This class is informed by Alexandra Baybutt’s varied creative practice and her rich training in and teaching of Bartenieff Fundamentals and Laban’s Space Harmony. Improvisation and guided tasks build to experience our inner and outer connectivity, together and apart.
Alexandra takes a playful approach to Laban’s movement scales, and shares ones rarely found outside of specialist Laban training programmes. The fundamental tools from Laban/Bartenieff Movement System offer ways to consider already existing patterns of movement and develop new ones. Alexandra’s interest in the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System continues through exploring what various concepts can mean through somatic inquiry and how they layer into improvisation structures. This class is less a museum of Laban concepts and history, and more a laboratory exploring their relevance for sensation, observation and creative practice.
Alexandra Baybutt works as an artist, educator and researcher. Her professional experience since 2004 includes dancing, choreographing, movement directing for theatre and film, teaching, analysing, dramaturgy and research. Space as a multifaceted political, philosophical and embodied concept remains at the forefront of her interests.
She completed her PhD at Middlesex University in 2020. Since 2010 she has been teaching the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System in Europe and on modular certification programmes in Scotland, Belgium, Netherlands and China, and online in a series of movement principles classes. Her work as a collaborative artist includes teaching with Barefoot Opera, with violist Maya Felixbrodt in the ‘Play As You Are’ series, projects with choreographer Stephanie Felber (DE) and with musician Huw Morgan (UK). Dramaturgical work includes projects with choreographer Tania Soubry (UK/LX), and with Moving Strings (NL). Her written work has been published in Critical Stages journal, Global Performance Studies, and Something Other.
LBMS is a comprehensive system used in understanding multiple aspects of the patterns of human movement. The methodology incorporates a theoretical framework and clearly delineated language for describing movement. The system is used to identify, represent and interpret both macro and micro patterns of human movement. As a system of analysis, LBMS is unique, as it identifies and codifies both the qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of movement. In other words, the system takes into account both functional as well as expressive content of actions. The system is also capable of identifying and differentiating what are universal patterns common to all humans, from group patterns, including culturally relevant patterns, and from patterns that identify unique characteristics of an individual.