If you want your students to take their character development to the next level, introduce them to Laban Movement. Laban will provide students with a clear and understandable tool set that will enable them to discover new ways to physicalize character. It will allow students to recognise and act upon creative impulse in the body and help them play characters who are different from themselves.
Laban is named after Rudolf Laban, who was a movement theorist, a choreographer and a dancer. He is considered a pioneer of modern dance.
For a long time this movement was primarily used by dancers. In the 80s and 90s, actors started using it to extend their movement vocabulary and ability to play characters physically.
Laban categorized human movement into four component parts:
Each of these parts has two elements:
How do we apply these movements to character development?
If you look at FLOW there are two choices: bound or free. If the movement is bound, that means the movement is tight and held in. A good character for this type of movement would be an uptight business man or administrator. But if the Flow movement is free, perhaps the character is a child, always running.
If you look at DIRECTION, you are either moving toward something directly or meandering. Is the character direct or meandering?
So, for example, if you’re looking at Flow and the movement is bound, then it’s very tight. It’s very held in. Think uptight businessman or administrator. Whereas someone who moves freely is the opposite of bound. Think of children. They are always running, always free. And if you’re looking at direction, you’re either moving toward something directly or you’re meandering toward it.
Laban then combined these parts together to create The Eight Efforts:
For each effort, Laban identified which component parts were to be used. For example:
WRING
Now, there’s a whole vocabulary to build a character. If you think about that business man with the bound flow, you also have a speed, weight, and direction for movement. You have a character who meanders, with a heavy and sustained gait. All of this creates a specific and unique physicality for a character.
Student actors have a hard time moving outside their own body. More often than not, when a student takes on a character, that character moves like they do. By sharing the Eight efforts with students, you introduce a process that gets them thinking about different ways to move.
With every character they play, they have a vocabulary to draw from: Does this character move with a flicking movement? What weight does this character have? Am I bound or free?
There are many different ways an actor can begin to employ these efforts into their work.
Observational work: Ask students to observe people in the world around them with an eye toward identifying the Eight Efforts within their movement and behaviour. Students can then take these observations, borrow some aspects and create a new character.
Text work: Students can analyze a text and look for speech patterns that are similar to the Eight Efforts. Our language is a representation of our inner lives. By looking at what and how the character expresses themselves, the actor can find clues for which one of the Eight Efforts to explore. For example: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the character of Peter Quince speaks in short, quick, words.
QUINCE
Here is the scroll of every man’s name, which is
thought fit, through all Athens, to play in our
interlude before the duke and the duchess, on his
wedding-day at night.
If you look at the elements of Dabbing you get:
DAB
This could be a clue to the actor to try vocally playing Dab in the voice and seeing how vocally playing this Effort affects the body and the physicality of the character.
Emotional work: Students can look at the personality and the emotional makeup of a character to explore different Efforts. On the TV show South Park, the character of Carman is pushy and aggressive with his friends. He tends to try to dominate any situation he is in and is quick to anger. You could think of his personality as a Punch (Direct, Heavy, Quick, Bound) Eeyore from Winnie-the-Pooh is light and indirect in his personality and the way he interacts with the world. He could be described as a Float (Indirect, Light, Sustained, Free) or a Glide (Indirect, Light, Sustained, Free)
Ask your students to look at their characters’ emotions or how they react to the world around them. How can they connect emotion with a Laban Effort?
By experimenting with the Laban Efforts and ways to interpret them, you can create a language to give your students to get them out of their bodies, out of their shells and into a new physicalization.
If you’ve never used Laban before it is definitely like learning a new language. What does it mean to Punch or Glide? Watch and See!
Want to learn more? Visit the info page for Todd’s course, Laban: Advanced Characterization, in the Drama Teacher Academy. You can watch the introduction video, get a closer look at the course, and explore other DTA offerings.
Subscribe for our exciting updates, insights, teaching resources, and new script releases. Plus, sign up now and get 4 plays and 2 lesson plans for FREE!
.png)
