The Way They Move.(The Talk of the Town)(John McCain, Hillary Clinton)

There's been plenty of (metaphorical) eye-rolling, and head-shaking, over the pronouncements of "body-language experts" who have turned up on TV this election season to parse the candidates' fist bumps and grimaces. Finger-pointing, according to Tonya Reiman, on Fox, represents a "tough guy"; Janine Driver, on ABC, said, of John McCain's leaning against a lectern, "It's as if he's saying, 'I need a little more support here.' " It's comforting, in this atmosphere, to encounter the quasi-scientific talk of Laban movement analysts--a group of dance teachers, therapists, and others schooled in the techniques of Rudolf Laban, the early-twentieth-century artist turned industrialist. Laban came up with a way of describing people's movements based on two categories--Space Harmony and Effort--which can be broken down into subcategories, like Weight, Space, Time, and Flow, and special terms: Float, Punch, Glide, Slash, Dab, Wring, Flick, and Press. (There is a lot of capitalization in this system.) It takes five hundred hours of training to become a Certified Movement Analyst, or C.M.A. "It makes us sound like a cult," Janet Kaylo, a practitioner, said recently.

A few months ago, an argument about Hillary Clinton broke out on a Laban e-mail list. It was around the time of the Maryland primaries, and most people on the list had been discussing how the "coccyx-heel connection" affects skiing. Three C.M.A.s sent out a gloss of Obama's movement at a campaign event, praising his exceptional Flow, an indicator of empathy: "At one point, a woman handed him a baby. . . . He held the baby out at face level. The baby and Senator Obama looked each other in the eyes for a good three seconds, as if they were communing on some deeper level." Clinton supporters on the e-mail list took offense. "A little 'gushy,' " one wrote.

The Laban movement analysts concurred on a few things about Hillary Clinton: she makes strong Forming or Shaping motions--which, according to Kaylo, are "when your body molds a space as if it's wrapping itself around an object"--and she shows Assertion. (Think of Clinton at her concession speech, holding her arms in the air like goalposts.) But they disagreed about what kind of impression this gives. "I experience ...