I love teaching the Diagonal Scale to my Freshman Actors! Its such a great challenge to get them taking risks and working with complex body actions like contralateral movement, spatial intention, and really committing to shifting their weight off vertical. Its an exercise that really shakes them up, and reveals to me all of their physical habits and weaknesses. When I see them bring back their version of the Diagonal Scale in class tomorrow, I’ll be giving them tons of feedback on ways they can improve their body organization, coordination, and break habits to free them up to be even more embodied expressive actors.

If you’ve never seen Laban’s Diagonal Scale before, here’s a video of me doing it (without the associated Basic Effort Actions) years ago for my entrance application to LIMS to get my CMA.