Embodied Strategies and Choreographic Technologies for Engineered Movement Design through the Laban/Bartenieff Lens
Led by Amy LaViers and Catherine Maguire

Interest in Laban Movement Analysis and Bartenieff Fundamentals in technology development and design has been steadily growing over the past decades. Researchers, developers, designers, and artists interested in understanding principles of choreography and their applications to the design of new embodied systems and interfaces look to this body of knowledge for information in how people create meaning through movement; rather than measurements of the velocity of body parts or of the internal firings of neurons, this body of work focuses on the aspects of movement consciously noticed by human movers.

In our course, we will expose students to different aspects of choreography, improvisation and the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System as a tool for meaning-making through recognizing patterns, reconciling paradox, contexting, and gaining respect for the complexity of human movement. We approach these ideas through both functional and expressive movement experiences that can illuminate the body as the basis for our “knowing” of the world in order to inform engineering work. Thus, we provide structured experiences in movement alongside the introduction of a taxonomy for more objectively describing features of movement observed in these experiences that is, in our experience, necessary for translation to artificial systems.