Ciane Fernandes

This comprehensive book will serve as a step-by-step guide to Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis, updating and expanding concepts and practices. Following extensive research on the method developed by Rudolf von Laban and his disciples, this book explains movement principles, exercises, and motif symbols in detail. Organized according to the four categories of Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis (Body-Effort-Shape-Space), additional chapters present the different developments of the theory in relation to performing arts and movement therapy. The author draws on Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis as a dynamic and connective approach, traveling from classroom and studio to everyday life, stage performance, and film acting. The Laban perspective serves as a multimedia artistic viewpoint, intertwining theory, learning, and imagery. This unique approach to this internationally used method is essential reading for educators and students of dance and other performing arts and movement-related professions.

This book embarks on an interdisciplinary study of dance theater, one that provides a deeper insight into contemporary performing arts. Ciane Fernandes combines Laban movement analysis and the writings of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault to investigate repetition in the works and creative process of Pina Bausch (b.1940), who is considered to be one of the most important choreographers of the twentieth century. This book examines repetition in Bausch's pieces as both method and subject, exploring its power in the metamorphosis of meaning. Repetition is used to subvert its own process of domination over the body at aesthetic, cognitive, and social levels. The body simultaneously becomes natural and linguistic, experiential and automatic, personal and social, constantly repeating and transforming the history of its domination.