Description:

Speaker

Whitney Laemmli, Science and Technology, Pratt Institute

Title

"The Measured Gesture: The Science of Movement from Weimar Germany to Corporate America"

Abstract

In 1928, the German choreographer Rudolf Laban announced an explosive development in the history of dance: a byzantine system of lines, tick marks, and boxes intended to capture the four-dimensional complexity of bodily movement on paper. Despite its initial association with Expressionist dance and fascist moment choirs, “Labanotation” quickly moved beyond the art world, finding a home in the clinics, boardrooms, factories, and laboratories of post-World War II Britain and the United States. This talk traces Labanotation’s story from the anxiety-ridden cities of Weimar Germany to its use by management consultants in mid-century American and British white-collar offices, and, finally, to the robotics laboratories of the twenty-first century. In doing so, it will examine how writing down movement functioned as a means of understanding and manipulating human behavior, promising to reconcile freedom and control, the individual and the group, and the body and the machine at moments of social and political upheaval.

Biography

Whitney Laemmli is a historian of science and technology with a special focus on the relationship between technoscience, the human body, and modern life. Her current book project, Measured Movements (under contract with the University of Chicago Press), explores how and why human movement became a central object of technoscientific, political, and popular concern over the course of the twentieth century.