The Kinesics of Infinity: Laban, Geometry and the Metaphysics of Dancing Space
The historical emergence of modernist dance is well documented, but locating its kinesics in history often proves more challenging. The forms and gestures characteristic of Rudolf Laban's practice, for example, were emphatically non-mimetic, not conducive to the representation of any recognisable historical reality. They nevertheless proved resonant for performers and audiences alike, and so clearly spoke to some form of shared perception, a way of conceptualising the body's actions that was accessible to a diversity of social subjects. If they cannot be seen as representation, then, they still comprised acts of ideation, and positioning them in history will entail locating their founding historical rationale, the mode of thought linking apparently subjective response to the social, the aesthetic object to its viewer. It is this species of thought, at once social and aesthetic, that Raymond Williams described with his term 'structure of feeling':
'structure of feeling' is a cultural hypothesis, actually derived from attempts to understand [artistic] elements and their connections in a generation or period … The hypothesis has a special relevance to art and literature, where the true social content is in a significant number of cases of this present and affective kind … The unmistakable presence of certain elements in art which are not covered by (though in one mode they may be reduced to) other formal systems is the true source of the specialising categories of'the aesthetic', 'the arts', and 'imaginative literature'. We need, on the one hand, to acknowledge (and welcome) the specificity of these elements – specific feelings, specific rhythms – and yet to find ways of recognising their specific kinds of sociality.1
'Structure of feeling' describes modes of thought of an unofficial, inchoate kind, which are therefore most evident in the relatively unlegislated realm ofart. Born of historically specific circumstance, they are fundamentally social in character: yet comprising forms of consciousness, they permeate the experiential, the subjective, the creative. It is via consciousness, then, that Williams proposes the gap between aesthetics and history be bridged. It is this line of investigation I will pursue in the following essay. Specifically, I will examine one area of Laban's early modern dance practice, what he terms 'space harmony' or 'choreutics'.2 In addressing both the kinesic forms involved in training, and the movements that typically emerge from it, I will seek to trace choreutics' relations with a wider social real, conceptualising it as the historical expression of a particular experience of the modern. [End Page 105]
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At the root of choreutics is the mental image of the 'kinesphere', a hypothetical ball of space enclosing the human body, reminiscent of a three-dimensional Vitruvian Man. With its centre anchored in the middle of the trunk and its surface marking the furthest one can reach with outstretched limbs, the kinesphere represents the total area individuals are able to cover in movement, an immediate kinesic environment they carry with them in life and about the stage. Choreutic training consists of moving within this sphere along what Laban calls 'trace-forms', natural routes through space that are discernible in everyday behaviours and, in more pronounced form, in specialised activities such as swimming and fencing.
The most basic routes for trace-forms are mapped into the kinespherevia three mental grids, termed 'scales' or 'crosses',3 each comprising a set of directions. The first of these Laban calls the 'Dimensional Cross'. The human body has, he asserts, three axes along which it can move in a stable, sustainable fashion: forward-backward, high-deep and side-to-side. These provide six possible directions, each corresponding to what he considers an archetypal mode of human activity – 'advancing' (forward) and 'retreating' (backward), 'rising' (high) and 'falling' (deep), 'crossing' (reaching left or right across the torso) and 'opening' (reaching away from the torso). Laban images these collectively in the outline of an octahedron, the geometrical figure formed when the terminus points of these six coordinates are...
