Laban Resources
Transcripts – John Hodgson
34 Individual Files Listed Alphabetically
Merce Cunningham (Tape 64)
Biography
(1919 – 2009)
Cunningham was an American dancer, choreographer and teacher who was at the forefront of American modern dance for more than 50 years. He collaborated most notably with composer John Cage. Cunningham and his Dance Company had an incalculable impact on dance and experimental art and performance in general.
Summary of Interview
Discussion of Labanotation (and why he doesn’t use it) and his dream of an electronic form of dance notation. Description of his approach to choreography not being about music but space and time. He knows nothing about Laban but did meet Wigman (a very funny description of the meeting).
Tape 64
MC: You talked with Cage, right? Long ago I briefly studied with [inaudible] and that dance was notated and Cage copied it, I think.
JH: Yes, he showed me the manuscript.
MC: Since then I’ve not had anything to do with it. One dance of mine has been notated in Laban. [inaudible] But she does reproduce it from that, but she had to add things to it. [inaudible] … accommodate to these things. What it didn’t do then was to allow for the kind of space thing, I assume and also the time. She did have a great deal of trouble with actual movements. [inaudible] But she told me that she did have to devise some new things to be sure she was clear, because I don’t use metric [inaudible]. Time like set [inaudible] And the space was also
JH: [inaudible] yourself, how did you find it?
MC: I didn’t find it. I didn’t use it. I think probably, well I didn’t know it well enough. But I think mainly because I didn’t … it took me too much time to write it out and I know quite well from [inaudible] that [inaudible] obviously, it could be much clearer. But I didn’t find it useful that way, so I didn’t use it. I don’t use any of it really for my own [inaudible] … although I don’t think that’s the answer, I think it’s just a way. Video is so accurate, not the thing itself but…
JH: You used to create with the video?
MC: I now use almost always video. I make some notes, sometimes. Mostly mine are stick-figures with notes. I have certain ways of indicating space and
JH: Are these verbal notes.
MC: Yes, I write little notes. I have certain very simple, they are ways only to deal with things that I know, and the impression, the memory. I know where something I didn’t… that somebody else would never be able to … but it’s not to do with notation.
JH: Is your feeling then that you wouldn’t want your … to write down your dances for other people to do?
MC: Well other people [inaudible word] some space and other people [inaudible few words]. I’m not averse to it, it’s just that I don’t, I frankly don’t think that the Laban system functions as easily… I know it works, I don’t mean that, I know people who [inaudible few words] but I prefer the idea of it being done some way by electronics. I think that that’s where the notation should go.
JH: Meaning what?
MC: I could put this in a sort of dream way. I don’t think just having video is good because that ends up like a record being style rather than skeleton. I think you need what amounts to a score, but I think for dancing it should be something that the dancer looks at, the way he looks at what it teaches, or the choreographer, what he can imitate directly, and I think that you could do that [inaudible] with electronics. I’ve seen some tentative efforts in that direction but done by someone who wasn’t really interested in dancing but [inaudible]. That wasn’t his job or anything but he did it, and I thought, well if he can do that, then if there were a million dollars, or whatever, that somebody could work it, something that would really function visually and ideally I think it should be that. It should be that next to a video of the dance so that the dancer could see how somebody did it, which I think is helpful, against which you look and see how it is done. There’s a difference. What it’s made [inaudible word] the exact proportions of the steps. For me that would be more interesting, in fact I tried to get involved working on such a project but first of all, as I say, it’s all this money, and second of all it took so much time that I couldn’t, I couldn’t do it. I was more interested in making things than doing that.
JH: That is the main point. Finding a system that is quick enough, that is accurate and detailed enough to make it worthwhile.
MC: I think it would be possible, but I think it would take a concerted effort on the part of the dancer, dancers, dance movement and electronic people, because the dancers could bring up the points about things that the electronic people wouldn’t realise needed to be there. And the electronic people could figure out a way how to get [inaudible]. But I don’t see why that isn’t possible. I think all that I would have to do, is have a hell of a lot of time and all this money. But think about everything that would need to go into it. [inaudible] I am sure this is possible.
JH: Have you come across Laban in any other field?
MC: I know nothing or almost nothing about the Effort thing. I don’t know anything about it.
JH; You’ve never come across any of his other theories at all.
MC: No.
JH: What do you find are the most influential philosophical theories in your own work, with regard to dance?
MC: I don’t know whether this is intellectual or not but people use them now, and I don’t say that I was the first one, there were other people too, the idea of the music being separate from the dance, for example it not being [inaudible].
JH: Did this grow out of your work?
MC: I always did it in my own work, although it was stricter in the earlier [inaudible]. It was a stricter thing. But never to metre in that sense. It was always based on… never phraseology, it was based on space and time. Even though they were closer [inaudible] but the principle remains that I think also the thing about space. And I think also that this thing of separating from the music. Students may ask about technique, but I am not concerned about making a technique, it’s about getting people moving around.
JH: When you talk about space, what you mean, actually?
MC: I mean, instead of say, thinking in terms of the stage, to think in terms of you… I am here dancing and the audience might be all the way around or they might only be in one place, but my focus can be multi-directional.
JH: Is this something arrived at from experience working with dancers or
MC: It probably, I think, partially that, but I think it’s also due to my being with painters and who were thinking differently about what a surface could be, so to speak. The abstract expressionist painters and then, of course, Rauschenberg and Johns and then of course the music, musicians who I connected to.
JH: If I said that attitude to space was very Laban, what would you say?
MC: It could be. I only think about that was I didn’t see any reason why it should be fixed in a single way. It could easily enough be seen in another way. I remember working one day by myself on a solo, thinking, I don’t have to face that way I could face any way, just like people in the street do. So that it could well be that, but I don’t think it’s a … as I say, I don’t think it’s something that belongs to me.
JH: I am just interested because I have a theory that in fact Laban’s ideas, I don’t know whether they were Laban’s ideas after people began to use them anyway, but a lot of, I think, the things which I regard as being Laban, have grown into the vocabulary of general thinking. Now whether this is because they were current anyway or whether they were something which like the wheel you absorb I don’t know.
MC: Well, that I really couldn’t answer. I didn’t know directly anything about Laban, other than notation.
JH: What about Wigman?
MC: I only met her once. I don’t remember it well. It was so brief. She had come to see us perform in Berlin. I liked her very much. She was a [inaudible]. She was so strong. I met her and … so many years ago. I was teaching uptown in a studio. I was standing in the hallway having done my teaching and was paying having rented the studio and Limone’s wife was there and she said [inaudible] And this woman in a big black coat turned around and I didn’t know, and she introduced her. And she said to me, ‘Aren’t you surprised to meet Mary Wigman in the hall of the dance studio?’ And I said, ‘No this is exactly where I would expect to meet her.’ And she laughed and said, ‘Exactly right.’
JH: You never encountered her work over here?
MC: No experience of it at all, really.
JH: I suppose the thing about painters and Cage, all working together and sparking off things from each other
MC: I think during that period since the late ‘50s and into the ‘60s that thing of people realising that they had common ideas even though they started from different points has made for lively [inaudible] times.
JH: I mean she was using silence to dance was very early. She said people complimented her on this innovation. In her case, she couldn’t afford any musicians.
MC: Exactly [laughs], yes. It’s always the most practical things that are the most interesting. That’s so marvellous when people don’t stop, they go on doing whatever it is they do and then deal with it. I always admire that.
JH: I think Laban was experimenting with a very different kind of sound, and different ways of using sound, and I think to some extent not using it in strict terms of marrying music and sound. Often he got the dancers to make sounds. This was happening in 1910, which is quite interesting.
MC: What is so curious to me is that it appears, it occurs to me, is that there were … I would say through Hanya Holm there was a great strong German influence with Wigman in, I guess, the ‘30s probably into the ‘40s. There was almost none of the dark [inaudible] thing here, that influenced the Valci, that was so strong in England, but very little of it influenced here. That whole idea about collaboration of artists or dancers, that kind of thing, at all. Although Valci had been there of course and came to the American school, but he’s not visually interested in things that come about very much. But the modern dance was almost totally, what influences it had from Europe was almost totally Wigman from German and Laban. Jooss would be Laban, part of Laban, yes? And he came here to the States at some point [1936].
JH: Did you see any of his work?
MC: very late. Of course, I’ve seen The Green Table done by one of the companies here. But they were here in the ‘30s. And of course Wigman was here too. There probably were other German dancers. Well, Kreuzberg was here, of course. And Georgi. All of that. They were apparently strong influences, as far as I can make out.
JH: They probably became absorbed into the [inaudible] thing. Much more influential here than in England, even though Jooss was at Dartington for a while. I don’t think he ever really made a strong impression.
MC: Yes, but it was quite strong, as far as I can make out, it was quite strong here. All the big [inaudible] were at the same time as American [inaudible few words, break in tape].
MC: I went to school in Seattle, Art School and grew up near Seattle and he came to play his piano for the dance class and then later he came to New York after a [inaudible] he suggested we give a programme. I made some dances, he played some music. We started and just kept on going.
JH: Did you two idealise a lot, did you throw ideas about? Or did you develop your ideas about … separately
MC: I think probably with John, because of his way of musical thinking, he prompted me to think that this might be possible in dancing, yeah. [inaudible] but then when we got together that way, we decided that there was no reason why he had to write a piece of music which fitted every single movement. That was the kind of start. We didn’t work in phraseology, we worked in time structures.
JH: From the beginning?
MC: From the very, very beginning. It’s always been the way. The time structures were closed, and now they’re very free, that is, a dance would be made up of certain lengths of time within which I would make a phrase of dancing or two phrases, and he a few notes, but there were certain joinings. Those were the structural points. So it really was like a television show or a radio show in time rather than on physiology or rather than some variation. The phrase theme and variation was perfectly acceptable in the 19th Century but it didn’t function in the 20th century. It seemed to be changing all the time and collapsing all around rather than going back and thought we were supported. Never, never. I would hear Louis Horst talk about that and I thought. [inaudible]
Margaret Dunn (Tape 66)
No Biography
Summary of Interview
Account of Laban’s influence in England in the late 1930’s. Amusing description of Laban teaching at Bretton Hall in the early 1950s and at a summer course in Moreton Hall, Newtown, Powys.
Tape 66
JH: So when did you first hear of Laban?
MD: Oh, long before I came to Breton [Hall College] really. I heard about him in I suppose 1937 or ’38 when he was at St Gabriel’s College.
JH: Who did you hear of him through? Who was the messenger?
MD: It was Diane Jordan. She came to teach at St Gabriel’s College and I was there and it part of the Physical Education there. But I joined the classes and was very taken with what she was doing in movement and dance and so I went with her and joined a dance centre which was run in Chelsea by Lesley Burroughs who was the wife of a Sir Graham Goosens and we used to meet on Wednesday evenings.
JH: is Lesley Burroughs still alive.
MD: Mmm, yes. I did a recording with her…
JH: Do you have her address?
MD: Which is down in the Surrey [National Resource Centre for Dance] now. But, then I heard, through that group that Laban was at Dartington. And then there was, Gillian Waugh, I think it was in 1939, there was a conference run by the Ling Physical Education Association in Bush Hill, somewhere - I’m not quite certain; you’d know that; you can follow it up – in which Laban and Lisa Ullmann were making a contribution. And so I went to it and listened. So that was the first time I actually met him through Diana Jordan. Then, with the war we were evacuated up to Doncaster to St Gabriel’s College, so we had to move up to Doncaster. Diana Jordan, we knew had been teaching down at St Gabriels, and was unable to come to Doncaster so, the principal was determined that dance should go on and I was given leave of absence for the summer term to go and live with Diana, following her classes, and talking and discussing with her.
The First Summer School in Newtown, Wales
At the end of that Summer term I went to the first Summer School which Laban and Lisa ran in Wales in Newtown, Wales, and by this time they were living in a farm house there, because they had to leave Dartington as it was too near the coast. There were lots of people there, about who came to that conference and it was hard going because we … they had no money and we had to work in the garden on the so-called lawn that the hens shared with us. So you looked before you sat down. And a lot of Lisa’s work demanded sitting down and thinking. And there we had talks from Laban and we found it terribly difficult to understand him because in those days English was by no means fluent. However, it was very well worthwhile. From that first course they then, with the encouragement of Diana and Joan Goodrich, ran vocational courses.
JH: Is Joan Goodrich still alive?
MD: No, she died about three years ago. And these were held in Morton Hall in the Summer and Sheffield Training College in the Christmas vacation. And I went to them all. And this is really how I learned about Laban and became so much more familiar. I was very taken with him, very taken with his ideas. He was most helpful and when they started the Studio in Manchester, probably in 1945 or 1946 [1946] I went over. They were always so welcoming and allowing me to go in, so that I was one of those very fortunate and very privileged people to be able to meet Laban and Lisa Ullmann in a sort of relationship of friendship.
JH: What do you remember of the Studio? What was it like?
MD: In Manchester? Well, it was, compared with these days, it was big room in a house. I suppose one could call it a house. Two rooms chopped into one, the floor we wouldn’t dance on it now, you know with knots. It was very un… but there what happened in those days and now … if you live long enough you go back to what happened in those days when things were happening immediately after the war, and the excitement of new things. And those people at that Studio were all excited; something new was happening, something was being made, something was being created and I was privileged to be on the fringe, but we did, were able to
JH: Who were there; were you able to meet people?
MD: You know the sickening thing is that I can’t remember. I have tried many times.
JH: Gerry [Geraldine Stephenson] presumably?
MD: I remember a woman called Tuck at the Newtown. I remember vaguely someone called Cox who was Vice Principal at Dartmouth Physical Education College. A few odd people like that but I cannot remember the names, who
JH: Presumably you met Gerry Stephenson?
MD: Geraldine was of course on the staff at the Studio by that time.
JH: Valerie Preston Dunlop?
MD: But she was later. She went to the Studio at Addlestone. [She was a student at the Manchester Art of Movement Studio from 1946 – 1949].
JH: Not before?
MD: I don’t think she was a student at Manchester.
JH: When did Marion North come into it?
MD: She joined the Studio… I’m not absolutely certain now whether she was in Manchester or not, I think she may have been in Manchester.
JH: Did you meet Joan Littlewood.
MD: Joan Littlewood came in. I don’t think Joan Littlewood was herself at the Studio.
JH: They were across the road though, weren’t they?
MD: But what was the name of the woman who worked with Joan Littlewood and was at the Studio in Manchester? And did a lot of work, and I cannot remember her name. [Jean Newlove, aka MacColl]
JH: You got Laban to come here [Bretton Hall].
Laban in the West Riding of Yorkshire
MD: Yes. When Bretton started [by Sir Alex Clegg in 1949], you Diana Jordan and I were in the West Riding, beginning with. Alex Clegg said, ‘You will introduce movement into the West Riding.’ Diana was to go into dance and was introduce it into education work. And then when Bretton started, and during this time, even during the days when were evacuated to Doncaster, Diana came up to Doncaster for long weekends and the odd week, and Lisa Ullmann came for the odd week, and Laban came for an odd week. So it continued through those years until Bretton and then Laban came over and he stayed at the in Woolley [near Wakefield] and he talked with teachers, but he came over to Bretton on a few occasions and watched the students at work and talked with them. He hadn’t taught, he didn’t give a lecture as it were with students at Bretton but he talked with them. He watched them working and talked with them. And I always remember he was so observant; he would say at the end of a class to me, ‘That student is idle’, a student who I had taught was … had a lot to say, you see, and had a lot of ideas, but Laban said, ‘Yes she may have, but she is idle, she doesn’t do anything about it.’ [Laughs] There were comments like this about the students in the Drama group, this was the one year Drama Group, which was so valuable. And then he gave a few lectures at the [Inn?] in Woolley to teachers and any students I could take over were invited. They were lots of [inaudible] because he was beyond the understanding of the teachers. They hadn’t caught up in any way. And I mean, I found him difficult, also with his models and his theories on space. I found it very difficult, but he used to get carried away with his ideas and I remember one occasion, carried away, he knew he wasn’t getting across, he fetched something to help him. He went up to his room and came down with some models that he had made and it became even more confusing and it was a very difficult situation because he knew he was not communicating. And so toward the end of his life I think he ceased to work or to communicate very much with people in education. He went onto Industry of course and became very interested towards the end of his life in movement for the… those who were mentally disturbed and people needing therapeutic treatment. He certainly came here and in his first days here was very pleasant. You see he was such a friendly man and the student could talk to him and …
JH: But he wasn’t like that at Dartington was he? When we
MD: On that year, I think the thing is, he was finding his way, he was a sick man when he came to Dartington first.
JH: In 1950, I’m talking about.
MD: Yes I know. But he’d got to Dartington in about 19… um
JH: ’39, 38. He was very sick then.
MD: But even then at Dartington at 1950 when we were there, no he wasn’t, it’s quite true. It was not easy to make contact with him.
JH: Very remote. And to some extent of course I think that was on the part of Lisa protecting him from other people.
MD: Oh, I think Lisa did protect him, almost too much.
JH: The problem with Marion, the problem with the Studio at the end and so on, was that he was away and she took over.
MD: She was very protective and even his books and his writing… At the Studio in Addlestone there was a curtain drawn and behind the curtain were all the … and only the very, very, very privileged few – I never saw behind the curtain, I might say.
JH: Now tell me about. How did you get you sorting out of his theory because one of the most complicated things about Laban he never was articulate in words, for a number of reasons, but how did you therefore sort out for yourself what was …
MD: I got … any sorting out I did was through Lisa and I remember … it’s so indicative… the way of things. In a Summer School at Moreton Hall they came, Lisa and Laban came, they introduced the idea of Effort – time, weight and space – and whereas the two previous Summer Schools we’d all been bewildered and couldn’t find our way, this was something that we could hang on to. And so we all thought, at last we knew what we were doing. Well of course it was a fatal thing. It was a terrible over-simplification, but I nevertheless do not, as far as I’m concerned, and I am being personal here, do not regret it because it was a beginning for me. I got something definite that I began to work on. And my [inaudible], if I know anything at all, is through the experience of trying to teach it and to make use of it. Any knowledge I may have of Laban’s work is through doing, of course. Of course, it was listening and going to Lisa and struggling to understand through the experience of doing it. And it makes me think that the way to do learn is to do through experience. Learning by experience is something I believe in very, very strongly and even now, after all these years, I couldn’t possibly – how can I put it? – I had nothing like the knowledge, for example, of Valerie Preston Dunlop has, or Marion North has, because they studied the analysis of it all.
JH: This is knowledge of a particularly selective sort. It is not necessarily a wide understanding.
MD: It is, it is most certainly. And that is needed. I think people like me need that. But my experience is through actual trying in some sort of way to communicate to students, really. I am trying to help them to understand what little I understood and together we struggled on to gain some sort of understanding.
JH: Did you ever find that you were able to take a problem to him?
MD: Yes, very much so. Because I know I can recall one occasion, one Summer School, when I was struggling because I, for one thing, I felt so inadequate, I was going through a period of feeling quite inadequate, that I couldn’t, you know, cope. And he actually came to me and said, ‘You’re going through a bad patch, aren’t you? You’re having difficulties.’ And I said, ‘Well as a matter of fact I am.’ ‘You must come and see me, but don’t do it now, not now. Can you come down for a weekend to Addlestone?’ Which I did, and he was remarkable. And it was just the sort of friendly talking and asking me all sorts of questions and making suggestions to me which clarified. Now, the details of it all I don’t recall, except that he gave me not a sort of Jungian or Freudian analysis, but a movement analysis. He made me do, perform various movements and said, ‘You know, you really … the trouble with you is you think too long before you do, before you act, and really if you’re working in the field of dance, you really must try to cease an idea and then work on that rather than think before.’ I get the idea and he made me do various quick things, as simple as ‘Now look there! Now look there! Now look there! And tell me what you see.’ And if I didn’t see it immediately he would clap his hands, ‘No, no good.’ [Laughs] In an effort to make me be more spontaneous.
JH: Very good. I think that was what he was actually remarkable at. He was less good at being articulate about his own theories. One of the things I found was
MD: He found it was very difficult.
JH: An extraordinary person, [inaudible few words] and the number of theories and why is it so. But he didn’t ever clarify what his own theory was about, that he could work at that level, he was superb. Really exciting.
MD: But that was very true. He could work… he could communicate with individuals but to put forward a whole philosophy, articulate a whole philosophy, he found very difficult. Now whether this was through the language problem, I’m not sure that it was language
[end of tape]
Christopher Fettes (Tapes 48)
[Tape begins with poor signal, first 30 second being inaudible. As ever, the microphone is closer to JH, so CF’s voice is harder to hear]
Biography
Fettes is a drama teacher who, with Yat Malmgren, created the Drama Centre, London. He is author of A Peopled Labyrinth: The Histrionic Sense: An Analysis of the Actor's Craft (2015). The work of Drama Centre and the theme of the book is based on a movement psychology developed by Rudolf Laban and Bill Carpenter.
Summary of Interview
Fettes created Drama Centre with Yat Malmgren. Malmgren taught for a year at The Art of Movement Studio in Addlestone where he met Bill Carpenter who was working with Laban on what they called Movement Psychology. This interview is an account of the curriculum at Drama Centre and how it relates to Laban and Malmgren’s Movement Psychology. The work centres on the creating of characters through structured improvisation drawing on the motion factors and their combination into inner attitudes and drives. Malmgren’s career as an award-winning dancer. Voice training.
Tape 48
CF: The second class is the Stanislavsky class. Both the movement side and the side concerned with movement psychology do occupy an enormous amount of time. [Inaudible] There are four half-hour movement sessions a week gradually, bit by bit, over the course of three years the full [Inaudible], which takes about three years to fully work their way through and to bring it as it were [Inaudible] performance at the end. So far as we’re concerned, I suppose if we take the theoretical work, the way we relate it to the students is through a chapter that I’m sure you know in An Actor Prepares which is called Inner Motive Forces in which for the first time somebody pins down the fact that all interpretation of character was inescapably linked to the notion that certain character types which are very, very roughly and perhaps incorrectly defined by Stanislavsky and which the theory of movement psychology then affords one a much, much, much more detailed and explicit statement and that is the way in which it’s, as it were, written into the training as such. It is, essentially in the first place, an aid towards the creation of character and the recognition of the way in which a psychological type will express itself through…
JH: Do you see Laban as being a kind of an extension of Stanislavsky in that area. And leads to further analysis and synthesis?
CF: Yes. Very much so. Obviously it is based on much, much, more elaborate knowledge than that of the very elementary kind of chapter which is one of the very simplest and shortest chapters in the book, and the very least explicit. And a great many people who read Stanislavsky just bypass because it’s obviously, at that time, much too embryonic. He merely points out how vitally important it is that a decision is taken very, very early on in the actor’s work or the director’s work as to what type the character belongs to. But then it doesn’t really explain, and as you possibly know, is then divided into three basic types which [inaudible] holds together. Basically there are only three types [Inaudible] more realistic.
JH: Do you in fact give the students a lot of practice to get
CF The way the theory is taught is essentially in a practical way. In other words, it’s based on improvisation from the word go, that is to say, that what Yat does now… I haven’t seen his classes for a long time and they have developed and changed a great, great deal. What they do now, basically speaking, is to start off with some working actions and things like that and then the recognition of the inner participations and of the mental factors and they have then to improvise on these very, very, very, very simple crude things from the word go. And then gradually then of course they start to work in detail through each one of the inner attitudes and they have to then produce improvisations in which they create monologues as different kinds of characters and different kinds of situations in which they investigate let us what is strong, direct and very simply, as it were, strong and direct, light and flexible, so that they do an improvisation on a character who is in some way, as it were, characterised by a predominance of one or another of those variations within each one of the inner attitudes which they do over the course of the thing. They have to do 26… 24 variations, 24, as it were, basic improvisations, gradually building up. With a large group of students, 35 or so, that takes a very long time. So naturally, the work gets done very, very thoroughly. Then when they get through to their final year they very frequently do give performances, give shows where they have to create, they have to select six different characters which are then much more elaborately built up, and the whole thing is explained to them in terms of the confluence of the externalised drives and the way in which the expression will change as the subordinate inner attitudes change and one replaces another around the predominating single one.
JH: You said that obviously An Actor Prepares is one of the basic pieces that the students involve themselves with. Is there any Laban writing that you use at all?
CF: [Inaudible reply]
JH: You don’t use [Mastery of] Movement on the Stage?
CF: No
JH: It’s true there’s very little of it indeed. So, how do feel that Laban’s work, Laban’s thinking and so on, do you feel that you have developed a lot since Yat met Laban?
CF: Oh yes
JH: The ideas I mean, and so on.
CF: Oh yes. I mean, the student’s understanding of the whole business of expression, of what determines expression, and the complexity with which they can assess a performance, or of their own performance, and describe exactly what it is that leads to variations and changes of expressions and so and so forth is to them something quite remarkable. At the beginning it was always very sound because he [Yat Malmgren] had years, and years, and years of experience as a modern dancer himself. He was quite a remarkable dancer, quite a remarkable choreographer. [Inaudible] these extraordinary programmes which in so many ways made him a highly suitable person to have developed, to understand how to develop that work, because it was, in many ways, so much the kind of thing he had been doing himself as an artist quite intuitively. All his performances as a dancer were really and truly based on different kinds of characters and so that even as a very young man when he first came to England in ‘38/’39, the first time he met Laban then, and first heard a little bit about the work that was going on then, he was very, very fascinated and impressed by it. And then that probably did, to some extent, influence his own work as a choreographer and as a dancer during the War in the United States. [Inaudible] Really, he was ideally qualified to develop the work. [Inaudible sentence]
JH: Did you find that he would ever agree with Laban, or does he ever get to a point at which he…
CF: No, I … there could be many things he found difficult to understand initially, but by working away at it, I don’t think there’s anything that he rejects about the theory at all. It has gradually, bit by bit by bit its complexities and obscurities seems to have [Inaudible] themselves out. He doesn’t question [Inaudible] logical ,,,, [Inaudible]
JH: And do the students involve themselves in the performance of dance here as well as the acting?
CF: They have movement. Yat is also responsible for all the movement classes, all their movement training. A certain amount of that is devoted to [Inaudible] given by other people, classical ballet, character classes, dance classes and things like that. But the movement classes themselves are as it were anything but dance classes. We lead them as far away from that kind of thing as we possibly can. They are all very specific classes we can build up around the actor’s need. They are very different from any kind of dance. Though they do of course derive essentially from the current technique concerned with Laban. But truly owes nothing to the Laban before. There have been many teachers but none of them were really influenced by Laban at all.
JH: And since he met Laban has this the main source of his inspiration, would you say?
CF: The Laban theory? Oh yes, very definitely. He literally dedicated his life to it, he really has. His whole achievement and his whole sort of mission has been the development of that work, literally quite selflessly. He has spent his life developing and in explaining to his students who Laban was and of course who Bill Carpenter was too. Quite obviously, these fantastic definitions, the accuracy of the definitions, as opposed to the quasi-mystical way in which Laban himself wrote and which puts a great many people’s backs up, and which enshrouds things in such obscurity that it makes them very often more difficult to understand and accept. Whereas it always seems to both of us that what Carpenter did in pinning down and accurately defining the notions which underlay Laban’s own ideas was an amazing job. Amazing. You, or rather we, wouldn’t have been to do anything on the work without that. We’ve always felt that he should be given very full credit for the collaboration between the two. Superb achievement.
JH: When does [inaudible] get back from holiday then?
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CF: He showed Laban one or two of his compositions when he was down there, and Laban was terribly impressed by them.
JH: Was Yat with Jooss?
CF: Yes. And I think he was a first dancer without being actually trained by them. He competed for the Olympiad in dancing before the war and won the gold medal. I think that was 1939 in Brussels. Jooss I think saw him at that performance and offered a contract when he came to London to audition for him. He was offered this contract and for the first time joined the company, because he had always danced as a soloist before. And then he went to Dartington and then to the States.
JH; When did Yat get in touch with Laban again?
CF: That wasn’t until the ‘50s. I can’t remember exactly. He’ll be able to remember. After the War he came back to Europe because he’d decided that he had to study classical ballet and he got a scholarship from the National Ballet in London and he studied here with Anna [inaudible] and eventually he went to Paris to work with Egorova, another [inaudible] and then he came back as soloist for the National Ballet and toured England for quite a time. And then he retired and when he retired he decided to go to teach and he started to teach very quietly in the National Ballet and of course he had no idea at that time that he would have ended up working with dancers. And shortly after that I met him and I introduced him to Tony Richardson, and when the English Stage Company first opened at the Royal Court and Yat was invited to work with all the actors… [inaudible couple of sentences] … and it was just about then that I think it was Bill Gaskill suggested that… I think he had met Laban at about that time … he suggested that Yat should get in touch with him… [inaudible]…
JH: And then he has just gone since developing the …
[jump in tape]
JH: Finding the need to use as fundamentally…
CF: I just don’t think they know about it. They don’t know about it and after, Laban is for most people, the majority of the people, the association is with dance rather than with theatre. When you get into drama schools and so on and so forth, the whole notion, as it were, that gesture underlies all expression, there is a gesture implicit within all vocal expression. It is an idea that you don’t find many people pay more than lip service to. If you say…[inaudible] It is for me personally that the extraordinary achievement of Laban is essentially that he is the first person so far as I know, and my knowledge is terribly limited, and I don’t think anybody [inaudible] philosophical training … It seems to me he was the first person who ever attempted a detailed analysis of the form of non-discursive symbolism with the kind of complexity, the kind of richness that has been brought to the analysis of language and the logical symbolism and so on and so forth, over the course of the last thirty years. He is the man who achieved that for the first time in the study of a form of non-discursive symbolism which then was then [inaudible] of all forms of non-discursive symbolism. Nobody, nobody in any field, who are concerned with that sort of problem, be it philosophers or artists or what have you, has really any inkling of this material, of its [inaudible], of its validity. It has, as it were, somehow has been confined in one way or another to an [animal study?] …
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CF: … load of codswallop. [inaudible] some of way describing characters [inaudible]
[break in tape]
CF: … It immediately, perforce, takes them away from this kind of standard English theatre voice which in point of fact is always completely unchanging. [inaudible] Prospect’s Pericles. But sitting then one thought every single person on this stage quite regardless of what they are doing and what the character – they all speak with exactly the same voice. There is one English stage voice and it overlies every single character that they do. The implications for the training of the voice in something like this is the ability and clarify and study the expression in terms of voice production is fantastic but of course its implications are disturbing and upsetting for people who have got the intellectual horizon who don’t want to be disturbed, who don’t want their ideas to be disturbed. [Inaudible]
JH: So is voice here taught in relation to … Laban?
CF: The head of the voice department is an ex-student. So he went through the whole training and school so in his own work he is therefore able to make very immediate use of what is going on in every other class in the school, all the acting classes and all the other classes, and therefore does have, right from the word go, a very, very immediate feel. From the first moment all of this work on the movement psychology is really taught not in conjunction with movement, with pure movement at all, it’s taught in conjunction with speech. They have to get up and improvise in character and start talking immediately. And the analysis is there conducted quite as much in terms of tone of voice as of physical moves, both the tone of voice and the actor’s physical gesture are being seen as the expression of which the underlying gesture is [inaudible]. They’re working with speech from the word go, it’s not something that is in any way detached from their grasp of the problems of [inaudible] or of movement psychology.
JH: Presumably vice versa: when they’re doing the speech predominantly, they’re also moving …
CF: Also, necessarily, when one talks about Stanislavsky as being the Method of Physical Actions, therefore whether they’re working on speech or working on text or whatever it is, it enables them in the end, every moment, or a teach at any moment to ask them to state quite clearly what the Physical Action may be, what it is, and what is in terms of the subconscious motive?
JH: Do you find then that your students are better equipped than … the feedback and so on … do they find this remains with them?
CH: Oh yes, yes. They do find it frightfully difficult, they find it terribly difficult. It’s quite definitely one of those things that a great deal of the training in school is very inappropriate for young and inexperienced students. Really it’s an ideal school for people who have had five years’ experience of professional acting and then would come to a place like this rather as in New York they [inaudible] That they can make fullest of it. Well, one can’t do that in England because actors can’t be in education when they are twenty five or something like that. So, one has to give them something that they’re going to be able to call on later on in life. And one finds, time and time again, students come back, five, six, seven years later and say, Look, now at last, they have grasped the kind of things that were embryonic when they were here. And many of them, of course, do work on and it becomes fundamental. Jack Shepherd … [inaudible] In the light of their experience of … the problem with the student is that he doesn’t know what the real problems of acting are. He is still obsessed by things that in point of fact he solves when one is an actor after about a year or even less in the profession. One doesn’t fall over, one doesn’t upstage people and one learns how to coordinate one’s physical movements with one’s speech and so on. All of that kind of stuff, all these superficial things which students still quite rightly find difficult and it’s only when all that’s digested that one begins to understand what the real problems of acting are, and what a real actor’s technique involves and the need to have ways of approaching problems, and what the problems [inaudible] materials and resources and so on.
[00.26.00 Tape changes to JH reading from a ‘Programme for the Jooss Ballet The Green Table’.