Body - Space - Expression: The Development Of Rudolf Laban's Movement And Dance Concepts (Approaches To Semiotics).

'Choreutics' can be said to contain the essence of Laban's thought as well as an elaboration of the framework which he found useful for the penetration of the bewildering complexity of human movement. This he based on the unity of space and movement and he recognised a natural order in which the energy from within unfolds in space.

This biography of the dancer, choreographer, and artist Rudolf Laban offers a biographical discussion presenting Laban as a pioneering figure of European expressionism and the founding father of modern dance, as well as an analysis of the significance of Laban as an important representative of expressionist Modernism.

Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body is a historical and theoretical examination of French court ballet over a hundred-year period, beginning in 1573, that spans the late Renaissance and early baroque. Utilizing aesthetic and ideological criteria, author Mark Franko analyzes court ballet librettos, contemporary performance theory, and related commentary on dance and movement in the literature of this period. Examining the formal choreographic apparatus that characterizes late Valois and early Bourbon ballet spectacle, Franko postulates that the evolving aesthetic ultimately reflected the political situation of the noble class, which devised and performed court ballets. He shows how the body emerged from verbal theater as a self-sufficient text whose autonomy had varied ideological connotations, most important among which was the expression of noble resistance to the increasingly absolutist monarchy. Franko's analysis blends archival research with critical and cultural theory in order to resituate the burlesque tradition in its politically volatile context. Dance as Text thus provides a picture of the complex theoretical underpinnings of composite spectacle, the ideological tensions underlying experiments with autonomous dance, and finally, the subversiveness of Molière's use of court ballet traditions.

Here for the first time is an account of how each of thirteen historical as well as present-day systems cope with indicating body movement, time, space (direction and level) and other basic movement aspects of paper. A one-to-one comparison is made of how the same simple patterns, such as walking, jumping, turning, etc. are notated in each system.