Gestures of Vibrating (Interruption) in Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigman, and Walter Benjamin

Abstract This chapter compares Rudolf von Laban’s and Mary Wigman’s practices and theories of vibrant gestural flow with Walter Benjamin’s theory of gesture as vibrant or intervallic interruption. For Laban and Wigman, gesture mirrors a vitalist understanding of life that is based on the assumption of transhistorical continuities of vibratory exchange between human and cosmic energy. Benjamin’s Brechtian gestures, by contrast, address historical inscriptions and manipulations of bodies, which provide comment on the conditions of society by subjecting to critique aspects of the idea of flow that pertain to unquestioned political figurations of power. This chapter thus explores three gestural manipulations of vibrant energy, and shows what they engender: in Laban, a process of transmission between dancers and spectators; in Wigman, an “action mode” of movement, which she called “vibrato”; and, in Benjamin, a possibility for philosophical insight, but also a disruptive revolutionary charge.