Making Movement Modern

Explores how researchers used systems for recording human movement to navigate the relationship between mind and body, freedom and control, and the individual and the state. In the early twentieth century, human bodily movement garnered interest among researchers who were convinced that understanding and controlling it could help govern an increasingly frazzled, fragmented world. Making Movement Modern traces one movement visualization technique, Labanotation, from its origins in expressionist dance, Austo-Hungarian military discipline, and contemporary physiology to its employment in factories and offices a half-century later. Frustrated by societies that seemed plagued by regimentation and alienation, the users of Laban-inspired systems—from artists and scientists to factory owners, politicians, lawyers, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and computer scientists—hoped to provide opportunities for individual expression while simultaneously harnessing movement to serve the needs of larger communities, businesses, and states. Making Movement Modern reveals how Labanotation's creator, choreographer Rudolf Laban, and his acolytes offered this system to a surprising variety of individuals and groups. It was a technique that promised liberation through expressive movement; it was also a means of organizing fascist displays of pure "Aryan" culture. The book explores these political ambiguities as Laban-based systems entered postwar society in the United States and the United Kingdom, where they were used to document disappearing folk cultures, treat Holocaust survivors, and make even the dullest, most repetitive work feel spiritually meaningful. Central to these efforts were vast programs to collect and store new kinds of personal movement data, and this history also has much to tell us about mass data collection today. This is a book for anyone interested in the relationship between art, science, data, and the human body across the tumultuous twentieth century.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Alien Gesticulations 2. The Lilt in Labour 3. The Dance Notation Bureau 4. Corporate Bodies 5. Moving On 6. From Volk to Folk Epilogue Movement in the Digital Age Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index

About the Author :
Whitney E. Laemmli is assistant professor in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute.

Review :
“Laemmli’s work unveils a fascinating and enlightening cultural history of dance notation, Labanotation, created by the renowned dance instructor and choreographer, Rudolf Laban. Using this notation as a heuristic tool, her work provides us with a critical study on how and why movement became a nodal point in an intricate network that included the natural sciences, engineering, politics, industry, factories, psychology, psychiatry, and popular culture throughout twentieth-century Europe and the United States. Her study on movement contributes a very important analysis of the historically contingent relationship between the natural sciences and visual aesthetics.” “With Making Movement Modern, Laemmli offers a much-needed long history of the application and adaptation of Rudolph Laban's movement principles and practices, covering more than one hundred years. A transatlantic and deeply interdisciplinary account of how the fascination with systematizing and recording movement becomes the key to so much more.” “Like a Modernist dance, this book moves with grace and discipline, poised between creative expression and scholarly discernment. Its proximate subject is the history of Labanotation, a method for encoding dance, developed in Weimar and Nazi Germany, and which has since flourished in Anglo-American factories, executive suites, ballet studios, anthropological fieldwork, and robot labs. But as the pages unfold, the reader is brought inside the silent history of a utopian project to marry mind and movement, motion and emotion, individuation and communal harmony—and the counternarrative of how unruly bodies have thwarted this project. A captivating performance and a vivid demonstration of how the history of science can teach us to see art and labor anew.”