How a Physics Professor Discovered Dance
Most ballet dancers start training as young children, learning how to point their feet, turn out their legs and maintain their posture. If they begin as teenagers, they have many more obstacles to overcome in terms of flexibility, muscle control and balance. But what happens when they start ballet well into adulthood? That’s what I asked Kenneth Laws, the physics professor turned ballet dancer and teacher who did his first plié at the age of 40. He had a fascinating story to tell.
“If you had told me I would be involved in ballet when I was 39, I would have said you were off your rocker,” laughs Laws. “But when I discovered ballet it just turned my life upside down.”
His daughter, who was five years old at the time, saw a performance by Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet and decided she wanted to dance. Feeling left out, his 7-year- old son declared that he wanted to take ballet too. With both his children enrolled in ballet classes, Laws decided to get in on the action as well. There were no adult classes offered at the time, so he worked backstage as the “curtain puller.” From the wings of the stage, he found himself falling head over heels in love with ballet.
“I would watch a pas de deux for instance, and I would stand there with tears streaming down my face, just overwhelmed with the beauty of a classical ballet,” Laws confesses.
When Laws enrolled in ballet classes, he couldn’t get enough. In the 30 years that followed, he took over 5,000 classes, danced in professional productions and eventually became an instructor. But he wasn’t just any instructor—he was a ballet teacher with a very unique twist.
Before Laws discovered his love for ballet, he was a physics and meteorology professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. After a few years of ballet, he came to realize that he could apply his knowledge of physics directly to the study of dance. While many saw his marriage of art and science incompatible, he set out to prove otherwise.
In his forties, Laws’s body was unable to move with the same agility as the younger dancers. But he discovered that when he applied physics to certain steps, like a tour jeté, he was able execute them with more ease.
“Many people don’t bring the legs together at the peak of the jump. There's a physical reason to do it - to maximize the rate of turn, to give the impression you are going up in the air and rotating,” explains Laws. “But you can only do that if you control the separation of the legs very accurately.”
When Laws was dancing in “The Sleeping Beauty” with Deborah Wingert at Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, he was able to use physics to get through “The Rose Adagio.” When he was partnering Wingert on her promenade in attitude, he noticed that she continued to drift away from him.
“She said, ‘Ken, don’t make me twist away from you,’” reveals Laws. “I thought about it and said, ‘Debbie, you're not doing what you have to do. You're tying to push sideways, but what you need to do is twist with your hand so you keep yourself on balance, but also to keep your orientation.’”
Wingert looked at Laws strangely but agreed to try his approach backstage. She was astonished by the result. “She said, ‘That works!’” Laws recalls. “I was glowing. To share something with someone who was going to be a professional dancer with New York City Ballet. The physics did something for her.”
After that experience, Laws realized there were some real scientific laws at work, and that physics could be applied to the study and execution of ballet. He saw the way most teachers conduct class, with a “don’t think about it, just do it” attitude, and was unsatisfied. “I’ve heard that statement so many times. My approach is to say, ‘No, think about it, and you'll find a more efficient way,’” Laws explains.
“The learning of dance comes from copying others, doing what a teacher tells you, or trial and error. Those are the traditional ways of learning dance.” Laws continues, “But my way is to say there is a fourth way—analyze what you're doing and find the best way to accomplish your aim.”
Laws encourages his dancers to think, something that the students find both challenging and rewarding. During a pas de deux class in a summer course, he recalls a particular lesson about whip turns. Many of the students were bringing the leg from the front into passe directly without opening it to the side first. The result? Not surprisingly, they got stuck and couldn’t get around in the turn. So Laws said, “You have to move the leg from front to side first and here's why.”
The next day, Laws put some whip turns in the combination to see if the students had retained his information. But they made the same mistake again. So he asked the class, “What is the reason to bring the leg from the front to the side?” Laws recalls, “Everyone looked down at the floor, and no one said anything until one dancer raised her hand and said, ‘You have to store the momentum in the leg.’ She was 11-years-old and she understood the physical principles.” That young dancer was Ashley Bouder, now one of New York City Ballet’s star dancers.
For 25 years, Laws continued applying physics to dance both in and out of the classroom. He taught at colleges and universities, dance companies such as Atlanta Ballet and New York City Ballet and various places internationally including Argentina, Mexico, Italy, England and India. He even brought his theories to the college classroom with a freshman seminar called “Physics and the Performing Arts.” In addition, he wrote three and a half books (including a second edition of his third book), published over 30 articles in scholarly publications and gave over 300 talks to various audiences.
“People have responded quite well,” says Laws. “The younger audiences are most responsive — they are the ones who are questioning. Many dance teachers say, ‘Because I say so,’ or ‘That's the way it's been done for 200 years.’ Young dancers are saying, ‘No, that's not good enough. I want to know physically why it works.’ They are challenging dance teachers to learn some of the physical reasons why things work the way they do.”
Although he finds his approach an efficient method of teaching dance, he knows he’s nowhere near perfect as an instructor. He finds inspiration from teachers such as Pat Sorrell, who has a unique ability to get in the minds of her students. “She once looked at two different dancers and said to one, ‘Imagine your body is squeezed into a drinking straw,’ and to the other, ‘Bring your body closer to the access of rotation.’ She got herself in the minds of these two dancers, realizing they had different ways of thinking, seeing what was appropriate to each dancer, recognizing that their minds work differently,” shares Laws. “I was blown away by the realization of what she was doing.”
While he admits he has not gotten into the minds of dancers the way Sorrell has, he has managed to translate the physics into terms that dancers can understand. “I have been able to look at dancers as a category of people who think differently than scientists,” explains Laws. “I’m able to get them to think about what is going on in their bodies so they can improve their dance technique.”
Laws also mentioned ballet teacher Arleen Sugano as a source of admiration. While she never had a background in physics, she began understanding and believing in the principles as a method of instruction. Sugano and Laws started to share ideas and research, ultimately co-writing the latest edition of his book, “Physics and the Art of Dance: Understanding Movement” by Oxford University Press.
The latest edition of the book, which was released in September 2008, makes the distinction between what you see when watching ballet and what is actually occurring physically. “There is a sub subsection called ‘What You See’ and that’s about the impression you get,” explains Laws. “The other subsection is called ‘What You Do’ and this explains what one can do in a ballet class or what a teacher can do in terms of experimenting in the class to impact what a dancer actually does.”
With the recent release of his new book, the party is still going for Kenneth Laws, the physicist who fell in love with ballet. “I started ballet because I was passionate about the art from—it was just so beautiful.”