What is Effort?

What is Effort?
Submitted by Yoshiko Makita - September 22, 2000

Last week, I had an opportunity to talk about Laban Movement Analysis to people who study robotics engineering in a university in Japan. It was a very wonderful experience and allowed me to explain LMA in Japanese. One Labanotation teacher who knows about LMA helped me to choose Japanese words.

After my explanation, one student majoring in philosophy asked me about Effort. The question was, "When we talk about Effort, which is centered, the mover or the observer"?

We write "inner attitude," "expression," "intention"... from the movers' perspective. So my first thought was that the mover is centered. But Effort needs to be reflected in the outer world as visible movement. So who does identify the Effort in "there is Light Effort in his jump"? I believe it is the observer's task. I think Laban must have experienced Effort as both a mover and an observer. He explained one aspect of movement that the observer perceived. But he explained it as the mover's inner thing.

Did he say, "What does the mover need to do to express Direct Effort?", or "When can the observer say there is Sustained Effort?", or "What does make the observer say there is some Effort?".

I know I learned about this from experiences in the LIMS Certificate Program. But I would like to know how Laban explained it, or ...am I missing something?