Movement: Exploring Laban 2

Overview

On this 10-week Exploring Laban 2 course, you will deepen your understanding of the Eight Efforts and expand how you use them in performance. Building on a working knowledge of Weight, Space, and Time, this course moves beyond isolated Efforts and into how they shift, combine, fragment, and operate beneath text and behaviour.

We will begin by revisiting the Eight Efforts to re-ground the body in their distinct dynamics and reawaken clarity and commitment. From there, you will explore Effort Weaves — moving fluidly between different Efforts and discovering how transitions reveal psychological shifts, instability, or layered intention within a character.

You will then investigate Effort Duos, examining how two contrasting Efforts can exist in tension within the same body, and how this duality can create complexity and contradiction in performance. This will lead into Incomplete Efforts, where one element of Weight, Space, or Time is withheld or altered, creating subtle, nuanced behavioural patterns that feel more human and less archetypal.

The course will then move into Inner Attitudes, exploring how the work operate beneath visible action as internal states that colour thought, listening, and reaction. You will work with these underlying dynamics to influence presence and relational energy without overt physical demonstration.

From there, we will examine Externalised Drives — how adding or suppressing Flow shifts the overall texture of behaviour — and how different Drives generate distinct performance atmospheres and impulses.

In the final weeks, you will apply this expanded vocabulary to character and text, using Effort Weaves, Duos, Incomplete Efforts, Inner Attitudes, and Drives to shape layered, specific, and psychologically alive performances. The focus will be on precision, subtlety, and the ability to shift dynamic state with control and intention.

This course is ideal for actors and performers who wish to:

• Deepen and refine their use of the Eight Efforts
• Explore transitions and combinations between Efforts
• Develop complexity through layered and conflicting dynamics
• Use Inner Attitudes and Externalised Drives to influence presence and subtext
• Apply advanced Laban principles to character and text
• Gain greater control over dynamic shifts in performance

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Contact us
If you have any questions about this course before you book it, please get in touch with us at shortcourses@rcs.ac.uk.