Juana de Laban (Tape 77 &78)

 

1910 - 1978. 

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Biography

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Juana was a dance teacher, choreographer and theatre director working in universities across the US. 

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Summary of Interviews

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Daughter of Laban and Maja Lederer. Taught by Wigman as a girl. Gained her Laban Diploma with Bodmer and Gertrude Snell, and studied kinetography with Knust, all against Laban’s wishes. Discussion of family and its Hungarian roots. Her education and professional career in the US. She met Hanya Holm and knew Jooss. She describes his Green Table. Discussion of Suzanne Perrottet. Discussion of the divorce between Maja and Laban. Her relation with Maja as the eldest child. André Perrottet’s suicide (also discussed in Jean Newlove pp. 21 – 22). Discussion of Azra [Azraela] Laban, his eldest child (b.1902) and her youngest sister Renata. Finishes with a brief discussion of Laban and the Freemasons.

JL: [Story about taking her mother woman on a road trip where they visited Indian Reservations.]

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Tape 77

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JL: Now did you speak to Mary Wigman? 

 

JH: Yes.

 

JL: You did. When? 

 

[Break in tape]

 

About Mary Wigman 

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JL: I don’t like to say this, my father, in a wrong way, really in a wrong way. You see I was a student at the time of Mary Wigman’s there, when I was little, 10, 11, 12. As you know children are very much more perceptive than adults. And having them there, that particular summer, she already had a love and hate at the same time. And it was in such a mixture that you felt it. For instance, when she watched me moving, I could feel her eyes burning. Then she said to me, ‘Child, come here.’ And then she said, ‘Sit on my lap. I was born when she was in the house and she said at the time, ‘Whatever shall become of you?’ So then she repeated the similar thing which my mother had told me, you know, earlier. And she said, ‘Come here’ and then she touched my face and in the touch I could sense that there was an indelible something left. But I also could see in the class that there was something very cruel when I was working. I was put through the paces in a different world. Now why, whether she couldn’t have any children with him, which she may have wanted, or whether it was that hatred that I felt, of competitiveness. 

 

JH: I’m sure you’re right, I’m sure you’re right. 

 

JL: I don’t know but I remember it so distinctly. 

 

JH: That is exactly what I feel, but I’ve certainly sensed that she has mellowed with the years. 

 

JL: And this is what I don’t understand because when she has mellowed she has also diminished in her mind the value he was for her. And that is what I don’t quite understand. 

 

JH: Now that I don’t accept even. 

 

JL: That’s very interesting but she has truly, she looks at it now from a rather ironical way.

 

JH: No, not in the way she talked to me. 

 

JL: Well, these articles are written in such a way that I was absolutely horrified. 

 

JH: Yes I think that’s quite interesting because I don’t think the articles necessarily represent her full vision of it. What I admired about her discussion with your father was that she can recognise his faults but is no way like seeing them as having any significance in what he meant to her. She is full of admiration, she is full

 

JL: As a woman? 

 

JH: As an artist. 

 

JL: As an artist she lately was not doing very much. 

 

JH: No, I think it’s the other way round. Also I talked to Jooss, which was interesting, who also has gone through this love/hate period. 

 

JL: Terrific, yes. 

 

JH: But has emerged from it and sees now, again, he just says, what a marvellous thing it was for him, even though, in spite of all the problems that they had and the disagreements and the conflicts. But he now sees the inestimable value and he treasures the great moments of harmony rather than the other. It’s very touching. Mary Wigman is very unwilling to have any kind of animosity. 

 

JL: That’s wonderful, I’m glad that she is harmonising with herself all these years. She changed, you know. It’s no more working now, and is retired

 

JH: She’s also very, very ill now. 

 

JL: I think sometimes, you know there was a very strong period where she really was against my father. 

 

JH: [interrupting] As many of them were. They’re coming through it now. This is why, in many ways, I was very sorry that I have not been able to get to the biography before this. But now I’m not so sorry, I’m quite glad because it means I think I’ve avoided all that period and am coming in now when people are taking this more mellow, more balanced view. 

 

JL: But in a way, you should have a notion of that period of the Hitler era. You should. Because it was rather devastating and I was asked to publish something in a magazine which no longer exists now, it is called Saturday Review and they wanted to give me an enormous amount of money but I refused because I didn’t feel that I could do it justice in every way and I also had a few knowledges of things which were so disturbing to me of his former associates, friends, and students, etc. And I couldn’t quite assimilate that experience until a good deal later. Did you speak to Käthe Wulff?

 

JH: No, I haven’t done so. 

 

JL: Did nobody tell you to talk to her?

 

JH: No. 

 

JL: Oh, that is very interesting. She is right where Perrottet is. Käthe Wulff in Zurich. One other person came to mind, who stood by in France

 

JH: I haven’t been to France, nobody has mentioned anybody alive in France at the moment. 

 

JL: Dusia Bochu.

 

JH: Is she still alive? 

 

JL: Very much. I have letters from her all the time. 

 

JH: Have you her address? 

 

JL: She had so many children. It’s not even funny! I think nine or something. 

 

JH: I have heard so much about her, I would love to meet her. She’s a very amazing woman by all I’ve heard about her. 

 

JL: It’s not Bereska, it’s her daughter. Her last address was in Nice. Somewhere out there. When her son got married, the younger son, then she wrote me a letter later saying we have moved again. So I have the address. There was another person – Grace Graf, Kurt and Grace Graf. 

 

JH: I think I’m going to see them in September. 

 

JL: They both trained. Grace fell in with my father and my father said, look… 

 

JH: Tell me what your first recollections of your father. I presume that you too have gone through a period of attitudes towards him, have you?

 

JL: Well, not really. I think I was more or less the one who didn’t, because I had no cause. I think that is always different when one is isolated from something and doesn’t want anything to do with it, for one reason or another, I do not know, or when a person finds satisfaction in working, in movement, like I did. It had nothing to do with him when I didn’t feel at all times satisfying with my work. It had nothing to do with him. So it was basically something I’m interested in from early childhood on; I loved to watch animals, people, movement in general. As a matter of fact my father enhanced it when we were little with stories. And he… did my mother tell you that he designed little handkerchiefs? And these stories, you see were the stories he told us. And then for each child my mother had to embroider that. I was always the only one who at an early age was able to go to Hungary and meet the rest of the family, so that I wasn’t as isolated from our background as the rest who did not have this opportunity. My sister Etie [Etelke] only had it later, much later. 

 

JH: Etie feels very strongly this Hungarian link.  

 

JL:  Very strong, and I would even say because of me. I don’t know whether she said that. But I went through my training phase, to the Royal Hungarian Academy and got my diploma there with the dance and with the people so that I didn’t have the same difficulty. However, both my father and mother didn’t want me to be in the dance. My father because he said, ‘You’re [inaudible], you know. And you know again the Hungarian character. So, he hurt me very badly because I couldn’t dance … but I was rather after him, I am practically as high as he is. It was at the time and I was thirteen. So naturally that’s disturbing to a youngster at that particular age. So, and then my mother, I used to design clothes and got a matter of satisfaction to make a wardrobe for her, so when she went on holiday I made all the clothes, including the bathrobe and everything. I like that. I had time to always costume myself at a very early age. But my parents were very much against this. So I had to ask my mother to help me to go to the dancing school in Munich when I was little. I have a different training. I have some of the Gunter Schule, and then I have Elizabeth Lamb training, then I have in Frankfurt with Lotte Muller, and Sylvia Bodmer. I got my next diploma there, and I got my diploma in choreography from Gertrud Snell, and then studied kinetography with Knust. And those were very good days in relation to working with the movement. However, my father was very adamant that his daughter should not be with that. And so Mr Knust helped me to hide out by his sister, I don’t know if he ever told you this? To hide out until my father asked my mother to come and get me and not to let me continue. And so they took care of me for a little while and then they promised my parents that they would take care of me if anything should happen. Well they didn’t have to take care of me, but they were willing, which was wonderful. So then, apparently, I found the right path by myself so I didn’t have to be taken home – I was only 15 – gosh! Then I danced in various places and companies and then the film, in Germany. I was in several films, done several parts, in Universal [inaudible] in Berlin. Then I had a card arbeitgemeinschaft, I think I still have it somewhere. So that was that. Then I went back to [inaudible] to take my other teaching diploma and I [inaudible] there for a while, and then the situation became such that I did not wish to stay there because I did not see any good with Mr Hitler arriving. I went to Berlin. I spoke to my father, and he thought it might be a good idea, what I had in mind, to go to America. So I went to Hamburg, got on the boat and left. 

 

JH: What attracted you to America? 

 

JL: We have several members of the family over there, and had over there, and one of my uncles was consul in America, so I wasn’t isolated. My mother had a brother, he lived to be 89 and they lived rather close to New York, and he had two boys, two sons, there were a little older than myself, single, and so I was very well taken care of. And then I had a cousin from my father’s sister’s children and he was there and he also was sort of looking after me. So I really didn’t have any worries. Then I went to Yale University and acclimatised to the United States by studying, taking a degree in dramatic criticism while I taught movement. And I stayed there a number of years and I was teaching movement there. Then when I got my PhD I went to University of Michigan. I developed two things: 1. Stage movement for the actor. There was a nucleus of four people and I was the fifth to join in a very young movement. Now it’s commonplace that we teach that, but at that time it was really only that very nucleus of us and it was not accepted and we had to fight. The second thing I had to fight for to introduce the history of the dance. Since I got my degree, like a university professor, I wanted to develop that. And so I did. And so I have been teaching that subject all the time. I taught very little technique or things like that but I taught composition a great deal, choreography, and I choreographed works, original, etc. directed plays and I also kept that up until now sort of on the side, not as my man thing because I am always hired as a historian and a researcher. After I had physical difficulties in ’64 I turned much away from all activity in dance and got into research. Fortunately I had so I thought it was time to use it. And I was asked to come to UCLA and start a graduate dance programme, so I stayed there for years. And then recently, in Texas they asked me to come and introduce into the graduate programme at their school, which I have done and now I am freelancing as of this minute. I just managed to get rid of all my commitments. 

 

JH: How much of this do you find you use your father’s theories and concepts 

 

JL: It is inherited. There is no way round. What I find is inherited that I am able to guide the young people and that I am really the driving force behind young people to find their way in the field of dance. I am told that this is the unique capacity of my father and it seems, I don’t know, you cannot learn that. You either have it or you don’t.

 

JH: Did you study your father’s theories?

 

JL: Oh yes. I got two diplomas, as I told you. With Dr [inaudible] and Sylvia Bodmer. I did the whole course, then I did all the kinetography with Knust, then I did all the choreography with the Choreographic Institute in Berlin. So I have all that under the belt. And then, naturally, studio training professional training, was not acceptable in America at the university, but I felt, if I tried on a studio-basis for which I had support and suggestions from many people, I felt that I can’t make it in America because I don’t the people and I don’t know their way of thinking and feeling. So, I felt it was necessary for me to go back to the university and get a concept of America. 

 

JH: And yet you have become very accepted in … I was in UCLA for a while the year before last and you were very much a household word. So they seemed to have accepted your presence. Which is very nice, isn’t it? Did you ever find that you yourself … I mean obviously this interest in the history is also I think inherited, isn’t it? 

 

JL: Very much so, yes. And I always asked my father, but we did not do anything about the history and Laban training school. It always bothered me because I was interested, what went on before, what were their methods and techniques, how were they passed on, when were the highlights in relation to the whole social picture, the economics and particularly one aspect, the politics, because I was born politically curious? I guess I became more aware about the promotion of the artist, especially when Mr Goebbler came to the same thing and stuck there with the whip in a straddled position, and he said ‘I want this girl to play the leading tart’. And Mr Staemler said, ‘She has no talent.’ He said, ‘You’ll make her an actress.’ It was quite something. I was able to get away because I was Hungarian and had a Hungarian passport, but it pretty soon ended once he arrived on the picture. The stage movement ideas I have for the theatre I really think that is where I applied most of my background with Laban’s method. In technique or composition as such because when I gave concerts, quite a number. And taught. And I was continually told that I am European. And John Martin wrote in The Times, ‘promising, highly promising, but very European. We shall watch very carefully.’  Things like that. Anyway, I watched too. And I said, it’s not exactly what I wish to do, anyway. And I got an idea that I must to know this country where I am living. That was a really consuming idea with me because I felt that would not be another time where I should return to Europe. I was very definite. Not like other people who came to avoid the incident and then go back. I had some friends in the art field who looked upon it as a temporary thing and they wanted, naturally, to go back as soon as they could. But I never did that. It was very interesting. I always wanted to stay once I got there. And I was never encouraged by anybody. But I felt, if I am here I must learn how this operates and how it works. So that’s what I did.  

 

JH: Did you encounter any… you know your father did a tour of America, did you find that he had done some groundwork so you could…

 

JL: No, as a matter of fact my father and I discussed this and he answered with several articles. He had a very unhappy experience in America because they exploited him and put a label on him which he did not feel was the label he represents. So actually, he felt that America was vicious to him in this exploitation. And he was very dissatisfied so I heard that from him and then I heard from other people after I was there a while that he was there at a … he really couldn’t make an impact because they took him off to the movies and lecture tours and he never had a chance to really assimilated any point of view with the people. He was presented as something and it seemed to be wrong. And then, naturally, I learned from Hanya Holm, a great deal about how America does it when they take you in their hand and guide you and control you and so then I knew that this was not what my father wanted because he’s a free spirit. The minute you put him in a cage he can’t operate. He has to find his own equilibrium and then function. I am the same. 

 

JH: I was saying of your father that he … I want to call this Rudolf Laban – Man of Movement because it’s not only that he is himself interested in movement but is a man constantly of movement, he himself is never still. His mind is never still. His body is never still. His location is never still. He goes on and I think this is probably …

 

JL: And that, I think, was his greatest contribution: that he tried to bring out of people what’s in them, and that he didn’t impose ‘à la so-and-so’, a style with the technique right away. I was so angry listening to this thing, I am tired. To digest his material because it is contrary to everything my father’s ideas, you know, contrary, absolutely. I was so happy when there was a silence in the room. Everybody’s [inaudible] were going, I could sense you know, but they couldn’t parry the woman who gives the lecture. But it was very fascinating to feel this rather ominous silence. No reaction, no bridge. Because all these people knew how my father worked and how he thought about movement in general. The people who he trained in particular and sooner or later you have to find yourself or you get lost in the wayside. It’s the only two ways. That doesn’t mean that you’re not valuable in other ways, except maybe you will not find yourself in movement, that’s all. I think that is particularly true.

JH: What about your father as a person. Do you remember, have you got any sort of anecdote that you think illustrates his fantastic sense of humour…

 

JL: Well, I don’t think his humour was always so … I think it was very ironic. Very ironic. For instance, my mother walked up the stairs, and would say, ‘Do you hear the elephant, thump, thump, thump?’ And I remember I was little, very little, I cried, ‘My mother, an elephant.’ It was so terrible to me. So those is one image. Another image when we went walking in the park, we lived somewhere where the forest was very near and he loved to scare us. And he would always say, ‘The big bad wolf is coming to get you’ and then he would be the big, bad wolf and do the actions, thinking that he would minimise the idea in the child’s mind, but he was overstating it, so we got worse afraid. I remember that very distinctly because my sisters had the same thing happen. She too cried. You know, Renata. Only afterwards I thought how funny, you know, when I grew up later. I thought how funny, he was trying to minimise and yet overdid it so we got more scared. And then we always to go walking and I always lost my shoes, with intention, so I didn’t have to go with the family. I hate family outings because all the children, father, mother traipsing these kids along. I hated it when I was little. And I understood later, my father hated it too, but he did, he did do it. And I don’t know why he did it when he hated it. I remember I always lost a shoe, so I had one shoe, and the rest of the shoe was lost somewhere and I would never say anything until we were a good distance away, so you couldn’t find the shoe. I was punished. And I do remember the classes we had out of doors with adults and children and [inaudible] the most beautiful things. We were not hemmed in any way by, ‘don’t do this or don’t do that’, you could do what everybody did or you could do your own thing. My father would bang on a gong and that was great stuff for us. So my mother participated, so we participated. I remember that. 

 

JH: So many people seem to idolise your father. Did you? 

 

JL: No, I was so angry. And he in a way understood, because they drew themselves on the steps and everywhere, on the theatre, and I was coming in the theatre and he ducked in and out to work with exits and adjacent back doors and things. Once or twice I had to walk up the steps where all these people were. It was a nightmare. I was only 13/14 and very affected by this thing. And so I got up and then my father says, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ And so we went out the back way and then one time somebody came along and ran after my father. Then he took me in his arms and carried me across the big street in Berlin because that was the only way to get away. I forever thought to myself, ‘What’s so great, what’s so wonderful about him?’ Do you really want to be that interested, to be as a father? And, as I say, he was very ironic. Oh, he could be very ironic. And he would make fun of you in a very unkind way and I was just in that age where I couldn’t take it. So I preferred my classes with Mary Wigman who was cruel. But I preferred it than to his class, because in his class I always… ‘Oh yes’, he said ‘Who is this rolling in the back there? Oh, it’s my daughter.’ 

 

JH: He was more severe because you were his daughter. I find this now myself with the people I am closest to, I tend to be hardest on. I think this is a characteristic of us as people. 

 

JL: But you know it is so unkind when you are in this transition stage when you are not so adult and then comes your own father and minimises or is cruel and says you like a [inaudible] and criticising – he always came up with something like that. 

 

JH: He had a marvellous mind for doing that sort of thing. Because although he saw your mother as an elephant sometimes, he also saw her as a kitten.

 

JL: Oh yes, a little cat. All the children he saw us as cats. And this is another thing. When I grew up and we were not at home, neither with father or mother, and I used to draw, I don’t draw any more, I used to draw, and I made everybody an animal and posted it on their door so everybody knew. And I remember I got very bad relationship with my aunt because I put her as an animal too! An old, ugly frog. 

 

JH: Marvellous, you had your father’s perception. 

 

JL: You see I got into a very bad state with her for a while. She didn’t feel kindly towards me. But that’s how she affected me. But I did not realise at that time that has anything to do with my father. Only years later, you know. 

Mary Wigman’s Teaching

JH: Mary Wigman must have been a very different teacher to your father. 

 

JL: Very different, yes. She had a great deal of dynamics and she had a great of personally talking to all of us. So by the time we got up to move we really were so in the idea that we lost our own identity. She did three hours of it, very often and she would stand there in the middle or on the edge and hold forth of that what she wanted to create. And what our function was in this thing and how she feels we can contribute to her dance idea. And it was fascinating what she said but by the time, again in retrospect, by the time she had us moving I often wondered why I never did anything of my own, later. I said to myself, ‘Why did I never really come up with anything, when I was at her studio?’ Well, that was the reason why. 

 

JH: But that’s surprising because she speaks now of the marvellous way your father got you to do your own thing. 

 

JL: I know, but she got us to do her thing. You see? And she is so powerful in conveying in beautiful language her ideas, and she conditioned us, literally conditioned us, 

 

JH: [interrupting] she had a wonderful flow of language

 

JL: oh beautiful 

 

JH: [interrupting] was she a beautiful woman too?

 

JL: She was a striking, dramatic personality, absolutely gorgeous. Neither was my mother beautiful, but my mother was so exotic, and so was Mary Wigman. Not beautiful in the sense of beauty but so striking, dramatic person. Every move you watched when she entered the room, it possessed the room. There was no doubt about it that she’s a great artist when she came into class. 

 

JH: And she must have been a pretty fantastic teacher because she had quite a flourishing school later. 

 

JL: Oh yes. But a very possessive quality in relation to everybody who worked with her. She would say, ‘You have to be the image of that school.’ And it didn’t do that you were a personality and somehow I was able to manage myself 

 

JH: [interrupting] was that because you think she was more into the German feel of the time than say you or your father who also had clung onto your Hungarian background perhaps?

 

JL: I think so, yes, I do. And also 

 

JH: [interrupting] She stayed there through the Nazi regime didn’t she?

 

JL: But I think she was a great artist much before then. Much before and the period where I trained with her was before. And I told you, 10, 11, 12. And when I was with her, she possessed everybody who was working at the studio, even her sister Elizabeth who played instruments. When she arrived her sister Elizabeth melted into nothing and just be there for accompaniment. It’s amazing. When my father taught he was sitting back or standing back or leaning back and you did your think and while he was active you too, in a certain way, but he never controlled the situation unto himself. It was always these other people who were there. And he was just there. 

Laban as a teacher (in comparison to Wigman)

JH: Your father was a reluctant teacher which I think is what made him a great teacher. 

 

JL: I think no. But I do feel that he had a sense of guiding you, so to speak, and you were doing the things, discovering the things and you felt a certain sense of satisfaction, but you also felt a sense of satisfaction but in a different way with Mary because it was mostly the technique she was after. She wasn’t after getting something out of you. But she wanted to put something into you. And the 

 

JH: [interrupting] Was she more power-conscious of the class than your father? 

 

JL: No, I don’t think I can put it that way. I think it’s just simply her dynamic personality. My father was dynamic too, but his contact was pulling the individual this way, and her contact was ‘here I am and you are there’. So really it took from her to them. But to my father it radiated towards him he

 

JH: [interrupting] he seemed much more of a catalyst whereas Mary was obviously something which was taking part in the 

 

JL: But she was a performer. I think that makes a great deal of difference when you yourself are a performer.  

 

JH: Did you see her perform? 

 

JL: Oh my goodness. Yes. Her early dances to her very late ones. Yes…

 

JH: [interrupting] and was it always commanding? 

 

JL: Oh yes. In the simplest things she did and I look at the films now and I say to myself, ‘How come I was so excited?’ And I was

 

JH: [interrupting] she is on film is she?

 

JL: Oh yes and I was excited. 

 

JH: [interrupting] you’re not excited now? 

 

JL: Yes I am but I have a distance to tell me that that was the period in which these ideas were ripe. 

 

JH: You find them dated now? 

 

JL: This idea while still valuable, it is no longer necessary. We have passed onto the next stage. 

 

JH: Do you find them dated now? 

 

JL: Not really, as I say. Not really. Because I look at history. I am a historian and I don’t look at the dance, I see the period and I understand much about the period when I look at her things, also when I listen to the score of Hastings, who mostly wrote it. The same thing is true of Harald Kreuzberg. I was fascinated with what he did. And with Wilckens’ music. And I thought they showed me something about the craft of the period and we have lost much of the craft this day and age. That’s why it’s not as you want me to say to you, it’s dated. Because the craft is always valuable, I feel. Without the craft you don’t have an artist. And there’s very little craft this day. 

 

JH: Yes, that’s true. She’s remained a craftsman. But I think it is amazing that this magnetism, this electricity, this magic, which she certainly had, with lots of other things because I think she had so many attributes

 

[00.43.53 – 00.47.31 break in tape when some story about a castle is read by a voice other than JH] 

About Mary Wigman

JL: … and I was so upset, so [inaudible] said to me, ‘Why didn’t you translate it?’ I said, ‘You didn’t ask me. I wouldn’t dare without being asked.’ 

 

JH: I don’t think he asked him to do, he did it. [The conversation is about an article that Walter Sorrell - editor and translator of The Mary Wigman Book – had published and/or translated without Wigman’s permission.]  She told me about this. She told me the story that he had said, ‘I’m sorry Mary, I’ve done something that I should have asked your permission for, but I’m going to do it. Anything you’d like to say, we’d publish.’ She said, ‘I can’t, I’m a sick woman.’ So she wasn’t even aware of what he had or what she’d written and so on at that time. 

 

JL: Because Mary’s respect is such that I would’ve asked her

 

JH: Of course he should have done so. But he took the … He had translated her book before – The Language of the Dance - 

 

JL: That’s what I’m talking about. 

 

JH: You’re not talking about the recent article. 

 

JL: The book which really is poetic. 

 

JH: yes, well she’s a poet, marvellous

 

JL: And the language, I could not understand how anybody could do it without getting her permission. I [inaudible] in Switzerland, you know. Every time I saw my father, I saw Mary. It’s my early childhood, it was my early teenage when I was most impressed with these two people because I knew everything about them, so naturally, I wanted to preserve as much in my mind as I could. But she never said to me, ‘Juanna, are you interested?’ 

 

JH: How did she meet him then? Sorrell.

 

JL: He was a critic in Europe originally and went to America, I think years before I went and because of the Nazi affair and established himself there as a university lecturer and gradually made his way and is respected. 

 

JH: it’s a particularly important book, I think. 

 

JL: Not in English. I think she says, or said quite recently, that she’s written lots of things but she’s still fairly proud of that. In German it is a beautiful book. It is beautifully done. And the same thing is … see now what my father, when he wrote his book, Der Tanzer in Leben [The title is Ein Leben für den Tanz, published 1935] he made of himself. I do that all the time and people say to me, ‘You have the best understanding, you never get angry about yourself.’ I say, ‘Why should I? It must be in the family.’ Anyhow, people misunderstand his book because he made fun of his experiences in a very subtle way in German. But you cannot translate that into English. It is not valid to be translated because he didn’t write it for that. He wrote it for a generation of people and artists at the time who understood him and said, ‘Now that’s one of his whims to see himself in this light.’ But it was not supposed to be translated. 

 

JH: And I think he also lived to feel that was a book that belonged to a particular time in his life and he didn’t want to go on … concerned with it. I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding. 

 

JL: The fünf Reigen [Die Welt des Tänzers: Fünf Gedankreigen – Laban’s first book] is very valuable to translate because there is his commitment to the field of movement, to the dance, and his basic philosophy, which is also misunderstood and was misquoted over the years, and I tried in America to erase this idea of this metaphysical thing. And Mr Gordon Curl told me

 

JH: I think Gordon Curl is a good example of what you’ve been talking about. He’s got some people who are inadequate to translate the work. He has then judged it on a bad translation. This is one of the fascinating things I have found in trailing around, is if you can get someone who can tune in, you get a very different impression. You have to see it belonging to a particular period or you can’t judge it. I think the greatest disservice that’s been done to your father is not seeing him as a growing, developing individual who said, ‘Oh yes, that I wrote it yesterday. Today I have moved on. And always searching, always changing, always 

developing, always readjusting his position.

Bartenieff

JL: and do you know this Bartenieff, Irmgard, is one of those people. She is always growing with the period, with the time, and she doesn’t go into the dance. Most people in America with their work go into the dance. But, for her, ‘This area now begins to work, aha!, I can move into that! And then this area starts working, I have still so much to do, so I go in this area.’ You know? And this is the true spirit of my father. 

The Thinking Style of Laban

JH: It is, totally. This is of one of the exciting things to me, the great contribution, this is what I was trying to tell these people, these youngsters, really. When you say, What is his contribution, it is in fact that he constantly re-examined his own ideas, he constantly developed them, he constantly changed them, he was always searching and always moving on to new ideas. 

 

JL: But in the Fünf Reigen he already talks about a sound experiment which he did in the last few years of his life. Then he … harmony in space, he talks about in the Fünf Reigen, what existed in the physical world, and he was talking about these Platonic Bodies, the fünf Platonic bodies, deriving the knowledge that we and the dance have that too. Now when crystalogy came out, and they are doing all this biomechanical work and ergonomics and all this work, discovering these theories that everything we have is hanging together in clusters and energies and divided in crystals and so on, that you actually can draw pictures of these things and you can separate them and put them together just like the innards of the body. Well, he had all that knowledge when he was young. And so then he said to himself, If it is inside of us, to be organised that way, then why don’t we work it on the outside because that’s the realm of movement. And so that’s what he did. And all his life he looked for the different combinations and then the architectural knowledge he had, you know, when he built in Ascona the artist’s things and so on. In his movement there was a period which was very architectonic in compositions in his choreography. And then, naturally, he left it after he was satisfied to find out the rules and regulations which you have to have and which a body demands in order to relate in the space something. Well then, that was to him satisfactory, so he went on to the next one. 

 

JH: And he came back to geometrical form. 

 

JL: Naturally, because he was deeply interested in mathematics, you see, their relationships. Sometimes, as I say, I don’t understand the people, they really don’t go to the root of things. They take his theory, what he has, they read up and they comprehend that, but they are not willing to go to all the other studies which he did. And so their assumptions are not right because you didn’t do that. 

 

JH: This is the greatest disservice we’ve done to him is imagining that because we are interested in one little realm, that’s him. This is nonsense. He is such a large mind, such an all-encompassing, developing personality that you cannot contain him in one little area and he … and very often he was interested in saying, ‘There’s an idea go and follow it up.’ But he was off onto another one and another one, and this is his genius. 

Albrecht Knust and Notation

JL: And he had hoped that people are able to evolve. Like for instance, Mr Knust when he collaborated, really, with my father in relation to notation, and I heard my father say to him several times they were working on something and then he said, ‘Well Knust, you develop it further, because you understand the principle I am after.’ And then Knust really figured it out and worked with it. And we had to solve, I guess maybe Azra spoke to you about that, because in the notation in Hamburg with Mr Knust my sister Azra did quite a bit and so I hope she talked about that because he did really collaborate. He wasn’t just learning notation or something, but he was a vital force in the evolution of notation.  

 

JH: In fact Knust says that you father threw out an idea and said, ‘You follow it through’ and then he would come back some time later and even be surprised that it was his idea originally. He would be complimenting him, and he would say, ‘Well I got the idea from you.’ Knust would say. And I think this is very true of your father that he had so many ideas that he threw them out at a great rate and went on to whatever was interesting him. 

 

JL: And Knust always would check with him afterwards. I remember Ann Hutchinson used to come to England and it happened too soon. She came at the same time as I came. For some reason or other and so he would say to me, ‘Now Ann is here again, she wants to verify things. Now why doesn’t she leave me alone? She knows what she wants and she knows that if it isn’t right that I will say something. Or Knust will say something. So Ann, do it once. You understand? It was absolutely fun! 

Laban’s Last Illness and Death

Did anybody tell you the story shortly when he had his great illness before he died, the last illness? Nobody? I can’t believe that Lisa did not tell you? When he was very, very ill he said that he was almost given up for being dead and he heard the people talking in the room and heard that they were planning to take him out and downstairs or somewhere and he said to himself, he has still many things to do, he cannot go. And what could he do to show them that he is still alive? And he said, ‘If I wiggle my toe uncovered.’ So he said, with the greatest of strength he put his hand out and finally got his small finger to move and the nurse happened to look. And she said, ‘My God! He’s still alive.’ And so then the doctors and everybody did things to revive him but his most striving point was, ‘I cannot go and I must let them know that I can’t go, because I still have something to do.’ So he told me the story, the agony of being able to find some way to let them know that he has heard and he is not ready to go. It was very interesting. I couldn’t come while he was in the hospital, with these jobs I had always, it is a vocation that you can go on, you teach till the last day, so it was very tragic that I actually didn’t make it when he died. Lisa telegraphed us but by the time I could get a plane to stand by I couldn’t get there. And then she told me that it would have been a very unpleasant sight and she was rather glad that I did not see him suffer after a few hours. And she did ask if we should open the coffin but the nuns were against that, they said no, it would be a shock and so they did not do it. It is terrible when somebody dies in agonies. 

 

JH: Especially after such a long and eventful life. And he had lots of suffering, your father. 

Laban’s Nationality and Departure from Germany

JL: Yes, he had a great deal of suffering with the Nazi regime. It is very tragic, very tragic. And my own involvement in it, because I couldn’t find him, which is why I asked you for Kurt and Grace Graf, they eventually helped to get him out. 

 

JH: When you leave, when did you go to the States? 

 

JL: ’37. 

 

JH: And he came to England in thirty what was it? 

 

JL: Also ’37 [in fact February ‘38]. I went to America at the very end of the year. 

 

JH: He left Germany before you left? 

 

JL: Oh yes. He was captured away in the middle of a conference. He disappeared. 

 

JH: So was it dangerous for you to leave then?

 

JL: No, I was a Hungarian citizen. You see. 

 

JH: Oh I see, he was a German, he changed his nationality. 

 

JL: No, he was a Czech [He applied for and was granted German nationality in August 1931].

 

JH: Hadn’t he taken German nationality?

 

JL: No, never.  But he had a Czech passport but you see he was so active and everybody thought he was German, but he wasn’t. He was separated from my mother for over twenty years so he had nothing to do with that, but nobody knew that he had this other passport, except this landlady of his and she gave him away. You mean, nobody told you that? And I … she was a tiny little… I guess she was forced into saying things and threatened and she just didn’t have the character or personality or something, I don’t know what. 

 

JH: So she actually told the authorities

 

JL: She told them where he was, yes, and where he lived, with her, and so they came and picked him up.  

 

JH: In fact, wasn’t he for a while in what we might call ‘close arrest’. 

 

JL: Yes, that’s what they did. Then and there. There was a festivity of the dance festivals and he was in arrest, you see, for quite a while, quite a while. Because that was in ’34 when he was arrested and then it took all this time to get him out. 

 

JH: And then there was this marvellous idea to get him to give a lecture to join that conference in Paris. 

 

JL: Kurt and Grace can tell the story because I don’t know it first-hand. I only know it second-and. You spoke to Frances Barter? Because there are two people involved. This was another one of his affairs, I guess. And she apparently had something to do with getting him to a hospital there in Paris after Kurt and Grace got him out. But between you and me, I don’t know the whole story. So you would have to …

 

JH: I’m going to see them. 

 

JL: You would have to ask them. It’s only hearsay. Because I tried to find out where he was and couldn’t, never was told no matter how many hours I spent sitting waiting in their offices, who took him away. I never was told. So, then I left for Hungary and only later I came out to see what I could do. 

 

JH: So the next time you saw him, he was in England. 

 

JL: Yes, yes. I did not see him while in France, he was in the hospital and very poorly, so then I came when he was moved to England. 

 

JH: Did you know Jooss in those days? 

The Green Table

JL: Oh yes, yes, yes. I knew Jooss. Quite in my growing-up past. He was the big hero because in 1929 or ’30 he did Green Table [Premiered in Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, July 3rd, 1932]. And that naturally was a sensation for everybody concerned. And so, the image was tremendous, you know. I saw, as a matter of fact, he sent me a telegram when I told him that I’d come to Essen to see Knust, then he asked that … he sent me a telegram so I see the last performance of The Green Table in the same theatre, with the same iron curtain where the first performance was given. So I was able to make it. After the war when Jooss came back to Germany, you see. And then I further was fortunate to go to South America and work with the people who were in the original show of The Green Table, and then [Ernst] Uthoff who started the Chilean Ballet and came to America to the Joffrey Ballet and did The Green Table in America. It really has a long history. It’s one of the repertory works of modern dance which survived. Which is fantastic. And I saw him twice or three times in Essen and his wife got sick and then he got sick and so then he gave up the school. The next time I came, the third time I came he already was no longer the director of the school.  

 

JH: He’s very well again, now. 

 

JL: yes, so I understand. He’s doing fine. 

 

JH: And again, he’s come through the phase of the difficulties with regard to your father, now is mellow

 

JL: Peaceful. 

 

JH: And speaks very movingly. It was a very moving interview. He records some of the moments of reunion with your father after estrangement. 

 

JL: You know it was always funny to me, Eukinetics and Choreutics which were sort of evolved in my father’s school but at one point, Jooss said that it is all his – Eukinetics. And I was a little bit amazed, shocked. But I never said anything and then when I was the last time there, he was teaching a class, he still was teaching a class, eukinetics, and then he said to me, ‘Do you know, I really got the inspiration from your father.’ And then he told me to put it into practice, and then he said, ‘Your father was very interested in developing it with… further, so it is a part of the study, even though it is now, your father had something to do with it.’ But you see, he couldn’t say that until the very last time. So all this misinformation exists now in dictionaries and papers and things and so on, and people say sayings which, well, they came in a period when people felt jealous of my father, for some reason or other. 

 

JH: It’s like anybody with a great deal of talent and genius. People are bound to be jealous, but also, Jooss is now able to see that he was in this love/hate relationship too, and I say to him sometimes, ‘Did you see anything which you criticise in Laban?’ and he says, ‘He was a god.’ 

 

JL: Oh how nice! How nice!

 

JH: And he really meant it. It was in his eyes. It was very moving in the … marvellous

 

JL: I do feel that eventually, you know, if you can be big enough, it comes out and I feel that maybe the people no longer have to fight for survival. As long as Mary had to fight, as long as Jooss had to fight for existences, for survival…

 

JH: Jooss says, ‘I was a very ambitious young man.’

 

JL: He was. Oh!

 

JH: But he recognises it now. 

 

JL: Yes, he was intent. Oh, yes. Just before he separated from my father he wanted to take over. It’s interesting. 

 

JH: Marvellous. This is what I like about both him and Mary, they both have got to a period where I think were looking very honestly now at the situation and I was very happy to be seeing them at this stage, rather than earlier, I would have got a rather one-sided view. 

 

JL: Well, I also experienced with him, with Jooss, a mellowing. He would never have said, ‘Come to the last performance’ or ‘be there on that date’. I wanted to come on the 26th and when he heard the 26th, he said, ‘Be there on the 25th’ which I thought was marvellous to give me that opportunity. And I treasured this idea so much to be there. It was really a great event for me.  

 

JH: The other thing that I discovered is, all the people that have had any association for any period of time with your father, now, when they recall it, it’s fantastically vivid to them and it’s a rejuvenating force. 

 

JL: Well, maybe it was a highlight in their lives. It is not very often that we meet a great man or a great woman. But when you do meet one, it does leave a trace. 

 

JH: What is great about it, is that, it is in a sense a great man and a great woman meeting a great man, because he… and this is another thing that I find as I begin to draw this stuff together – it was an incredible range of high talent, skill, gifts and magnetic, dynamic, personalities. 

 

JL: But the whole period of that era, 1919 -1928 was absolutely fermenting with talent in Europe. Now that I look back on the history, I’m amazed in every branch of the arts, it was something coming up. I guess it was after the World War, you had to have a surge of something again. 

 

JH: But he began it. Ascona seems – those people who were at Ascona with him 

 

JL: Ah, yes. Him and Ludwig and the writer and Ferrari, the composer. Ah, so many people. And it is so bad that Hans Brandenburg died, that you couldn’t talk to him, and then also the other girl died in Munich. My mother kept in touch with her until she died. Pieran Kamp. And they worked with my father in the very early period and so it’s a shame. Switzerland, Ascona and everything. Did you ever get together with Mayzele [?], that coloured fellow who worked with my father. I don’t know where he is myself. And then there was a coloured girl in my father’s school and nobody has been able to get you any …Did Perrottet not give you any information? 

 

JH: No. She is one who hasn’t got, I don’t think, over her …

 

JL: No, never. I mean she carried it all her life. 

 

JH: And still is carrying it. 

 

JL: I saw her a few years ago. About three. And she made an appointment with me and, och, it was just. 

 

JH: In a way she’s still giving a stage performance. She’s a marvellous stage performance and one enjoys it, but I always feel, I feel with her, that she is doing the kind of performance thing. 

 

JL: She never became great herself. And she never has digested all the ideas which my father generated. 

 

JH: She lives in the past. 

 

JL: Not only that but even at the time, I don’t believe she completely comprehended everything what was offered her, because when I talk to her, [inaudible] of my half-brother, I had noticed that there is a certain kind of a veil over the important things which my father was trying to transmit to these people. And she is the one who never really quite captured…

 

JH: And I think she doesn’t go on struggling to capture it. 

 

JL: No, no, it wouldn’t be in her temperament. 

 

JH: She’s much more living on it, I think. 

 

JL: I think so, yes. And in a way I like that because, I think her son [Claude], was very much introvert and he would benefited from a greater admiration of my father. I think all the children suffered from that, really. And that they didn’t have contact with their father. 

 

JH: Especially because they felt that he was such an omni-present personality. 

 

JL: And each of the women, including my mother, kept their imagination alive, and only good things, she never said anything bad about my father. Whereas I remember the few things bad he said about her, you know what I mean? But she always, for us, she always kept him in this highlight. 

 

JH: And she is not alone. They all 

 

JL: Yes, yes, this is what I felt. It’s interesting. Don’t you wish to have been that man too? Who can sleep [slip?] such an impact with females, masses of females? Fantastic!