Mastering Movement

The Life and Work of Rudolf Laban

John Hodgson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781135860936
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Like Picasso in painting, Stravinsky in music, or Stanislavski in theatre, Rudolf Laban (1879–1958) has been a seminal influence in contemporary arts.

This is the first major study of Laban's movement theories and practice, exploring the ideas on mastering movement and giving the reader a practical understanding of balance and harmony in the human body – the core of Laban's thinking. John Hodgson looks at the different phases of Laban's life and writings to show that Laban's thoughts about human movement and its mastery and control are the building blocks for a practical understanding of how the human body can create both beauty and purity through movement.

Part One

THE PROBLEMS IN UNDERSTANDING LABAN

‘I worked with Hanya (Holm) … it was hard to distinguish what came from Wigman and what came from Laban …’

Alwin Nicholai, International Dance Director.

The Problems in Understanding Laban

Ignored by Dance

Ironically, both before and since his death in 1958, the UK and US dance worlds have given little credit to Laban’s work in their training and expression. It is odd that a onetime choreographer to the Berlin State Opera and icon of modern dance theory and notation technique should be so little known within the professional dance fraternity.

Most will have heard of him, of course, but few will know what he is about or be ready, or able, to acknowledge just how much of the theory of this most influential dance figure they are constantly using. Still fewer will realize fully what more he has to offer them in understanding or extending their appreciation and expression in dance.

Establishing a Permanent Centre

It was the movement education activity that enabled the setting-up of an Art of Movement Studio, first in Manchester and then in Addlestone. The main emphasis (largely due to financial pressures) was the training of movement teachers, though there was a broader aim to provide an International Centre for Research, Training and Teaching of Movement Studies.

Things continued very much along the same lines right through to 1972 when Lisa Ullmann, who had been the Principal of the Art of Movement Studio since its inception, retired. Finding a successor presented the trustees with a considerable task since there had never been anyone else at the helm apart from Ullmann. During the early years, Laban himself had been a pervading presence but for the next fifteen Lisa Ullmann alone had operated supreme.

Return to the Dance

Dr Marion North, who had previously taught at the Art of Movement Studio, was appointed to succeed Lisa Ullmann. Dr North had worked closely with Laban as a research assistant. For a time Marion North held the appointment as Director of (now) The Laban Centre for Movement and Dance together with that of Head of Dance at the University of London’s Goldsmith’s College. This situation enabled Dr North to move the Centre into London in 1976, to a site adjacent to the Goldsmith campus. With the move came a significant shift of emphasis, once again, towards dance, with new staff and international links and outlook. It seemed that Laban’s importance in the field of dance was about to be re-established. The wheel seemed to have come full circle and everything appeared exciting in its development and promising in its prospects.

Forgotten Laban

At the present time, there are but two institutions which carry his name: the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance in London and the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York. Laban remains only a name with vague associations and recollections rather than being a towering, creative, iconic individual whose contribution is instantly recognized and whose worth is regularly accepted. Why are his ideas not more widely studied and applied in the movement-conscious world of today?

One reason springs from the very circumstances in which he lived and died. There is, it seems, an inevitable period after the death of many a well-known personality, be it politician, entertainer, writer or artist, when, in the process of establishing a more balanced perspective, a reputation passes through a period of discredit or eclipse. The individual is no longer there as a sharp reminder of all that he or she stands for and has influenced. Laban is no exception.

Reassessing Laban

With Laban’s death and the years that have intervened, there are some people who have attempted to undertake a detailed scrutiny and devaluation of his work. He was a person of impressive bearing and authority. He also had a kind of remoteness which kept some at bay. Others, who might have had the gall or the boldness to approach him directly with criticism, were fended off, in a somewhat proprietary way, by a misguided few who surrounded him, seeking to protect Laban in deference to his age, his standing or his health.

Once he was dead, he could no longer be protected; nor could he protect himself. Reappraisal is useful, but the danger in such circumstances is that by our zeal for reexamination and critical re-evaluation, we too lose our objectivity. The temptation is to show we are thoroughly independent and so throw out Archimedes with the bath water.

Laban’s case is unusual. When he died there were people who had worked with him in England, during the last twenty years of his career, but comparatively few who had spent any time with him in Europe during his first fifty. Amongst those surviving were individuals who had a long time been involved with their own versions of his theory and practice, and had become so engrossed in a single aspect that they had little time or inclination to seek or accept a broader view. It was the age-old problem of trying to maintain a perspective while working in close-up. Because of the aura of Laban the man, some claimed that through this closeness they had reached the fount of understanding and knowledge. The problem could only be recognized by bringing these ideas together so that it was possible to discern that it was rarely the same knowledge and hardly ever the same understanding.

Amongst his disparagers, on the other hand, there were those who were frustrated when they could not easily discover the answers. Some looked for a clear formula in Laban’s life and work and blamed him if they could not readily find one. Some, regarding him as the Stanislayski of movement, wanted a system and looked for his equivalent of An Actor Prepares or Building a Character.

There were deprecators who maintained that Laban’s ideas were restricted to limited fields of the dance or even to dance notation. Others wrote off dance notation as no longer relevant, claiming that now the job was done better by video. There were those who took some aspects of Laban’s thinking and tested them against inappropriate criteria, seeking to prove themselves by finding him wanting. Some even set out to challenge the entire philosophical basis of his thinking.

The Quest and the Questions

How has all the confusion arisen? How can we arrive at any kind of clarification? Is it possible to gain an objective perspective? If we can forge a way through to the essential core of Laban’s findings, leaving behind the admirers on the one hand and the detractors on the other, it should be possible to find where Laban’s real worth lies.

Laban himself did not make it easy. He never attempted to present his theory with any degree of encyclopaedic wholeness. It becomes a matter of sifting and sorting a way through his activities, his principal contemporaries, his forerunners and his writings, towards a better understanding.

Before we can proceed on the main quest of the journey, we need to discover the principal factors which have brought about the break in the line of influence and understanding. So this is where we first begin.

1 The Fields of Laban’s Enquiry

Laban himself is puzzling, so perhaps it is not so surprising to find that there are problems in understanding his work. A man of broad concerns and curiosity, he was never still. He changed his abode, his focus, his concentration, almost, it seems, with each new moon. Even in appearance he was perpetually modifying himself. There is something of the chameleon in the figure captured in photographs of him taken over the years. In one portrait he is an army officer cadet, in another he looks like a Bohemian poet. In one he looks more of a mystic, another presents him as a debonair young man, while a further photograph shows him rather like a business executive.

To some extent, the same changeability and expressive needs are reflected in his work. The range of his activity is often bewildering. Here we find him working as a stern dancing master, now he is the idealist, there the dancer, then the organizer, here the theoretician. At one point we find him writing songs in Paris. Now he is teaching on the slopes of a Swiss mountain, then on the telephone by his pageant-master’s desk in Vienna, now at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, choreographing the ballet sequences in Tannhäuser, then designing a theatre, or painting a landscape by the Danube, or analysing workers’ actions in factories in northern Britain.

His many talents and activities at different times and in different places have led some people to make extravagant claims that he was professional in any number of fields. There were those who believed him to hold a doctorate in medicine, and those who thought him to be qualified in quite a number of other disciplines. Joan Littlewood in her ‘peculiar history’, Joan’s Book, gets carried away like so many others. ‘I gathered,’ she announces in her appendix on him, ‘that he was or had been: a Dadaist, a crystallographer, topologist, architect … [and] while still in his twenties he had become the leading choreographer and dance master of the Weimar Republic.’¹

How have these misconceptions taken root and where in all this does the truth lie? It almost seems that, at times, he was as much an enigma to himself as he was to others. At different periods of his life, he clearly sought to express in his outward guise and activity contrasting sides of his personality – or it may have been more of a search to discover it.

Parental Pressure

Being anybody’s child and finding yourself is no easy task; finding your own identity as the son of a famous father is even harder. While Laban was still a schoolboy, at the end of the nineteenth century, his father was made first Deputy Governor, then Governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This was a military/diplomatic post and it was well known that the Emperor Franz Joseph personally hand-picked all his high-ranking officers.

The young Laban did not see much of his parents. Father was usually away on service and Mother, as often as not, went with him. Rudolf was sent away to school (where he tended to rebel) and visited his father in the holidays. While abroad with his father, he enjoyed physical exertion, found delight in the sports, and revelled in shooting, fencing and other forms of combat. He not only saw massive manoeuvres of troops but sometimes took part in them himself, riding horseback alongside the young officers. He loved observing the formations of the troops and was never happier than when he saw musters, march-pasts and military parades.

Considering a Career

Though childhood and adolescence were surrounded by these military influences, there was another side to young Rudolf s personality which needed an outlet. He wanted and needed a more creative form of physical expression, so he found ways of releasing his feelings in and through performance. The family home was in Pozsony (later Bratislava), in southern Bohemia, and it was there, as he grew up, that he first became fascinated by puppet performances, and by the local theatre (for which his uncle held the keys). He also began to observe movement as a foundation of human expression – at funerals and weddings – and admired the deportment of women carrying pots on their heads.

Such were the pressures of his early life that he remained uncertain about a career until he was almost thirty. It was a tough world and one in which there was little room for compromise. Rudolfs father had been disappointed in his son’s lack of success at school, but expected him to follow his father by taking up a military career. He was the eldest of four and the only son. Preconceptions about manliness only strengthened his father’s endeavour and he brought more pressure to bear when it began to appear that his son was developing definite artistic leanings.

It was he who had shown him the troops in action, observed that Rudolf was a skilled horseman and so settled him at twenty as a cadet in the Officers’ Training Academy at Wiener Neustadt (Vienna), fully anticipating that he would carry on the military line and enable the family at last to be proud of him. But Rudolfs heart, soul, and mind were not into the training Instead of being interested in guns and mechanized equipment, his imagination perpetually wandered. He survived only by investing the inanimate instruments of war with a life of their own. ‘For me it became clear that my place was not to serve the soulless steel-ox but rather to become a kind of adversary and antithesis to it, in spite of my admiration for its power.’²

The training establishment, though not Rudolf s father, realized that his talents lay elsewhere. Even at this stage, the young man thought of himself as an artist – though he remained confused as to exactly the kind of artist he might become. He endured the military academy for a full year, during which the only really happy time he had was when the authorities asked him to direct a dance festival of the cadets for the final celebration.

The return to his father with another failure created a greater rift between parent and child. Field Marshal Laban would not tolerate or attempt to understand his son’s artistic leanings, let alone his tendency from time to time to express them in the clothes he wore. When he found his son insisting that art must be his life, his father advised him that if he could not, would not, change his ways, there was a gun in his desk drawer and that would at least be an honourable way out.

That remained a devastating experience for Laban and years after, he still felt that he could not go home until he had proved himself and his profession. What followed were phases in his development in which sometimes he was pulled towards the desire to display free exp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Publisher’s Note
• Contents
• Preface: Laban in Question
• Acknowledgements
• A Brief Chronology of Major Events in Laban’s Life
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Laban’s Influence
• One The Problems in Understanding Laban
• Two Laban’s Ideas in Context
• Three Laban’s Documented Ideas
• Four Clarifying Laban’s Basic Ideas
• Five Turning Theory into Practice
• References
• Index