Making Movement Modern: Science, Politics, and the Body in Motion

Explores how researchers used systems for recording human movement to navigate the relationship between mind and body, freedom and control, and the individual and the state.

In the early twentieth century, human bodily movement garnered interest among researchers who were convinced that understanding and controlling it could help govern an increasingly frazzled, fragmented world. Making Movement Modern traces one movement visualization technique, Labanotation, from its origins in expressionist dance, Austro-Hungarian military discipline, and contemporary physiology to its employment in factories and offices a half-century later. Frustrated by societies that seemed plagued by regimentation and alienation, the users of Laban-inspired systems--from artists and scientists to factory owners, politicians, lawyers, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and computer scientists--hoped to provide opportunities for individual expression while simultaneously harnessing movement to serve the needs of larger communities, businesses, and states.

Making Movement Modern reveals how Labanotation’s creator, choreographer Rudolf Laban, and his acolytes offered this system to a surprising variety of individuals and groups. It was a technique that promised liberation through expressive movement; it was also a means of organizing fascist displays of pure ＂Aryan＂ culture. The book explores these political ambiguities as Laban-based systems entered postwar society in the United States and the United Kingdom, where they were used to document disappearing folk cultures, treat Holocaust survivors, and make even the dullest, most repetitive work feel spiritually meaningful. Central to these efforts were vast programs to collect and store new kinds of personal movement data, and this history also has much to tell us about mass data collection today. This is a book for anyone interested in the relationship between art, science, data, and the human body across the tumultuous twentieth century.

Whitney E. Laemmli is assistant professor in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute.