Michael Liu - The One Called Laban

After Victor Hugo, Professor Azaroff directed me to find out about Rudolf von Laban. This guy was a bit hard to track down. It's almost as if he transcended into a philosophy or a way of method, because everytime I found his name, it was about his methods.

Laban truly believed that every person has this desire to dance, but are restricted to do so because of societal pressures. He was interested in the space around us, which he called the kinesphere. Any point in space that you can reach with your limbs while standing in one place is part of your kinesphere.

The easiest way to describe Laban's work was to compare his thinking to music. Laban created dancing scales, certain sets of movement, that when enacted can make the dancer feel happy, since all those movements were in harmony. Like a musical scale, there are a set of notes which musicians play that are harmonious and in sync with each other. This is why guitarists can play all those wonderful solos because they know the scales and stick within certain sets.

Still, I didn't have a thesis.