Rudolf Laban

Karen Bradley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351117043
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Rudolf Laban was one of the leading dance theorists of the twentieth century. His work on dance analysis and notation raised the status of dance as both an art form and a scholarly discipline. This is the first book to combine:

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• an overview of Laban's life, work and influences

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• an exploration of his key ideas, including the revolutionary "Laban Movement Analysis" system

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• analysis of his works Die Grünen Clowns and The Mastery of Movement and their relevance to dance theater from the 1920s onwards

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• a detailed exercise-based breakdown of Laban's key teachings.

As a first step towards critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners are unbeatable value for today's student.

1

LABAN’S CORE

Biography

Rudolf Laban never planned anything in his life. As a true visionary, he regarded life as one long improvisation. He described himself as a salamander, and it is possible to see him that way—eyes darting to see everything, quick, constantly advancing. He has also been described as a genius, a manipulator and a womanizer—all of which turn out to be facets of this complex man; a man without a plan, but a man with a purpose. His purpose was to move ahead and to spread out. In photographs, he is leaning forward peering at us, challenging us to respond, to grab hold of the essence of life. His eyes have a twinkle in them. The twinkle is mischievous.

He never owned his own intellectual property; ideas flowed through him, coming from a vast number of sources, passing through his continually active mind and body, where he readily disbursed them to his followers. He did not see his work as a commodity. Despite the fact that money was always a problem for him, his work was not for sale.

Mary Wigman described him as a “great wanderer.” (Wigman and Sorell, 1973, p. 32) Vera Maletic added that wherever he stayed, even if for a short while, he left his traces. (1987, p. 13)

Mary Wigman (1886–1973) was a choreographer and student of Laban’s. She is considered one of the founders of modern dance in Germany.

To him, it was simple. In Laban’s world, life was movement and movement was life. He was master of both the instant and the long-range horizon. Laban was also a recycler; he was pragmatic, opportunistic and conservative in the sense of making the best of a situation and the materials at hand, in the moment. At the same time, he saw the range of possibilities across a broad spectrum. Laban’s view of the horizon did not lead to his forming intentions, however. The horizon merely provided a canvas for possibilities.

Some portray him as a trickster, and he loved play and playfulness. He was definitely a provocateur as well. But even though he could be quite naïve, he was no fool. He was a keen observer and saw human impulses and predilections that needed to come to fruition. He watched, and listened, and responded as a man fully in touch with the realities around him. Only in his political astuteness did he fail to attend soon enough; he admired power and so, as we shall see, became entangled with the Nazis for a time.

Laban was both naïve and wise. He was open to new possibilities and viewpoints and he could be dogmatic at times as well. Laban looked at phenomena from many perspectives. Some say he could see the trace forms of movement and the energies behind gestures. The desire to tap into and amplify the human movement story is what drew him to the theater. (Kennedy Interview, July 8, 2004)

His student and colleague Kurt Jooss said that Laban’s main interest was always a kind of educative and therapeutic approach. “He believed in the salvation of the science of dancing” (Partsch-Bergsohn and Jooss, 2002). In 1920, Laban even told Jooss that dancing would develop and would rescue a dissolute society.

Kurt Jooss (1901–1979) was a dancer with Laban’s Tanzbühne in the late 1910s and 1920s. He eventually established his own company, combining ballet with the Tanztheater work, and is best known for his antiwar ballet, The Green Table (1932).

Laban’s life story is a tale of aspiration to deliverance and transcendence, but it is not the story of how he saved society. It is a story about the gifts of salvation and transcendence that he tried to give humanity, through movement. As we look at the last 150 or more years since Laban’s birth, it is clear that humanity has, thus far, tended to ignore the gift.

DEVELOPING

Laban was born December 15, 1879, in Bratislava, the oldest of three children and the only boy. His father was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army and his mother often traveled with her husband, leaving young Rudolf alone with his grandparents. From the hills above Bratislava, then called Poszny or Pressburg, he gained perspective. Looking down on the town: the church spires, the twisting streets and shops, the theater, and most vividly, the series of town squares, he could see humans in interaction, in expression, in community and in commerce. He could also see the heavens, majestic and massive, and sense his own small place within them. It was there in those hills that he first came upon the interweaving of nature and metropolis, the individual and the community, the quotidian and the performative that informed his later work.

His early teenage years were full of travel: to Sarajevo, Mostar, Istanbul and the like. Since his father was an officer, such deployments were not uncommon. As an inventive and self-possessed child, Laban roamed the countryside in these locales on his own. The natural formations of rocks, trees and terrain created a backdrop and set for his imaginative stories and plays. Local myths and folklore culture played an influential role in his creations of plays and puppet shows, and because of the travels, he picked up an international banquet of tales.

During his travels, Laban was exposed to both eastern and western sensibilities, studying under an Imam for a time.

He drank in Middle Eastern philosophy and sacred practices … Russian Orthodox Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, Turkish-style Muslim concepts and behaviour, extremist Sufi practices, as well as Catholic and Protestant Christian groups, all contributed to his awareness of religious possibilities and human behaviour.

(Preston-Dunlop, 1998, p. 3)

While in Istanbul, according to Valerie Preston-Dunlop, he also encountered Sufism and Dervish dances. The exposure to mysticism, the crossing of boundaries between the waking and dreaming world, provided Laban with a holistic sensibility, launching him on a lifelong search for hidden meanings and allegorical symbology.

He was attracted to performance—theatrical, military, story-telling, puppetry—all forms of nonverbal, movement-based forms of human discourse. He wrote about his childhood Kasperl Theater (a Punch and Judy type of puppet stage). The character of Kasperl was based on his actor-uncle, Adolf Mylius (who had become a sort of black sheep of the family), and the devil character was called Napoleum, after Napoleon; these players conspired to find a blue flower that renders the finder immortal. The devil was banished and there was a joyful dance at the end. Laban, in A Life for Dance (written on the eve of the rise of Nazi Germany), concludes: “My childhood play has a happy ending. Time has taught me to think differently. It is the devil who more often than not gets to keep the blue flower” (1975, p. 9).

His relationship with his father was convoluted. As a military man, Papa Laban was not pleased that his only son chose the life of an artist over following in his footsteps. Nevertheless, Laban’s father supported him financially through his turbulent years as a young artist in Paris.

His mother was more of a playmate. A painter, and a woman with liberal, if not socialist leanings, Marie von Laban encouraged the imaginative play and spectacles in which her son engaged.

During his later teenage years, the family lived in Budapest, where Rudolf was a bit of a man-about-town. Photos from this time show a dark-haired, slender, intensely focused man-boy, with an expressive eyebrow, and a sophisticated air. The family was upper-middle class and Laban was the oldest and a male. The city of Budapest had become a cosmopolitan and sophisticated Mecca for the Empire and the coffeehouses rivaled those of Vienna. In many ways, Laban could have easily wound up a shallow cad, for the café-society called him and he responded with enthusiasm.

But the muses also came calling early on and he was pulled in artistic directions and subsequently adopted a more focused and disciplined attitude than he might otherwise have had. Despite a privileged, but often lonely childhood, he had learned to observe human behavior. This visual perceptivity led him in the direction of the visual arts.

Laban was first drawn to painting as a vocation, primarily due to the tutelage of an artist whose values of “love of work, scrupulous fulfillment of duty and unaffected behaviour” (1975, p. 10) were a contrast with the indulged life he had been living as the only son of a high-ranking officer. As his visual training evolved, however, he began to see the movement within the static picture:

It needed a special occasion to open my eyes to the fact that in the “moving picture” lies hidden a tremendously enhanced expression of human will and feeling … Then came a memorable day when I discovered tableaux vivants.

(Laban, 1975, p. 11)

He put together a series of these tableaux, with musical accompaniment, in such a way that each moment built on the last. When strung together, the theatricality and evolution of the static scenes took on movement and drama. He was still in his teen years when he built such tableaux; he was also apprenticed to a scenic painter for a time.

By the late 1890s, along with many writers and thinkers in Budapest, he was caught between the old world of traditions and stories, which he understood as powerful and compelling, and the emerging questioning of the direction of human culture. This struggle was far more than a man versus machine concern. The reconciliation of old and new was being played out across the western world. Laban’s particular and personal struggles led directly to the evolution of his theories and practice.

TRAINING AND STUDYING

Laban entered into officer training for the Austrian–Hungarian army in 1899, into the Military Academy at Wiener Neustadt, near Vienna, at the behest, if not direct order of his father.

His training included riding, social dancing, military maneuvers, fencing, French, German, and “nationalist dogma” (Preston-Dunlop, 1998, p. 6). Within a year and a half, Laban quit, through with the conformist training. He had always been an erratic student—bright but difficult—and the Army of the Emperor found him engaged in the same struggle.

Even as a child, he had been taken with the patterns of military parades, and fencing and social dance patterns also interested him. His intense training in these latter two areas, particularly, informed his personal movement skills. But the parades, large colorful sweeping patterns in which the individual skills of the performers were subsumed, may have been an inspiration for his improvisational choirs later on. He struggled with both a fascination for the machine, particularly the reliability and discipline that repetitive functional movement and spectacle provided, and for the artistic soul of the individual. He appreciated the particulars of folk dance and the agrarian lifestyle as well as the attractions of high culture and urban life. The academy at Wiener Neustadt afforded him access to all manner of society, but in the end, the desire to live the life of an artist won out.

His father was not pleased with his choice to leave the training academy, but provided support and letters of introduction, as well as financial support for Laban and his new bride, Martha Fricke, to set up household in Munich. It is not clear how Laban and Martha met, but both had aspirations as visual artists and Fricke was already a painter.

EXPLORING MUNICH AND PARIS

Munich in 1898–99 was an up-and-coming center for what would become expressionist art. Art Nouveau was in the ascendancy at the time Laban and Martha arrived, and it was in Munich that he was influenced by Hermann Obrist, a sculptor. Obrist was interested in the modern and the abstract but, more significantly, he worked in many different media forms.

Hermann Obrist (1863–1927) was a German sculptor and part of the Art Nouveau movement. Art Nouveau was popular from about 1880–1914 (World War I) and was a form of design that consisted of curving, flowing, elegant lines, incorporating plants and flowers.

Munich’s artists were shifting from romanticism to expressionism. Laban was influenced by all schools and ultimately found himself creating in the spaces between story and abstraction, physicality and expression. He was a man influenced by many sources and he lived in a time when the arts, sciences, psychology and social theories were all converging. Laban began to think about his own path, which had, up to this point, been largely unclear. His barely articulated quest was to find a form of performance that allowed the individual to speak with his/her own voice, to contribute to a greater whole, and that allowed group access to the larger concerns of the human condition.

According to Valerie Preston-Dunlop (Interview, July 3, 2004), Laban started in Munich as a pageant director. He was hired to create a comic carnival piece based on a profession. Given a brief and asked to do it, he came up with the idea of an improvised group dance. Later on, the group work would become far more formalized but even in these early days, he valued both individual and group input.

Laban was deeply concerned with questions about the nature of the individual versus the group. He was developing his philosophy and life choices at the same time that many were reading Marx and Engels, Freud, and anarchists like Michael Bakunin. The very nature of government, of democracy, of capitalism, of culture was being questioned by writers, activists and artists. And the role of the individual within the concerns of the group became a seminal issue of the twentieth century.

Laban loved the mystical, the grotesque and the circus. He knew the sources of play and storytelling as well as the underlying layers of tragedy within those forms. He unpacked the layers readily, and observed as the stories and images that were revealed took form as visual and plastic art.

After he and Martha moved to Paris in 1900, he tried to enroll in various studios and ecoles. It is clear from his subsequent drawings and architectural designs that he did study, but according to Preston-Dunlop (1998, p. 10), his name did not appear on any of the rolls at that time. Martha’s did, however. She was enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux Arts School of Architecture in 1903.

Laban and Martha both participated in the café life and the salons. There, the blend of spiritualism and decadence that prevailed led to his early commentaries and works based on this period. The early days in the Paris café scene laid the groundwork for his depth of understanding of the light and dark forces that an artist draws on for creative work. In A Life for Dance, he described his attempts, some years later, to capture the dichotomies of the café society that both fascinated and repelled him:

Has art, so passionately defended as the great provider of happiness and peace, any place amidst this hustle? How can true beauty dwell among the glitter of tattered silk and under the artificial purple lights? How can the soul rejoice amid the rags of the poor and the hollow eyes of hungry children? How utterly remote is the fragrance of the mountains and forests from the air of the slums, so thick with coal-dust and from the deadly smell of the powdered prostitute! Is that the song of man? I wondered in horror.

(Laban, 1975, p. 43)

This somewhat Victorian and judgmental perspective on what was attractive to him as well as repellant did not spring from either an overdose of religiosity or any type of atheism. Laban was highly spiritual but he did not ascribe to any one spiritual practice; he was not a cultist. He was attracted to practices that expanded perception rather than allowing himself to fall under the spell of unexamined beliefs. He was willing to experience the beliefs of any aspect of society and to apply this perspective to his creative work. In the end, his openness was part of his aesthetic, one of his many talents, and later informed the development of his theories.

Laban’s journey almost ended, however, when Martha died in 1907, leaving him with two small children. Laban did not soldier on as a single parent. Few men, especially Europeans, would have in those days. The children went to Martha’s mother. The next three years of Laban’s life are hazy. Rumors place him in Italy for at least part of that time, in Munich, perhaps at a sanitarium. He essentially dropped out of the society in which he had been involved, and left no tracks.

EVOLVING PHILOSOPHY/CHOREOSOPHY

Laban resurfaced in 1910, after having met his second wife, the singer Maya Lederer. They married and moved to Munich. In Munich, Laban found an “island of international culture … an oasis of anti-authoritarian thought and easy-going tolerance” (Preston-Dunlop, 1998, p. 17). Munich was café-society in its early stages—cabarets, puppet theaters, balls and soirees. The Blaue Reiter group—consisting of the artists Kandinsky, Klee, Franz Marc and others—promoted a more spiritual and expressive approach to abstract art. The composer Arnold Schoenberg was also in Munich at that time, raising questions about what was harmony, harmonic and harmonious.

Munich was a smaller and more intimate city than Paris and the emerging cabaret and café scene provided a locale for writers, artists, musicians and performers to share their concerns about the wealthy and the bourgeoisie. The artists sitting around in cafés were against rigidity of thinking, status-driven success, hypocrisy and complacency. They produced magazines, newspapers, paintings, small theatrical events, vaudeville-like performances, atonal music, and more in the service of the nouveau.

Laban’s movement influences during this period also included the body-culture approaches of Bess Mensendieck, Rudolf Bode and Emil Jaques-Dalcroze, all of whom were part of the physical, spiritual and expressive culture-of-the-whole that was prominent in Munich at that time. He studied Noverre’s Letters on Dancing and Ballet, a text from the eighteenth century in which Noverre recommends privileging the storyline of a ballet over the decorative and technical prowess of the time. Laban was aware of the notation systems used in historical dance forms (especially Feuillet notation, with its swirling pictorial pathway...