Rudolf Laban

German dancer and choreographer

• Born: December 15, 1879
• Birthplace: Bratislava, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Slovakia)
• Died: July 1, 1958
• Place of death: Weybridge, Surrey, England

In Germany, Laban is recognized as the founder of the expressive dance (Ausdruckstanz) movement. In England his effort theory vitally influenced the educational system. In the United States, dance acquired literacy through his system of notation called Labanotation.

Early Life

Rudolf Laban (REW-dohlf LAY-ban) was born Rudolf Jean-Baptist Attila, Marquis de Laban de Varalja in Bratislava, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Slovakia). Nobility formed his aesthetic, wit, charm, intellect, and vision, attributes he possessed in glowing colors. Laban’s father, who was a general in the Austro-Hungarian military, envisioned his son in the military, while his mother encouraged him to develop his athletic abilities. Rudolf, a namesake of the reigning house of Habsburg, attended military school for one year but withdrew to follow his visualizing mind through the arts of painting and sculpture. These disciplines were not his final expression; they did not capture the festive spirit that had magnetically drawn the youthful Laban as he traveled with his father to see parades, rituals, folk dances, whirling dervishes, and military ceremonies. The artistry that captured him was the dance of human motion and space celebrating the spirit of humankind. Laban’s career choice reinforced his parents’ worst fear: He would become a family outcast similar to his stage artist uncle, Adolf Mylius, who as a direct result of his career choice was forbidden to continue to use the family name. Laban broke from traditional family nobility of aristocratic service to serve the magic of human motion and space that impelled his imaginative and scientific mind.

Having broken from the expectations of his family by deciding to follow his artistic instincts, Laban had to take full responsibility for the direction and sustenance of his life. He never returned to his father’s house. He chose Paris to set his vision in motion; there he managed to support himself through his natural talents in graphic arts. He dabbled in the art scene of Paris to become familiar with the broader spectrum of his interests. He studied ballet with Monsieur Morel, a student of François Delsarte, and at the École des Beaux-Arts he studied architecture. It is reasonable to assume that while in Paris Laban became familiar with the notation system of Raoul-Auger Feuillet, to whom Laban later made reference. From these influences, he began to formulate a system of movement and a design for a theater that would demonstrate his vision of motion in space.

Laban learned the rudiments of life and art from several master teachers. As a schoolboy, Laban gained a proper respect for craftsmanship from an old friend, a painter, who taught him to discipline his imagination by, among other tasks, cleaning paint brushes. Laban conceived the staging of dance as living sculpture (tableaux vivants) while serving as an apprentice. These moving poses developed into group-dance scenes and later into movement choirs, a form that became Laban’s stylistic signature.

Life’s Work

Dance, for Laban, was the expression of a person’s festive being, a celebration that grew out of the community and culminated in a common identity and purpose. His new dance was not intended to teach new laws of nature or new rules of conduct, but rather to foster the recognition of humankind’s vigilance for the observance of laws and rules: He pontificated a global community in celebration of its individual and collective festive natures as far superior to a global community intent on arsenals and killing fields. The new dancer was created out of a world of “thinking-feeling” and willing, not as isolated parts of the psyche but as harmonic interchange of these elements. Dance was the ideal art to integrate the isolated elements, since words were formed from body sounds, which, in turn, were formed from body movement: Tanz-Ton-Wort (dance-song-word), a phrase coined by Laban, represented a basic triadic function in his theory of movement.

These ideas were developed during his summers at a dance farm in Ascona, Switzerland, and during his winters (1908-1919) with his dance company and school in Munich, Germany. At the dance farm, he explored the rhythms of the moving body (motion with force or strength, time or duration, space or direction) moving in the open air space. He worked with a dedicated group of students who came together each summer to study with him. The most prominent among them included Mary Wigman, Suzzanne Perrottet, Maja Lederer, and Dussia Bereska. His book Die Welt des Tänzers (the world of dancers) was published in 1920 and set forth his basic structure for the theory of free dance.

Subsequent years found Laban choreographing, teaching, organizing festivals, and writing. In 1921, he served as the ballet master at the Mannheim National Theatre where he created Die Geblendeten, Epische Tanzfolge, and the Bacchanalia in conjunction with Richard Wagner’s performance of Tannhauser. In 1923, he opened the Zentralschule Laban and Kammertanzbuhne Laban (school and small studio stage) in Hamburg. The Zentralschule Laban became important for its emphasis in the training of movement choirs. They presented new works by Laban entitled Lichtwende, Agamemnon’s Tod, Dammernde Rhythmen, and Titan. His choreography for the stage included Der Schwingende Tempel, Faust Part II, Prometheus, Die Gaukelei, Casanova, Don Juan, Die Nacht, Narrenspiegel, and Ritterballet.

Laban continued to organize the layperson for the festivals of community life. He was invited to thousands of these celebrations, ranging from small funerals to the Festzug des Handwerkes und der Gererbe in Vienna. The latter festival exhibited a moving snake seven kilometers in length and had ten thousand participants.

Being involved with the world of dance from a variety of perspectives, Laban was concerned with the low position that dance held in relation to the other arts. He credited dance’s lack of equality to its nonpermanent, “now you see it, now you don’t” status. He believed that a system of notation was as important to literacy in dance as it was to literature and music. Whenever he was choreographing, he was also working on a way to notate his movements: In 1928, Titan became his first notated score that proved to him it could be done.

Laban continued to open the traditional boundaries in dance, created primarily by the existent codes in ballet. By his constant search for the natural laws of movement and their prosodic relation to “dance-song-word,” he developed a language of dance that strengthened the five positions of ballet and expanded the field of dance and movement to new possibilities and applications. His theories of dance were published in two books that have become germinal to English-speaking students of Laban. Choreutics (1966) gives the framework for Laban’s space harmony, and The Mastery of Movement on the Stage (1950) also contains his thesis for human movement. Predecessors to Choreutics are the German publications Choreographie (1926) and Gymnastik und Tanz (1926) by Laban.

With the reign of the Nazis in Germany, it became difficult for Laban to continue his role in the organization of dance for festivals and concerts. The Eleventh Olympic Games, in Berlin, brought the rising tensions to a head. Laban was given responsibility for the dance section but was never allowed to perform his premiere, Vom Tauwind und der neuen Freude, for the occasion. He was placed in exile but escaped to England, where he joined two of his previous students, Kurt Jooss and Lisa Ullmann. Through the influence of Ullmann, Laban designed a course of study in dance for education. The course has had wide acceptance in England and culminated in the publication of Modern Educational Dance (1948).

While in England, Laban met F. C. Lawrence, who was interested in the application of Laban’s movement concepts to the performance efficiency of industrial workmanship. This collaboration created a divergent path for the application of Laban’s thesis on the qualities of human effort. It resulted in the publication of Effort (1947), coauthored by Laban and Lawrence.

In 1953, Laban settled permanently in England in the community of Addlestone, Surrey, near London. He established the Laban Art of Movement Centre and wrote one more book before his death on July 1, 1958, in Weybridge, Surrey.

Significance

In the Western world, the impact of Laban’s ideas led to the founding of several centers: in London, the Laban Center for Movement and Dance, and in New York, the Laban Institute of Movement Studies and the Dance Notation Bureau. Labanotation is a common inclusion in the graduate dance curricula of American universities. The movement scholarship in dance therapy is deeply reliant on the science of movement as Laban has written it.

Human movement embodied the qualities of the mind, in the thinking of Laban; therefore, to study the natural rhythms of ebb and flow in movement would be the most tangible way to explore the nature of harmony itself. His idea of community and festive events as the greatest pleasure of dance was to deepen humankind’s understanding of the harmonious structure provided by nature. He did not view this structure as a balance of parallels but as a dynamic tension existent in polarity.

Laban’s life work has indicated another way to view human nature and life. From the perspective of human movement in three-dimensional space, a kinship is formed. Experiencing movement and space as a kinship relationship creates an alternative to the common acceptance of space and movement as isolated entities. Laban’s discovery of laws of affinity in human movement and space as illustrated in his scales of movement have become as important to the art of dance as the laws of harmony are to music. Much of this material he could only set into motion but did not have time to complete. It was his ardent wish that his “methods might be developed, or better forms might be found.”

Bibliography

Davies, Eden. Beyond Dance: Laban’s Legacy of Movement Analysis. New York: Routledge, 2006. A brief introduction to Laban’s life and work, describing how his dance techniques have developed and extended into movement therapy, early childhood development, and other fields.

Foster, John. The Influence of Rudolph Laban. London: Lepus Books, 1977. A thorough book on Laban’s significance to the world of dance. Contains a good biographical section and includes appendixes, references, and an index.

Green, Martin. Mountain of Truth. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986. A comparative study of three artists, of which Laban was one, who passed through the Italian-Swiss village of Ascona between 1900 and 1920. Their personalities and ideas on art and culture are compared within a social critique.

Hutchinson, Ann. Labanotation. New York: New Directions Books, 1954. This work is a fairly easy to follow explanation of Labanotation. Includes a foreword by Laban.

Laban, Rudolf. A Life for Dance. Translated by Lisa Ullmann. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1975. Laban’s autobiography in a unique format that combines his artistic, personal, and imaginative life with his work.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Modern Educational Dance. London: Macdonald and Evans, 1948. A guide for teachers and parents who wish to use the basic movement themes to develop the expressive qualities of children.

Laban, Rudolf, and F. C. Lawrence. Effort. London: Macdonald and Evans, 1947. A concise presentation of Laban’s effort theory as it related to industrial workers.

Maletic, Vera. Body Space Expression. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1987. A comprehensive development of Laban’s movement and dance concepts. His concepts, works, publications, and life are placed in chronological order, showing the roots and evolution of his system.

Partsch-Bergsohn, Isa, and Harold Bergsohn. The Makers of Modern Dance in Germany: Rudolph Laban, Mary Wigman, and Kurt Jooss. Highstown, N.J.: Princeton Book, 2003. Profiles three founders of twentieth century German dance: Laban, his student Wigman, and his assistant Jooss.

Ullmann, Lisa, ed. A Vision of Dynamic Space. London: Falmer Press, 1984. A compilation of Laban’s sketches, drawings, and words, not all originally intended for publication. Gives insight into Laban’s visual and visionary aspects.