Introduction to John Hodgson Interviews

How the cassettes came to be discovered

 

I began work on John Hodgson’s collection of Laban materials in March 2007, and was hugely assisted by Sam Gibbard, an Australian working in the Brotherton Library’s Special Collections. Together we would search the stacks for materials about or by Rudolf Laban. On one such trip Sam found a case which was full of audio cassettes: recordings of interviews that Hodgson had conducted between 1972 and 1991. I later reported this finding to Donald Howarth who was a great friend of Hodgson and whose trust was funding my research. Donald breezily mentioned that he had quite a few cassettes lying around his house (by Hammersmith Bridge in London). I scoured the floors and surfaces and found around twenty further cassettes. I mentioned these discoveries to Vivienne Bridson who had helped Hodgson throughout his researches and who had organised most of the interviews. She noted that several recordings of interviews conducted in London and New York were missing. To date these have not been found. 

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My first job on the cassettes was to digitise them. We found three cassettes that were jammed. The next step was to see if the signal in the digitised sound files could be improved. I sent them to a sound technician, Bruce Asher, to clean up and boost the signal, and he reported that a further 43 cassettes were inaudible. In September 2021 I shall make a second attempt at playing the original cassettes on a more powerful machine in the hope of getting a better signal from them. Many of the successfully digitised cassettes still have very poor sound quality. 

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The names on the cassettes were often so misspelled it was difficult to guess the interviewee. The spellings have now been checked. Hodgson edited the cassettes files which results in the majority of the interviews beginning some way into the conversation, and often including material unrelated to the interviewee (one being a report by John Humphreys on the 1971 war of liberation in Bangladesh). Hannah Butcher (who transcribed the interviews with Hanya Holm) has edited the interviews to remove all such extraneous material. Should anyone be interested, the extant recordings are still available in Special Collections. 

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The Interviewees and what they tell us about Laban

Bridson and Hodgson managed to interview many of the leading figures in Laban’s life along with family members. Most of these interviews took place between 1973 and 1975. Taken together they offer a unique picture of Laban’s career in Germany in the 1920s and early ‘30s and then in England in the 1940s and early ‘50s. Two figures stand out amongst the interviewees: the dancer and choreographer Kurt Jooss (1901 – 1979) and dancer and choreographer Hanya Holm (1893 – 1992) both of whom were interviewed on multiple occasions (Bridson notes that there are some cassettes missing in both cases). 

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What I find most fascinating about the interviews is how they disagree on aspects of Laban’s character and his work. Was he a predominantly serious figure or did he have a wicked sense of humour? What was his attitude towards ballet? What kind of teacher was he? The honest answer is that we who never met the man will never know. Each person interviewed has their own story to tell and we have to accept it as their own story. 

Where possible I (and Hannah) have offered a précis of the interviews and a brief biography to help the researcher find what they are looking for. Given that together the interviews total nearly 340,000 words, these signposts might be welcome! 

 

Dick McCaw, London July 2021.