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Shall We Dance?
Learn to bow by Laban’s motion factors
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By James Reel

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THE ANCIENT GREEKS KNEW OF FOUR ELEMENTS: earth, air, fire, water. The periodic table of elements is a lot more crowded these days, but many dancers still reduce everything to four elements of their own: weight, space, time, flow. That’s what 20th-century dance theorist Rudolf Laban emphasized in his study of movement.

These elements could apply to string playing, too. What is bowing but a dance on a wire by wood and horsehair partnered by your arm? Janine Riveire, an associate professor of music at Cal Poly Pomona, has adapted Laban’s theories to help you bow like a dancer.

As you know from chemistry, elements combine in many different ways to form various substances. Similarly, Laban’s elements—he called them factors—combine to produce many different kinds of motion. There are more than you might guess, because each of the motion factors comes in two varieties.

Weight can be either heavy or light (also called strong or weak). Space may accommodate a movement that is either direct (with a single focus) or indirect (multi-focused, like crossing from one string to another). Time, in terms of movement, means that something is either fast or slow (or sudden versus sustained). Flow can either be bound or free (a bound movement can be stopped suddenly).

As Riveire points out, “The combination of the first three factors can result in the eight basic efforts: dab, punch, flick, slash, glide, float, wring, and press. Flow then moderates these efforts, giving an overall character to a movement.

Getting confused? It’s not that complicated. “Dab,” for example, is a movement that is direct, light, and fast. “Punch” is a movement that’s direct, heavy, and fast. Change just one of the factors in the combination, and you get a different effort.

GO WITH THE FLOW

Let’s start with something simpler, the factor that gives each movement its final character: flow. “Probably the most important thing anybody at the beginning or intermediate level can be concerned with is recognizing the difference between bound and free flow,” Riveire says. “I’d say that 80 to 90 percent of the time, we want free flow in the bow arm. You have to recognize when you have tension in the shoulder, neck, or arm muscles, that will inhibit the free movement of your bow. Tension is blockage that interferes with the sound. Most beginners are very familiar with the choked sound that tells you your arm is way too tight or you’re using way too much pressure.”



The Suzuki method, Riveire notes, acknowledges that small children naturally start out with short, jerky movements—bound flow—so Book 1 gives them lots of 16th- and 8th-note rhythms, saving free- flowing legato bowings for later.

According to Riveire, “Laban believed that any skill is developed through a type of consciousness-raising, ‘a gradual refinement of the feel’ of a movement.” That ties in neatly with her own training under the method of Paul Rolland, which has you practice movement using your instrument in only a primitive way, or not using your instrument at all.

“You just practice the movement to develop the muscles and angle and flow, whether you do it with the instrument or not,” she says. Learning vibrato, for instance, can begin by pretending to shake salt on your salad with your left hand, or fanning your face, or waving goodbye to yourself.

When it comes to bowing, Riveire suggests imagining that you’re pushing open a saloon door to get your elbow to open up.


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This article also appears in Strings, Issue #154




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