Alan Lomax
Dance links people together in a culture...
Has art, so passionately defended as the great provider of happiness and peace, any place amidst this hustle?
-Rudolf von Laban
The roots of my jazz journey started with dance - first watching Fred Astaire movies, then as a dancer myself back in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. The first dance I performed was a tap solo to Sweet Georgia Brown. Then my jazz journey wound its way from Grover Washington Jr. and Weather Report all the way to the free jazz of Sun Ra in the late 1980s. I admit, I covered a lot of ground quickly. Since I started writing about my jazz journey in October 2020, I’ve spent much more time on the jazz side than the dance side. So this week I want to focus on my roots - dance.
I first heard about Rudolf von Laban, one of the founders of European Modern Dance, in 1986 at the Akademie der Künste, which then was in a beautiful Werner Düttmann-designed three-building complex next to the Tiergarten in West Berlin (you can watch a wonderful tour here). Incidentally, this is the same location of the Workshop Freie Musik from 1969 to 1978, which spawned much of the FMP (Free Music Production) label.
You can read more about FMP here:
While I was there, I watched a film called Hexentanz, which was playing as part of an exhibit on the great modern dancer Mary Wigman:
Wigman’s work was central to the development of Freie Tanz (Free Dance), a form in stark contrast to ballet, the earlier tradition of dance as fine art.
At the exhibit, I learned that in 1913 she studied under Rudolf von Laban at Monte Verità, a colony for people searching for alternative lifestyles near the Swiss mountain resort Ascona. He was working there as the director of a new “School of all the Arts of Life. ” Laban went on in the 1920s to revolutionize dance and opened numerous dance schools throughout Europe.
Many years later, I was re-introduced to Laban in the most peculiar way.
In the late 1990s, while studying industrial management at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago, I ran across a text called Effort: Economy of Human Movement co-written by Rudolf Laban. I thought, “Could that possibly be the same Laban?” As it turns out it was.
During the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, Laban’s name and work were destroyed. In 1938, he left Germany and settled in Britain to begin a new phase in his life. He moved to Manchester and worked in factories, where he made many observations of worker’s movements, which he called Personal Effort Assessments. As a result, he was asked to help in the war effort by introducing work study methods to increase worker productivity. These techniques, known as Laban/Lawrence Industrial Rhythm, became the basis of Effort: Economy of Human Movement, first published in 1947.
Recently, I ran across Laban again in connection with of all people the great American Musicologist Alan Lomax, who brought the best recording technology to the world’s traditional singers and musicians so that their art could take its rightful place as an equal beside the best classical and commercial music. In this area, Lomax’s legacy is well known. Despite the inherent flaws, I admire Alan Lomax’s musical mission; however, what is less well known and what I admire even more was his interest in dance.
This week on that Big River called Jazz we’ll dig our paddles in and explore the world of Alan Lomax and choreometrics, his theory to describe the study of dance as a universal dynamic of body communication and find steady patterns and measures of movement that vary regularly with culture and with social structure.
Alan Lomax’s father John was born in Mississippi in 1867. John grew up working on his father’s farm, where he befriended an African American worker and a former slave called Nat Blythe. Nat taught John the songs his ancestors had passed on to him and in return, John taught Nat to read and write. Thus beginning John’s long exploration into the unknown history of song that continued for many years.
John Lomax’s first book was Cowboy Songs, published by New York’s Sturgis and Walton in 1910. This book of lyrics and musical charts, introduced in the foreword by President Theodore Roosevelt, preserved future standards like Home on the Range, The Old Chisholm Trail, Git Along Little Doggies, and Streets of Laredo.
In 1933, John and his 18-year-old son Alan loaded their car with a 350-pound disk recorder, powered by two 75-pound batteries to seek out folk and blues musicians in the American Deep South. If they hadn’t hauled recording equipment to Angola Prison in July 1933, songs like Good Night, Irene might have vanished into thin air.
In 1934 at Cummins State Farm (a prison farm) in Gould, Arkansas, John Lomax recorded a group of African-American prisoners singing a tune called Rock Island Line. Here’s Lomax’s original 1934 recording:
Like his father before him, Alan Lomax spent his life on an odyssey of unrecorded sound, searching the world for the essence of music and lost songs of isolated cultures. He recorded more than seventeen thousand field recordings of singers and songwriters, discovering blues musicians such as Lead Belly and Muddy Waters, the folk singer Woody Guthrie, and traveled from Michigan to Ireland and the Outer Hebrides in Scotland to record traditional music from forgotten sources. Alan Lomax’s massive music archive is online and features his historic blues and folk recordings.
During the late 1950s, Alan Lomax researched the relationship between musical style and culture, which he termed cantometrics. However, by the 1960s he had not yet found significant cross-cultural correlations for rhythm in song and after a chance meeting started looking toward dance.
In 1964, Lomax was a student of Dr. Ray Birdwhistell, founder of kinesics, the study of human movement as culturally patterned visual communication. Birdwhistell told Lomax that he considered dance a more fundamental and primary relative expression than song and that he might find the kind of answers he was looking for by considering the system of analyzing human movement developed by Rudolf Laban.
Inspired by Birdwhistell, Lomax developed a process that studied the dynamics of body communication, which by combining the words choreography and metrics or measurements he called choreometrics. Lomax in his own words defined choreometrics as “the measure of dance or dance as a measure of man.”
In 1964 while at Columbia University, Lomax initiated what he called the Choreometrics Project. This project was the first to adapt Laban-based movement analysis to the observation of cultural/geographic differences. To help him, Lomax enlisted Irmgard Bartenieff because she had studied with Laban and had already applied his methods to physical therapy, dance therapy, and movement-oriented psychological research.
Born in Berlin in 1900, Irmgard Bartenieff was first trained as a traditional dancer.
In 1925 she began studying with Laban, trying to find common ground between Laban’s innovative movement teachings and her earlier dance training. She soon became one of Laban’s star students.
In the early 1930s, she left Laban to form the Romantisches Tanztheatre Bartenieff, which toured throughout Germany in 1933. As WWII approached, Bartenieff and her husband immigrated to the US and brought the work of Laban and his colleagues to North America, where she created a setting for teaching and training the Laban theory. They soon opened a private practice in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In 1942 she left to pursue studies in physical therapy in New York. In 1943 she graduated from NYU’s physical therapy program.
As a physical therapist, faced with the challenge of helping patients recover from paralysis, she drew on everything she had learned from Laban. She used the same theories and principles of human development that she applied to her dancers in her work with polio patients.
In 1944 Bartenieff was asked by Dr. George Deaver to work in the poliomyelitis unit of the Willard Parker Hospital in New York, a unit she managed until 1953.
Later she became chief physical therapist of the Polio Service at the hospital, where for seven years she worked to rehabilitate victims of the polio epidemic. In 1954 she became the rehabilitation program coordinator at the Blythedale Home for Children in Valhalla, New York.
When co-founded the New York City Ballet George Balanchine’s wife Tanaquil Le Clercq, one of the great ballerinas of the 20th century, contracted polio, the physical therapist called in to help her was none other than Irmgard Bartenieff.
In a strange twist of fate, in 1946, when Le Clercq was fifteen years old and one of the brightest lights at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, Balanchine asked her to perform with him the role of a girl with polio in Resurgence, a dance he choreographed for a March of Dimes charity benefit at the Waldorf-Astoria. He played a character named Threat of Polio, and Le Clercq was his victim. The music was Mozart’s String Quintet in G minor, and at the close of the plangent adagio, Balanchine came onstage wearing a large black cape and enveloped her. She became paralyzed and sank to the floor. In the final movement — a sunny allegro — she reappeared in a wheelchair. Then children tossed dimes at her character, prompting her to get up and dance again.
Tragically, ten years later in 1956 on the New York City Ballet’s European tour in Copenhagen, Le Clercq’s dancing career ended abruptly when she was stricken with polio. She did eventually regain most of the use of her arms and torso but remained paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of her life.
Filmed just months before her tragedy, here’s a wonderful Canadian video of Le Clercq dancing with Jacques d'Amboise to Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun choreographed by Jerome Robbins:
From 1958 through 1962 Bartenieff joined Dr. A.D. Gurewitsch as his research therapist at the Institute for the Crippled and Disabled and in his private practice. It was during this period that Bartenieff started exploring the fundamental aspects of movement and establishing concrete exercises that could be performed by those in rehabilitation. This work eventually led to the development of the Bartenieff Fundamentals and the Basic 6 exercises taught to students of movement analysis around the world.
Bartenieff’s work on Lomax’s Choreometrics Project laid the foundation for the establishment of a Laban/Bartenieff approach to movement and dance known as the principles of Laban Movement Analysis. In 1978, as a center for the development and study of these principles, she founded the Laban Institute of Movement Studies in New York City. As a testament to her humble character, not until June 1981, a few months before she died, did her name appear in the institute’s title: Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies. The change was initiated in her honor by the Board of Directors.
In 1965, through the Choreometrics Project, Lomax, Bartenieff, and her then-student Forrestine Paulay set out on a mission: to view, code, catalog, and preserve the totality of the world’s dance traditions.
They wanted to develop a vocabulary for describing dance styles across cultures and set out to geographically map variables to bring rigor to dance movement. Believing that dance carried otherwise inaccessible information about social structures, work practices, and the history of human migration, Lomax and his collaborators spent eight years gathering more than 250,000 feet of raw film footage. It was the foundation for a universally available visual and textual atlas of human movement to be used as a new system of movement analysis.
Here are the over 3000 film clips of dance from around the world that are part of the Lomax collection at the Library of Congress:
Through this research, Lomax used choreometrics to observe and interpret the relationship between dance and social structure that culminated in 1974 with his fascinating documentary film Dance and Human History:
In the film, Lomax stresses the vital role dance and the many movement styles play in the stabilization and growth of human culture. He introduces choreometrics and uses it to find steady patterns and measures of movement that vary regularly with culture and with social structure. He then concludes that these creative patterns are not arbitrary symbols, but instead represent a close link between dance technique and the level of productivity in a culture.
Although Lomax may not have found all the answers he was looking for, he nonetheless provided a base for future research into the role dance plays in human development.
Here’s one more for the road. In July 2023, I wrote about the special connection between Japanese dancer Min Tanaka and percussionist Milford Graves. You can read more about them here:
In 1981, Graves and Tanaka performed at a school for autistic children in Japan that ignited the student body into an ecstatic display of spontaneous collective energy. In his own words, in 2022 Tanaka recalls the experience:
When we did a performance in front of a group of autistic children, they started to look at us while lying down. And then some of them turned their faces towards us. Eventually, they got up and came up to me and hitting me. Some other kids came over close to Milford’s drums, and jumped up and down. I felt this was a great thing. The teachers struggled, as they wanted to get the kids back to a healthy condition. The drums and the dancing had broken up their daily routine, which Milford and I were very happy about…. I believe that drum and dance are a very fundamental act, but it is not so much that they are “by Milford and Min Tanaka,” it is more that the drumming and dancing were destined to exist very closely with each other. I think it is one of the most important acts of expression of humanity.
Here’s a photo from that day, with Tanaka in white dancing with an older boy and a child in front of Graves's drum set:
For Tanaka and Graves, it was never about the drums or the dance. It was about the space between the drums and the dance. They both discarded existing traditions within their art and, like Lomax’s Choreometrics Project, explored the possibility of organically-driven experiences to change the human condition - a noble cause.
I believe there is something in choreometrics that has yet to be fully understood. In the way Laban’s early and innovative movement studies led to advancements in physical and dance therapy, choreometrics will help open the door to fully experiencing and understanding movement as our common life force.
In Dance and Human History, Lomax beautifully states:
For every spoken language there is an accompanying language of movement, each one carrying messages from the heart of the society. To understand the role of dance in human history, we must somehow decode these varied patterns of body language, of silent communication.
Perhaps choreometrics can help us find answers to questions like, for example: If movement is every human being’s first and foundational language, what is the post-industrial impact on society of social media and AI?
Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig in our paddles to explore the world of the song The Look of Love.
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Until then, keep on walking….
Amazing essay. This is I come to Substack for—to discover and learn, at age 72, things I never knew. Thank you!
Thanks for walking with us and for the kind words, Chuck.