Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) is a method for characterising quality in human movements in terms of timing, space used, posture and intention. The full LMA uses five description categories, namely Effort, Shape, Phrasing, Body and Space, to classify motion. In this work, we focus on the Effort category and more precisely, we are interested in recognising Effort qualities from hand motions only.
Laban Effort describes the dynamic quality of motion and is based on the 4 following descriptors (with the associated extreme values): Space (direct - indirect), Time (sustained - sudden), Weight (light - strong) and Flow (bound - free) making the Effort category isomorphic to [−1; 1]
Figure 1: Laban’s Effort cube: the eight Effort Verbs are represented at the corners of the cube. The three Effort Factors of Space, Time and Weight, are represented as axes of the cube. The six Effort Elements (light, strong, sudden, sustained, direct, indirect) are the faces of the cube.
Expert studies on Laban Effort expression [5] observed that Space, Time and Weight are often sufficient to describe actions, with either two or three of them being active at the same time. Motions involving one descriptor are defined as Factors (characterised by two opposed Elements), those involving two descriptors are defined as States and those involving three of them as Drives. In this study, we omit the Flow dimension and focus on the so-called Action Drives which involve the three dimensions of Space, Time and Weight. The Action Drives are also referred as the 8 Effort Verbs : dab, glide, float, flick, thrust, press, wring, slash. Figure 1 shows a representation of the 8 Verbs positioned in the Laban Effort cube. In table 1, we detail the decomposition of each Effort Verb into its corresponding Elements.
Table 1: Laban Effort Verbs decomposition into their corresponding Elements. Each Effort Verb contains three Elements. Each Element is contained in four Effort Verbs.
