Horrific Movement

I'm taking a course in basic Laban Movement Analysis-- this stuff is fascinating to me as a movement teacher. It's giving me a whole new vocabulary to talk about what's missing in a choreography or performance, or what's excellent. it's also giving me a structure to speak about why some movement combinations seem "natural" or "creepy."

Useful when you teach Gothic bellydance classes.

After this second workshop (all taught by a martial artist, not a dancer-- extra interesting!), I'm starting to understand the concept of movement affinities and disaffinities better. Which makes me bounce up and down.

Basically, movement affinities are combinations of effort and direction that fit together naturally. For example, if you think of "light" as a quality of weight, the first direction that comes to mind is "up." If you think of "strong" or "heavy" as a quality of weight, you think immediately of "down."

A disaffinity is when you combine effort and direction in non-intuitive ways-- light movement down, for instance, or strong movement up. A primary use of movement disaffinities is comedy-- when your body is saying something other than what the situation seems to be calling for. Think of the uses of slow-motion falls to add comedy-- you expect quick speed, but the fall is sustained instead.

Another use of movement disaffinities is horror. When it's well done, it's the kind of creepiness that you can't place, the instinct that tells you, "Cross the street rather than walk past that guy-- something's not right." If you see someone backing away slowly from something, you know this isn't just a normal startle reaction (back/quick is the usual movement affinity). Something is wrong here.

I plan to have a lot of fun with this in future Voodoo Sisters pieces. We use plenty of disaffinities in our work already (see Vampian Lespire Cats!), but this can take it to a whole new level. Watch this troupe.

-mv