1
Door plane
The plane you face. Up and down, side to side, nothing coming toward the audience.
- High right
- High left
- Deep right
- Deep left
Contemporary dance · The Lantern, Sheffield
Twelve directions and one body
The field above is the notated phrase of Ninety Degrees of Nothing.
Most dance companies describe their work in adjectives. Visceral. Raw. Tender. The words are doing no work at all: they could be moved between any two pieces in the country and nobody would notice.
The profession already has something better. Rudolf Laban spent forty years building a way to write movement down — where the body reaches, and how it goes there — and every dancer in this company was taught it. So that is what this site records.
Each piece stores a path through the kinesphere and a position on four Effort factors. Nothing else. The naming, the plane, the distance travelled, and the thing moving behind the title above are all worked out from those, which means the site can tell you something about a piece that nobody sat down and wrote.
The kinesphere is a real solid
It is the space you can reach without going anywhere, and Laban modelled it as an icosahedron: twelve points, thirty edges, twenty faces. Not a metaphor and not a diagram somebody drew — the twelve fall into three golden rectangles at right angles to each other, which is a property of the solid rather than a convention.
Those three rectangles are the planes a dancer is taught in the first week: the door you face, the table you turn in, the wheel you travel along.
- High right
- High left
- Deep right
- Deep left
- Forward high
- Forward deep
- Back high
- Back deep
- Right forward
- Right back
- Left forward
- Left back
2
Table plane
The plane you turn in. Everything at the height it started at.
- Right forward
- Right back
- Left forward
- Left back
3
Wheel plane
The plane you travel in. Forward and back, rising and falling.
- Forward high
- Forward deep
- Back high
- Back deep
The repertoire
The word above each title is not a description somebody chose. It is the Basic Effort Action that Laban's table gives for the three factors the piece was scored on, and once or twice it is not the word the choreographer would have picked.
One piece, read out in full
Ninety Degrees of Nothing
8 reaches · 38% of them in the door plane · 11.6 radii travelled
Basic Effort Action
Slash
Strong, sudden, indirect. A limb thrown through the whole reach at once.
- Weight
- How much the body commits its mass. Not how hard the dancer works.
- Time
- The attitude to time, not the tempo. A slow piece can be full of suddenness.
- Space
- Whether attention goes everywhere at once or to one place.
- Flow
- How readily the movement could be stopped half way. Not part of the action names.
The eight actions, whole
Weight, time and space, each with two ends. That is eight combinations and Laban named all eight — there are no gaps in the table and nothing left over. Flow is the fourth factor and is deliberately not in here: adding it would be inventing a table rather than using his.
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Float
Light Sustained Indirect
Light, sustained, indirect. The arm that goes everywhere and arrives nowhere.
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Glide
Light Sustained Direct
Light, sustained, direct. A hand moved across a surface without pressing it.
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Flick
Light Sudden Indirect
Light, sudden, indirect. Getting something off a sleeve.
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Dab
Light Sudden Direct
Light, sudden, direct. Touching a key, or a face.
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Wring
Strong Sustained Indirect
Strong, sustained, indirect. The whole body turning against itself.
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Press
Strong Sustained Direct
Strong, sustained, direct. Moving something that does not want to move.
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Slash
Strong Sudden Indirect
Strong, sudden, indirect. A limb thrown through the whole reach at once.
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Thrust
Strong Sudden Direct
Strong, sudden, direct. The punch, and everything shaped like one.
Fourteen people
Nine dancers, a rehearsal director, two technicians, and two people who do everything else. Nobody here is freelance for the season.
- Ama Boateng Artistic director since 2,009
- Ruaridh Finn Rehearsal director since 2,012
- Noor Haddad Dancer since 2,016
- Tomas Erlich Dancer since 2,017
- Winnie Okonjo Dancer since 2,018
- Jonah Vestergaard Dancer since 2,019
- Priya Raman Dancer since 2,021
- Ilse Brandt Dancer since 2,022
- Marek Sowa Dancer since 2,023
- Hester Quill Dancer since 2,024
- Bo Lindqvist Dancer since 2,025
- Deji Aranmolate Lighting since 2,014
Why there are no photographs of us
Every picture on this site is of movement or of a stage. There are no portraits of the company, and that is a decision rather than an oversight: a dance company is not fourteen faces, and the thing we would actually like you to look at is the thing the faces are doing.
What the site knows
It knows where each piece reaches and how it goes there, because that is what we wrote down when we made it. Everything else on these pages — what the movement is called, which plane it lives in, how far the body travels — the site works out for itself, and once or twice it has come back with an answer we would not have chosen.
Come to a Thursday
The studio is open on Thursday afternoons and anyone can sit at the back of it. You will see the same piece for two hours and it will not get any further, which is what making a piece is actually like.