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Rudolf Laban's Theory of Effort
Rudolf Laban's Theory of Effort: Dance and choreography theories, with a particular focus on Laban's Theory of Effort, are another basic component of our approach: they are the basis upon which we build our analysis of expressive content in human movement and gesture. Laban's effort is a quality of movement. The effort present in a gesture and the variations it endures during a movement performance convey the expressive information carried by the sequence of gestures. The work of Laban was aimed at understanding the factors of the movement that are perceived by the observer and that carry expressive information independently from the specific gesture performed. According to Laban, expressive power is not only a feature of the kind of gesture performed (a punch, a caress) but it is mainly related to the way of performing it. The variations of some movements factors concur in giving a gesture its expressive power. Laban studied those factors and he found four of them that are collectively named "Effort". It is also possible to think about the effort as a property of every movement, described by a set of four parameters. In our research we built a model of movement description inspired by this part of the work of Laban, described in the following paper:
A.Camurri, R.Trocca, G.Volpe (1999)
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