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The Choreography of Labour #1




This first event of Romana Schmalisch's residency concerns itself with the question of the efficiency of labour and how artistic methods are also used to enhance efficiency in industrial production. Romana Schmalisch will focus among others on the choreographer Rudolf Laban and the industrialist Frederick Lawrence, who in the 1940s collaboratively realized a training programme for employees in various factories in the UK. The programme was based on Laban’s well-known dance notation, the so-called “Labanotation”, and the Laban/Lawrence exercises related to the movements performed at work, attempting to “compensate for the physical strain, to increase exactitude and speed besides stimulating the sporting instinct of the individual worker in the operation” (Laban).

This examination of the use of artistic methods for the purposes of production will be the entry point for a more general investigation into the interrelations between the sphere of labour and production and that of film and the arts within the project Film Laboratoires.

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+ date + friday march 22d
+ time + 8 pm
+ free entrance on reservation + at reservation@leslaboratoires.org / +33(0) 153 561 590

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Photography: Roland Watkins, © Mary Watkins, Totnes/United Kingdom.
"Laban/Lawrence 'industrial rhythm' training, Manchester, 1947"