’s not coming across. Then you ask them to bring the quality of floating into their body: to find a way, without any sharp movements, of continually ending up just out of reach. Suddenly, the text starts working, not because the actor is consciously saying anything differently, but because what the body is doing finds its way in.

Maybe I need to try working that way. Instead of thinking about how many pages I need to write, or what I want to check of my to-do list, maybe I should imagine the sensation in my body of punching and pressing the words into being. I feel a thrill of discomfort just thinking about it. I have the impulse to close my computer, and walk away. Dab, flick, dab. I open a new tab. I google “kickboxing classes.”