Laban's Concept of Effort and his Work in the 1940s and 1950s

Effort was at the centre of Laban’s thinking about movement behaviour in this period. However, we have already seen that he was writing about movement qualities in the 1920s when the four motion factors were: Force, Space, Time, Flight. He called this aspect of movement analysis Eukinetics: the Greek prefix eu- has the senses of ‘good’, ‘well’ and ‘easily’, while kinetics comes from the Greek verb kinetikos, moving. Dancer and choreographer Aurel von Milloss remembers working with Laban in 1929: ‘We experimented, improved and throughout it all we concerned ourselves with Eukinetics.’ ¹