 |
|
|
 |
Home Information Registration Sessions Schedule Participants Contacts |
SESSIONS Surviving Assembly Line Work using Laban Bartenieff Movement Analysis--workshop by Teresa Heiland, USA Workshop I returned from studying dance abroad for a year and I desperately needed to make money. I quickly took a job unfamiliar to me: working on an assembly line doing repetitive tasks for 8 to 10 hours a day, standing in one spot the entire time. This was grueling for me, and knowing so much about my dancer’s body and its needs, I was physically and emotionally traumatized. I had interviewed for 15 other jobs, but couldn’t get hired because I was “over-educated.” I had to make the most of my most ill-fitting work situation, and in so doing applied as many of Laban’s and Bartenieff’s lessons as I could while standing at an assembly line. Laban taught us to move more fully rather than to economize in order to withstand the tedium and wear and tear of manual labor, and to outlast the time clock. I survived each day using Irmgard Bartenieff’s lessons by vocalizing, rocking, shifting, gradating my joints, moving with Baroque-like arm flourishes and Javanese dance movements, and I shared my body-knowledge with my coworkers. Eventually, I also tried to inspire the management with my ideas of ergonomics, table height, and organizing people into teams to switch from standing to sitting and back again, but they wanted nothing to do with my enlightened thoughts and knowledge of Laban’s work in factories. I wanted to have Rudolf Laban and Warren Lamb beside me to support me in my presentation to the bosses. There I stood, alone with my knowledge, but with no tried-and-true, convincing or financially feasible, quick approaches towards helping my fellow factory workers at home and around the world. Today, I’d like to share with you how I applied my Laban Bartenieff skills in a factory world, to give you a mock light-industrial factory experience, and to share some of my ways of surviving the grueling tasks of speedy, monotonous, repetitive movements while standing in one spot. You will join me in mock-assembly line work in its usual methods, and then I will introduce you to the ways I adapted my own work and instructed other to preserve their bodies using Laban Bartenieff movement analysis. You will be encouraged to join in to discuss ways in which we might put our body knowledge to action to support our fellow light-industrial workers around the world. What sort of approaches might body-educated individuals take to support people in factories. Repetitive-task-oriented production facilities tout their successes on the premise that highest production in the shortest amount of time sells the most and makes the most money. Laban believed this end all be all approach to economy to be the downfall of humans because we eventually destroy the workers who do the handiwork. How far have we come? How far can we go? How do we convince the management that their workers are important and that workers’ compensation is not fixing this problem. Research in ergonomics has helped us create tools that fit the body, but the unfortunate turnabout is that now the little units of space that industrial workers toil in are being designed so carefully that people aren’t even asked to walk around or to bend, thus making the human into an even more mechanized state of being. How can we convince managers in industries that going slower with larger movements and more relax time equals higher production? Research shows that it does. Can dancers educate business managers? Is there a place for Laban’s factory research to come back into the factories now? Teresa Heiland is an assistant professor of dance at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA. She received her PhD in dance education at NYU and her CLMA in Integrated Movement Studies during the summer of 2004. She is a certified Language of Dance instructor (Level III). She teaches modern dance, choreography, Bartenieff Fundamentals, Dance Pedagogy, and Costume Design for dance. She choreographs, teaches Motif description, teaches Pilates, works with clients with movement repatterning, and performs Javanese dance while she continues to explore movement from every angle possible.
|
