Veronica Sherborne (Tape 39)

Biography

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(1922 – 1990)

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Sherborne (née Tyndale-Biscoe) initially trained to be a teacher of physical education and dance at Bedford College of Physical Education in 1940 – 43 and later as a physiotherapist. There she studied under Joan Goodridge, an early supporter of Laban. After a two-day course with Laban she went to Manchester to study with him and Lisa Ullman at the Art of Movement Studios in Manchester, where she studied with Warren Lamb, Valerie Preston-Dunlop and Geraldine Stephenson. She was then invited to help him on his book Modern Education Dance (1948). She is author of Developmental Movement for Children (1990). 

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Summary of Interview

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Studies with Joan Goodridge (at Bedford College of P.E.) and Laban. Her shift from using the 8 Efforts to working with the Motion Factors (Weight, Space, Time, Flow). A critique of Laban’s followers who have confused his thinking. She denies having a hand in writing Modern Educational Dance, a book she finds turgid. Her teaching in Primary Schools. Her thoughts about Weight. Jung’s 4 Archetypes. Laban’s Drives and Inner States. Work at Withymead with Laban, focusing on movement observation (rather than psychological analysis). Work in the Drama Department of Bristol University. Working with gravity and children with learning difficulties. Laban and parenting. Dervish dances. An account of her career. Lisa Ullmann. Sylvia Bodmer. The importance of experiencing your weight on the ground, a feeling of grace and harmony. Flow. Warren Lamb’s theory of Flow (loss gain ration between Flow and Effort). Geraldine Stephenson. Laban’s work in industry. Further reflections on models of teaching.

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Tape 39

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VS: I was taught by Joan Goodridge and by him. And Joan Goodridge taught so differently. She imposed on us and taught us and we copied her and the other made us experience what we did. And I went to Laban in great confusion and said, What are you supposed to do? Which is the right way? And he said, ‘You must find your own way.’ So that didn’t help me very much, because I still found … I recognised at the time it was like being asked to swim the channel or something. It opened your eyes. I was there for a year in 1947 and I didn’t believe a word of all this Effort lark and I had to go and teach Efforts to all the new people, people like Valerie Preston-Dunlop who was 18 and had just come to the studio and I was left with these six or seven or eight new people and would I please teach them all these Efforts? And I did it, and I couldn’t see the relevance until I’d left and I went to Bedford [College of FE] and I had two groups of First Years and with one group I worked on Effort and with one group I worked on Space, because I couldn’t see that either of those should be more elementary, should be more preliminary to the other. And I found the Effort group got on far better than the Space group. And then, in the years which followed, I dispensed with Efforts and only worked on movement qualities which is what I use now. And I find the Efforts too arbitrary and too manufactured. They are too pure. And I work on the basic elements which absolutely opened my eyes. They illuminated for me really all the work I do now. I might say, that I think somebody is a Presser, but I’m more likely to think that they are very direct or have intention, direct intention plus strength. I don’t use Efforts any more. 

The same with Space. He got lost in his architectural… fantastic scientific playing. He could turn inside space into outside space. He was interested in how the outside became the inside and he made terrific things which demonstrated this. To a large extent I worked so much on what’s going on in the person that the space begins to assume its own validity or whatever because the inside is so good. And I am very aware of the emptiness of a lot of the space which Laban taught which has now become Gospel, which has no content. 

JH: Is that fair to him? I think we do him a disservice as soon as we have a Laban gospel. 

VS: Well, it’s been misused by his pupils. In all good people… Laban talked about Dalcroze and he said how good his work was. Now Dalcroze’s work has been made more and more suspicious by his followers, by his students. My colleagues, of my age range, who all were students at the same time, have mostly got carried away into his theories of space and effort so that you meet students from a College of Education and they say, Well we’ve done… and they say the A-Scale, something in diagonal or whatever and they know nothing about movement. And they’ve just got another set of externals which is what ballet deteriorates into. 

JH: And which he was moving away from.  [Gap in recording] … People say you wrote it [Modern Educational Dance]

VS: God I didn’t, my God I didn’t. Oh no, that’s quite untrue. I helped him a little bit on observing nursery school children, that’s all I did. I helped him with his English, a little, which was impossible. Oh my God, I didn’t. Who on earth would tell you that? 

JH: Several people. 

VS: He thanks me in the Preface, that’s all. 

JH: But most people say Modern Educational Dance wasn’t written by Laban. 

VS: Oh, yes it was. That’s not my thing at all. I was a student, I helped him a little bit with his English and I was set to a Nursery School to observe children. It’s a tiny little bit that I actually wrote. I think he found it helpful to have somebody to discuss it with. I think I was a sounding board to some extent. But I think it’s so turgid, that book. 

JH: It didn’t sound like you, but I didn’t hear it just from one source, I heard it from three different areas. 

VS: Well it’s quite untrue. I couldn’t have. I think it’s the only handbook, you know, but it doesn’t flesh out his theories. And it’s very dry. 

JH: Understandably, because he is a German writing English. 

VS: I’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t actually communicate through a book. A concept and the experiences that you have. You can only pass it on by actually working with people. Then if you write something for them it then makes sense to them because they’ve experienced it and this then might clarify or fix or help them to see intellectually what it is they did bodily and through their whole being. I am interested in the Doman Delacato method in America, in Philadelphia, a method of working with brain damaged child. They won’t write it, because they just know it will be misused. 

JH: Neverthe… [tape cut]

VS: The sorting out of what you’re doing is very helpful to you. I have written two articles which didn’t actually teach me anything knew but they helped me to be simple.

JH: And sometimes they help just to arrange one’s [inaudible]

VS:  It is arranging things, how things follow on. I wish I had more time for writing. [Break in tape]. I just don’t know.  

JH: He didn’t discuss it with you before? 

VS: Well, I tried to help make the sentences easier to understand. But, I wasn’t all that competent or good at it. I found it terribly hard working in the studio all day from roughly 9 o’clock to 4.30. Physically, it was very, very strenuous. And then going along in the evenings to where and Lisa lived in Didsbury and then using my head and thinking. And there came a time when I just couldn’t do it anymore and I went in and said, I just can’t work physically all day and mentally in the evenings. And he said he quite understood and he described other conditions where people had worked so hard bodily that they just couldn’t get their brains to function. And I had a break from it, I was taking in so much new stuff in the day which I was trying to assimilate and then going on again in the evenings, it was really too much. It was too much to operate at this level until nine or ten at night having started, you know… And I was given things to write, and I did struggle with the writing. I worked quite hard. 

JH: tell me about your work in Primary Schools. He sent you in. What did he send you to look for? 

VS: It was a Nursery School. The whole point was to look at babies. And I noticed that when they cried, they wriggled and twisted. Pain is expressed so often by counter-tension. And a lot of the movement was double: the legs both kicked, the arms flapped. I’ve watched my own children hard since. And when a baby experiences anything it’s a total experience right through, everything goes. There is no isolation or anything like that. I am very interested in watching free flow in children. I am also interested in fine touch and the marvellous delicacy of movement very young children can have. I think I’ve learned a terrific lot from observing my own children. I know I have. 

JH: Going back to the observations from the Nursery School. What response did they have from Laban? 

VS: He treated them as factual evidence. I mean he recognised that I would be skilled enough to do this. Well I wasn’t! And he also did the same with Jean Newlove. Have you been to see her? She did all his industrial work and she was left in factories to get on with it. And she did all her analysis of movement and all her decisions and things, and she was very young and very competent. And he trusted you. And I think this is one of the nice things. I think he believed in you. When I think now, I’d do it alright now. I didn’t then. 

JH: He also had an incredible knack for sensing people. 

[Interview interrupted at 10.10 with JH reading out a title: A reflection on How to Develop this Material in Size of Groups, Kinds of Groups, Aims and Objectives whether for Music, Dance, Drama, Mime, Etc.]

VS: At that point there were three. One was an action, a doing. This kind of doing mood. One was a lyrical, romantic feeling mood, and the third was an architectural, intellectualising, planning, organising the space mood. And would I do three improvisations on these three different things? I did my best. I entered into the spirit. Three actually contrasting states, as far as I could see. I think I had time to prepare a little bit. I don’t think I did. I went straight into them. And, he said [judging from her accent, she is referring to Laban], By the way you are not very strong in the legs. And I know now that’s the one thing I look at whether I am working with actors or teachers, is the basic strength from here down which I realise now is your contact with the ground and it’s your management of your weight. It’s entirely through the weight-bearing bits of you. And I am sure I was as wobbly as hell and as unaware, even though as a result of being in the Studio for a year I got into the English reserves Lacrosse team and I went skiing at Christmas and I was the quickest person around skiing because I done all this strengthening of the legs. But I still wasn’t strong enough in them. And I now realise how vital this strength is for the actor, for the teacher and just psychologically. 

JH: How did he come on to discover the four [Jung’s Four Personality Types of Sensing and Intuition (modes of perceiving), Thinking and Feeling (modes of judging)]?

VS: I think he was influenced by the writing of Jung and he … I just don’t know enough about this, I wish I did. 

JH: Did he talk about Jung to you? 

VS: No. But I think he must have read a lot of Jung. I don’t know, I’d like to ask Lisa because then Jung’s sensation equates with the action, the person who [inaudible] through the muscles and is a sensuous or sensual person and works through the senses which is a very animal and the most primitive of the … things. The second thing that occurs developmentally in man is feeling which is a kind of knowing from another area. It’s a value judgement from feelings which equates with lyrical. It isn’t really quite the same as Jung’s but it’s got something in common. And the one he had not thought about so much is knowing about the world through intuition which Laban then taught me about later. He equated Time with it because when intuiting things you jump to your information. It isn’t a rational knowledge, whereas feeling is a rational one, it comes out of a reaction to something you know. And the fourth is thinking which is the last that Man has acquired. I’m not very certain about this but I think that sensation would be the earliest, and then intuition, then feeling, then thinking. But Jung had it as a cross. 

JH: because Laban seemed to have an amazing intuition about…

VS: He was fantastically intuitive. But I think it was largely based on experience. You can get people who rely on intuition who don’t back it up always … and I think Laban did. 

JH: He had acquired an incredible wisdom, hadn’t he really? 

VS: I think it went through many, many stages because I really knew him in his late sixties and seventies. And he was much more tolerant. I think he had been intolerant and selfish, self-centred and all these other things in his middle age, in his youth, and he’d become much more benevolent in his old age, and tolerant and understanding. 

[Jump in the tape]

VS: … when they moved into the Studio for the first time. And I helped them decorate and I worked very hard for about three weeks and enjoyed it. And I used to have quite a few sessions with Laban where he practised things out, and I was a kind of Guinea Pig. And he put me through the various states which he was working on, which were combinations of things like Space and Flow together, or Time and Space together, or Time and Energy together. And I used to try and get myself into these States. And he was interested in the inner state but got at it through the body doing it. I was also set to compose on these things. I sat at the piano and I made sounds which seemed to me to express them using the piano. And he also made me do movement observations and they were interviewing for pianists and they were opening and had funny people from Weybridge near Addlestone, quite unaware of what they were coming to, you know, Jazz pianists and all sorts coming to play. And I had to do quick movement observations as they did their interview and then Laban would check them. And I also did some movement therapy with him watching and helping. And he was incredibly helpful. 

JH: Where did you get your people from for movement therapy?

VS: He had somebody living there called Bill [Carpenter]. You’ve probably come across Bill. He died not long after Laban, perhaps before Laban died. And he’d been a patient at Withymead where I’d been working and Bill offered himself as a pupil, you know, stooge. Bill didn’t have a sense of humour and he became quite aggressive and in a way I was glad Laban was three because he rescued me. And he taught me things like, If you touch a person. He thought I’d tackled Bill the wrong way. He said, First of all you work on the wrist and you work on the head. And he did it all the way he would have done it and Bill did it all again. And so he began further back than I had begun. I had begun on strength because I’d seen that Bill was rather long and thin and not very down, and I’d worked on the thing which I thought he needed. But Laban worked even more primitively, just on relaxing him. And then he said, When you touch a person who you’re working with, you should shake your hands afterwards. Now this is strange. And you flick it off, whatever you may have acquired from the person. 

JH: Was he thinking particularly about people who were there for therapy? It sounds very peculiar. It would be rather disconcerting if he …

VS: perhaps you wouldn’t realise. So he was aware that you take in this person’s sickness into you and you transmute it in some ways. I think one does do this. I think you get invaded a bit, probably. There’s one very good reason why you should work as a member of a team, you should never be alone in this therapy situation and you ought to be with a team that keeps meeting and discussing what you are doing and achieving with people. And this happened at Withymead. There were weekly meetings. As Withymead deteriorated, as things began to happen and medical profession became more and more responsible for it and so much the psychotherapeutic profession, there was a young doctor there and he was amazed at my ability to diagnose and to assess people that I’d only met that week. He said he’d like to know more about this as a diagnostic thing. 

JH: Was this an analytic thing? 

VS: It was entirely based on what you saw. 

JH: Not necessarily analysing what you saw but a kind of Gestalt appreciation? 

VS: I think one’s assessment always comes down to what you see. Certainly based on empirical factual evidence. You see it. 

JH: Do you assess it as factual evidence?

VS: Yes. You know why you think it. You must. [Break in tape] It’s so much common sense you wish you could share it with everyone. 

JH: There was something else that was good about Laban. Lawrence was saying how much his industrial movement seemed to be very much common sense. 

VS: Entirely common sense. And very humane.  Terrific understanding of people. I think you can get hold of knowledge and use it the wrong way. 

JH: Which is I think what we’re doing at the present time with a lot of what we think is Laban theory, or Laban technique

VS: You can blind everybody with science and you miss the whole boat completely. 

JH: What is your approach to the actor, and Gerry’s [Geraldine Stephenson] and how much does it stem from Laban? 

VS: I have been reassessing what I do in the University Drama Department in which I have been working for a long time now. Each year I think, what am I doing? Why am I needed? Why do they still employ me? Why do the students come? And what am I actually doing and what ought I to be doing? And I think there are two things, and I said this to the Professor last Friday after an examiner’s lunch in which we all had a lot to drink. I said I thought that I had two jobs. One was the personal development of the student, to help them get on with each other, to fit into this department that they come to at eighteen from all over Britain and other countries, just a kind of ability to work with this new lot they’ve met. The second thing I thought I did was to help them as an actor with various enlargements of their ability to move. So whatever parts they were given they could draw on what I worked with them to help them in these various parts. And I particularly worked last year in the Spring term on street theatre because I like this big scale, speaking long distances and out of doors. They had just started street theatre with a student of yours. Red-haired boy. 

JH: Rob

VS: I think I’ll probably do more of that this year and go into the putting into practice of body awareness and things like that directly into kinds of situations they might meet in their theatrical work. Because those students in university live for productions. That’s their main … they’re not keen on the lectures and the analysis

JH: I think that’s because productions are a marvellous educational thing anyway. At the culminating moment there’s excitement, anticipation

VS: And it’s very relevant if you work towards their production, they see it in action straight away.

JH: I gather even in the early days Laban was always trying to get children interested in a leap, he said to somebody, Right! You are a frog!

VS: Yes, I do this. 

JH: So much of movement training these days is abstraction. 

VS: I work with mentally handicapped children and I have developed various aspects of Laban’s work much, much more fully because I have been forced because [00.22.40 signal becomes mono and almost inaudible] this approach would have to 

VS: I have to keep concentration because mentally handicapped, their big lack is that they can’t concentrate. They’ve got this [inaudible] mind and they can’t cope with [inaudible]. They have no conception of their bodies as being them. [inaudible] 

JH: You say you’ve developed certain things. What are they? 

VS: [inaudible] As you become [inaudible] so other people give you a greater concept of yourself. You become aware of yourself [‘against somebody’?]. There was a film on BBC 2 on rhesus monkeys. All this monkey had was an [inaudible] mother with a nipple to drink from and they put him in a cage with other monkeys and all he did was [inaudible]. I work on relating to people and then relating to yourself, sometimes against people, sometimes against the ground, sometimes in water. And I strengthen and develop awareness in [inaudible] because otherwise [inaudible]. People can get a certain amount from a weekend or four day course but they can’t get what a student can get in a year and a half or two years. 

JH: The frightening thing is that people think they have got something from a weekend course. 

VS: They go off full of enthusiasm and all I can teach at a weekend course is really…. Perhaps two things relating to other people and relating to the ground. All the difficult things I can’t cover [inaudible]. But I am very fascinated by gravity and the weight of the body. And all this information that is coming out about these men being in space so long. The whole body is upset by the lack of gravity and I don’t think we realise what a fantastic effect gravity has on us. I mean we just forget about it, like the air we breathe, we just take these completely for granted. And I know now very, very clearly that the more nervous, fearful children, the more disturbed children will not trust themselves to the ground or to people or to anything. And this is expressed by this resistance all the time. The head that won’t lie on the ground belongs to the person who is most scared and unable to commit themselves. And you get a child who rolls easily and they are healthy. 

JH: Concerning the men in space. We can learn a lot from that about difficult the adjustment is, their re-adjustment to gravity. It reminds of that course that we had with Laban. We had a round to sing. I don’t know where the words came from. I think it was Laban, actually. But drawing breath is life. The act of breathing, an act of faith. 

VS: And this means far more to the East that it does in the West. I do a lot of work with the voice. Because I think that freedom in body movement must come vocally. And it’s no good being marvellously expressive in the body if you’ve got a tiny little voice. 

JH: I’d love to have the leisure to investigate that because it fascinates me. 

VS: Luckily I worked in the [inaudible] school for over three years and I was able to explore this with actors and I learned a lot from them. And I do it now with the acting, and I do a lot with student teachers. I’ve come to the conclusion that you need [inaudible] to be a good actor. 

JH: [inaudible] I would extend this to say, To be a person. Acting can be incredibly dated. 

VS: it’s just being very, very human. Did you ever hear of Stanislavsky who had a real pregnant woman in one of his plays and when she walked across the stage [inaudible] his actors. I think that just about sums up [inaudible] You see this is what Laban taught me. The opposite, the absolutely invigorating thing that you always take the opposite. And he kept speaking in the therapeutic work. You don’t need to know anything about these people, about their parents, their background or anything, you don’t need to know. The only thing you need to be aware of is your movement observation, you’re observing people, and knowing what is missing. That they have got this but they haven’t got this. And I learned too, fairly quickly, you don’t go for the thing the person hasn’t got, you begin with what they have got, which is a very important lesson. Knowing what they have got then you can begin on a safe wicket. 

JH: Did you find any help in Laban’s classification of High, Middle and Low? 

VS: No. You get them, but it doesn’t… I think it’s absolutely vital to be low, it is essential to be well-based. This is what I miss at lot in the work that I have examined. It’s all so up in the air. And if you go into West-Indian dancing, African Dance, Indian Dance, it’s all this fantastic feeling for the ground. 

JH: The fact is, if you’re going to take off from the ground, you’ve got to have a knowledge of the ground …

VS: You must have your springboard. All the emphasis in the dance I’ve seen has been on lightness, and of course it’s been all girls. Well, it doesn’t work. 

JH: Girls need the strength. 

VS: And we need strength to [inaudible] because we work with mentally handicapped and they’re more boys. Most of the girls have a very good relationship to her own strength and her own aggression and her own basicness. 

JH: Why are mentally handicapped children mostly boys? 

VS: I don’t know. Another thing. In the ESN of the ESN Mile[?]  School there are more boys there than girls. Now that’s not mental handicap, that’s backwardness and being disturbed. I think you’ll find they’re more maladjusted, boys. More boys in prison, more boys in borstal. I think the boy is more shattered by lack of security at home because it depends so much on the mother. I don’t think that that is necessarily the reason, I think as far as being disturbed … 

JH: The girl has to have the Father, is this what you are saying?

VS: Well, she identifies with the mother, that’s all she knows. 

JH: She doesn’t need mother, she identifies with her? 

VS: Well, I don’t know. I think a bad mother is bad for both boys and girls. I think boys are more damaged by bad parenting or by bad mothering. I think I probably have the answer in a book I’m reading called the Four Archetypes of Jung. I don’t really understand but it more or less explained it. It depends which comes first. It might be easier for the girl, I don’t know. On the whole the early mothering, when you become a toddler it becomes difficult. 

JH: Does this have a relation to Laban himself? He was not much parented? 

VS: I don’t know. He father was a Governor in Bosnia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and he was absolutely awful to Laban. Gave him a gun to go and shoot himself with because he came home in sandals and a cloak and very bohemian. He gave him this pistol and said, You know what to do with it. If you destroy the family honour. I.e. you shoot yourself. Now, a dad that does that. He also, this father, had the ears cut off of various wrong-doers in the area he was responsible for and his name, Laban, was so known, that when Laban went to Yugoslavia with a dance group he just couldn’t be allowed out, he had to be protected. 

JH: I don’t think he had much relationship with his mother either. 

VS: I would guess not. 

JH: I wondered what effect this had on him. The kind of person he was. 

VS: Well, he couldn’t really relate to women. I don’t know how many wives he had, or how many mistresses he had and how many children he had. Do you know? 

JH: I haven’t actually counted them all, but it was quite a lot. I’ve just been visiting Maja [Lederer], his second wife and his grandchildren, and it’s then that you realise the irresponsibility. They knew the power of their parentage and ancestry, yet they never knew him. It was quite a shock to me. 

VS: He was loathed in that area. One thing Laban told me. He went from this part of the country, Bosnia or wherever, across to Istanbul and he saw the whirling dervishes and he studied them and I think he was 16 and went and saw his father’s soldiers and I think this could have been a very influential thing on him. The movement was Right Hand Up and Left Hand Down. I was in Istanbul this Spring and my husband and I were in Dania Konya where they dance in December. I brought back a most superb record of the Dervishes dancing. And I think these things … I think it’s a fantastic thing that he could look at movement and he could always break it down into aspects of the person’s attitude to space, their attitude to time, their attitude to energy, their attitude towards the flow of movement. Time and space you might say, OK, but energy, people don’t recognise, and flow of movement. [Inaudible comment on the connections between energy and flow of movement.] Space is connected to thinking, and time is connected, in Laban’s mind, to intuition. I’ve always analysed these four ways of judging. Thinking and feeling are ways of judging. These two men did something [Inaudible] discovering gravity. 

JH: [Inaudible]  that Laban should discover movement. Here is the common denominator. 

VS: The man sitting, just doing this in a factory is moving. Just as a dancer. Or babies.

JH: The whole business of thought and speech all being part of movement patterns. 

VS: And your inner states and how much you express in the eyes. 

JH: Did he talk to you about eyes? I have seen some of his early paintings now and the eyes are a rather interesting factor which is always fascinating. 

VS: He talked a lot about Shadow Movements … you know, a person can have one thing going on outside… His favourite thing was the person smiling and being the opposite. Things that actually tell you... Shadow movements which tell you of the inner state and the outer thing which the person is trying to … He didn’t come up with the persona, Jung did. I think I’m very lucky because… it wasn’t so much that I was lucky,,, I searched for Laban. I was lucky in that at eighteen I was at Bedford. I had spent my first year at Bedford trying to find something which involved the whole person. And we had gymnastics, we had dance, and I was influenced by a man called Jacks, Professor L.P. Jacks who wrote about the whole man. And this [Education for the Whole Man (1931)] was in the college library and suddenly Joan Goodridge had arranged three days with Lisa and Laban in the Summer term in our first year. And they taught us for three whole days, at great expense, I’m sure to the college. And it was very summery weather and it was so hot and heavy and I had a complete revelation through this three days’ teaching. I was miserable as hell in this college, I kept a diary and it was the only way I could relate to my misery. I’ve still got this diary and it describes these three days and the absolute amazement – I’d suddenly found the thing I’d been looking for. I poured sweat, I trickled, I dropped all over the floor. We all were. And we did one, two and three with Lisa. One is one dimension, two is two dimensions, and three they made it into a more three-dimensional three. I’d never met the dimensions before. And Laban’s sessions were choral movement and stuff. And everybody bashing away and joining in and [inaudible]. And after that when I left two years later I went to Sheffield and worked with them on a Sheffield course and I went for three weeks to Sheffield and then I went to the Studio. So in that I’m lucky. I was looking and I did follow [inaudible]

JH: At what stage did Laban discover you, in a sense? 

VS: I don’t know. I mean, when I went to the Studio, my father paid for me. There were no scholarships then. I was very grateful to my father because then I had four years’ training, you see? After that, I got a job … I went back to Bedford. I had to. They gave me a small grant and they gave me thirty pounds towards that year and they said would I come back? I was miserable, as you can imagine. And then I went to Bath Academy of Art, and while I was there, Laban had a scheme which he was going to start in Devon with a very nice Director of Education in Devon. He would have a building in which he would do movement therapy, a building especially for it, and I would be his assistant. And I was delighted at this. I thought it would solve my problem because I found that Bath Academy of Art wasn’t very movement inclined. Nobody understood Laban. I learned a lot from it. And then Laban and Lisa, I think both had a terrible car accident and this put Laban out of action, really, and put paid to this scheme. And Lisa didn’t want him to either. She was jealous as hell because he was working … he kept … he went to Wityhmead, he got on very well with Mrs Champernowne who introduced him to all the Jungian thing and he worked out of doors on this lawn at Withymead and they were all very impressed. And one of his pupils, Dennis Hill, who went to Studio, came back as a fulltime therapist. And then eventually, Mrs Champernowne … Betty Meredith Jones was the first one who went to Withymead, and she wanted to stop and go and work in America and Mrs Champernowne was on a dance course in Dartington and she saw us all working and I was teaching as a very junior assistant and she said she would have me. And I didn’t know who she was and she said, Would I go and work at Withymead? And I thought, Well I don’t know, and I went and asked Laban. And he said, It’s alright, you can go and work there. Don’t try and find out about why they’re ill, just work as a movement observer and come to me for help. Which I did, And over the years I used to go with lists of things which I couldn’t cope with or didn’t understand and would he please come? 

JH: And was he helpful? 

VS: Very, absolutely super. 

Jh: Did he usually send you back to basics or what? 

VS: we just talked it over and then clarified me. I’ve got quite a lot of his workings somewhere. 

JH: In relation to this sort of work? 

VS: His exploring of these states that I went through. I think they’re in our attic. I don’t think they’re anything different from what had already in his papers at Addlestone. 

JH: They might be very interesting. Lisa’s got loads of things there, but they’re not very well sorted out. 

VS: Well, exploring these States. I mean, Spell is fascinating, Vision is another one. You recognise these in people. Especially Spell. A person who is in a kind of … they trap you. You are spellbound. I was thinking of the word Godspell the other day. I’ve got this record and my son went to see it, and I thought what a strange juxtaposition of God and spell. If you’ve worked with somebody who uses Spell a lot, it’s very exciting. 

JH: The ‘spell’ in Godspell is just ‘word’, the Anglo Saxon for ‘word’. 

VS: Is that what spell means? I didn’t know that. Dorothy Heathcote has got the spell. In her classes, she teaches through spell. Now, I know all about her. I’m not going to use it except under very, very special circumstances shall I turn it on. Only if the health of people I’m teaching is safeguarded. 

JH: What about Laban’s Spell? 

VS: He used his spell in a very healthy way. 

JH: How? 

VS: I think because he had a sense of humour. 

JH: Did you always feel it was present? 

VS: No, I wasn’t aware of him using it. I know now he was, but he had this fantastic sense of humour. He was a warm, earthy sort of man. And he was very human. […]  He was very witty, in a childlike way. 

JH: And his whole sense of movement observation and his sense of caricature. That kind of abstraction must have meant that his [inaudible] was always ticking over. In his later years

VS: He was often ill. He had terrible Typhoid. And the car accident. I feel very critical of the way Lisa looked after him and possessed him. [inaudible] … him growing. She clamped down on his growth

JH: She’s still doing that, you see. She was quite cross that I went to go the continent to meet people. She could have told me it all. Even people she hasn’t met. 

VS: No, Lisa is a very, very pathetic person. I’ve stayed with her occasionally and she’s never honoured what I’ve done and when [inaudible]. Everyone rises when she comes into the room. Dreadful primadonna treatment. She is so unreal and she has been so hidden in this building, this room. How she’s going to leave it, I don’t know. Rather hard.

JH: I think she’ll just remain hidden there. 

VS: I went and taught there [presumably the Laban Centre] for a day not very long ago and I taught their First Years. And at lunchtime I was a bit late for lunch because there was so much happening, and she was very cross with me because I was late and she said, I’m sorry I didn’t come I was very busy with the milkman. I thought, Here am I coming all this way, teaching her students, and she can’t even be bothered to come and watch. 

VS: [jump in tape] … like each other. There was a strong similarity in the breadth of these two people and he recognised a whole area of psychology which he wanted to explore and which he would have. And Lisa would not let him go. 

JH: It’s amazing, she’s still there. She’s still trying to possess him. Now. Rather than the Studio going on to be a bigger place, it’s become smaller and smaller and smaller

VS: It’s become nothing. I’ve got an old student there who’s just finishing and a Norwegian girl and they came around not long ago and the Norwegian is very disappointed. It’s all technique. It’s all about skills. Nothing which this Norwegian felt she would get. I think the last [inaudible] in a way was Sylvia Bodmer. 

JH: Yes, I went to see Sylvia.  It was very interesting. I think she’s kept a certain aura from Laban, but she [jump in tape]

VS: I’ve a very warm spot for Sylvia. And most people think she’s crummy [?]. And if you’re ever in a production of hers it’s absolute chaos. She doesn’t understand the Anglo Saxon mind and she works in this sort of muddle and the Anglo Saxons want it all worked out, Shall I go from A to B in four bars or eight bars? She would say, Go, go! The rays of the sun, the rays of the sun! You are the rays! And I had to help her with productions and this was the annunciation and the rays of light and she’d taken a picture of a marvellous painting. And in the end what happened was quite superb! But the chaos before it emerged. And the anger of people like myself not being told exactly what we ought to do, and not understanding her in all her confusion. But I think Sylvia had vision which Lisa never had. [jump in tape] He gave Lisa support which she badly needed and now without him it’s very, very hard for her. 

[inaudible few sentences] 

JH: [inaudible] Which kept her broad. I mean that’s the problem with Lisa. She has not allowed people to come on extending her.

VS: He has absolutely ossified. And when she [presumably Bodmer] moves even now, it’s a revelation. It’s her own [inaudible], space and the flow of movement. It’s quite exceptional. You don’t see anybody move quite like her even though she’s fat and elderly now, still she has an inner quality which is very rare. And she couldn’t actually teach anybody. [jump in tape] …and somehow you can satisfy people very easily with the space study, whereas Laban was trying to you to experience something. I remember in London a very important course at the YMCA and I was in the class and he was taking it. He was trying to work relationships with different groups of people. And he couldn’t. He said, As soon as I talk about relationships I make you self-conscious so that you can’t do it. I have now found out that I can do it. But I must do it through play. I feel starting from point when I saw him struggling with it and then not thinking about it for many years and then having to work on relationships [inaudible] because you can’t use speech, you’ve got to relate at another level I found myself building up relationship plays, as I call them for myself. I am able to do now what he could not do, because he destroyed because he intellectualised it … in trying to get it, he killed it. And in a way, I don’t say anything and I just take it into play and then after we’ve experienced it [inaudible] then you can start looking at it. I think that’s the most important thing. The two things. There’s gravity and relationships, I think are the two things that I have most explored. [inaudible]  In Bristol, years ago now, Laban taught us, we were sitting on the ground, and I looked up, and you’re in a kind of shape, and you roll, and you can roll all over the place, like a wobbly man that you knock over and he comes up again. I was in the Studio some years before and I suddenly realised what this meant. Really what it meant. What is [inaudible] a movement skill? Something to do with rolling on your body weight and using the flow of weight. 

JH: and working with the gravity thing? 

VS: You can constantly [inaudible] between gravity and weight and the flow of it. And it was as though as if someone had just come sort of peeled off like an onion skin and I thought why I have I been so dim? It’s taken me all these years to see this. And now I feel more and more layers coming off, all very slowly. 

VS: I use all forms of the body on the ground. I was teaching in a school for the physically handicapped [inaudible] and we went out of doors twice or three times and we had a nice grassy place and these children couldn’t get enough of rolling down this hill. [Inaudible few sentences] and they got more and more confident. [Inaudible] to help children feel more and harmonious and more confident. 

JH: How did they get to the top of the bank? 

VS: They were carried up or crawled up. I watched them all afternoon rolling down the bank, screaming with laughter, tumbling down, collapsing, total abandon. And this has got something to do with the trampoline, all my kids love the trampoline. 

JH: The trampoline in a way is against gravity in a way. That enables you to do things that you can’t do. 

VS: It’s commitment. If you utterly commit yourself. We have a [Inaudible] and I can make handicapped adolescents [Inaudible] too heavy to hold up and let the whole body down, whoomph! And the joy of not hurting yourself and a complete giving of yourself to this. [57.13 break in the tape. The continuation is a much better signal.] 

VS: Warren Lamb says in his book that he doesn’t think that a child acquires flow after a certain age if they haven’t got it by five, they won’t have it. 

JH: Do you accept that?

VS: No. 

JH: I wouldn’t have thought that was true about anything. It’s harder perhaps 

VS: he thinks the degree of flow which a kid has is established at a certain point. I don’t think so, because I’ve seen students with great difficulty with the [Inaudible], very tense and unflowing, getting much, much better. I’ve seen it improve and I’ve seen them beginning to appreciate and enjoy. 

JH: And balance and so on I suppose is related to this whole thing of giving confidence?

VS: I’m not certain that I mind so desperately about balance. I think awareness of your weight in any … wherever you are, is a very useful thing. And being able to fall is very useful, especially if you are always … I mean a mentally handicapped kid does fall a lot. But when they work on the ground, their bodies are so harmonious and so fluent that they are beautiful. The minute they stand up you see all their physical disabilities again. On the ground they are like a mermaid, they are good, they are like a seal in water. They look a bit awkward on the …

JH: How does this actually help their … they have to come back to be on their feet again? 

VS: I think it gives them a good feeling. It harmonises them, which is very valuable because you know when children are very disturbed they become aggressive and violent and all the rest of it. I think too it gives them a better feeling of their bodies when they are standing. The fluency is still there even though they’re standing. But you need a lot of work on the ground to develop it before it begins to be there at all times, as you might say. I notice adults getting more and more fluent just as much as the handicapped children. 

JH: Which suggests it is something that can go on being acquired. 

VS: It has a harmonising effect. A harmonious effect on quite awkward, jerky people. 

JH: This is interesting. This is what Sylvia says as Laban’s greatest contribution for her, making her aware of harmonies. 

VS: Well she’s thinking more of harmonies of concepts and I’m thinking very much more of a fluidity, a knittedness and a centredness, towards the centre of the body. 

JH: I think, for me, she was in fact relating the two. 

VS: Well, then she thinks like I do. A lot of people think of space harmonies as …

JH: No, she was speaking about Space Harmonies just being part of the whole harmony. She was interested in even man’s harmony with nature and so on. And you’re saying man’s harmony with gravity, instead of fighting it. 

VS: And harmonious with the middle. Because you see when somebody’s on the ground their body is mainly supported on the trunk. So it makes them much more aware of their backs and their stomachs, their hips, all the ‘trunky’ bits. Whereas this is usually the dead bit and so the child gets a rubbery, good feel about this dead trunk. And the same applies to students or anyone who teaches. They begin to operate much more from this bit, which Martha Graham does, in a very exerciserly way with her contractions. Her dancers are terrifically diaphragm- orientated, gut-orientated. They are very aware of the middle but it becomes

JH: Often they lose it, I’ve been amazed at

VS: It becomes always a contraction and it always has this tension, it tends to be very tense. 

JH: It lacks real guts, oddly enough, somehow. 

VS: Well you see her dancers never stand. They never go ‘poom’ like this. You never hear that noise in any of her dances. They move with bound flow. And then

JH: That’s what gives it that odd quality

VS: And then you get to the point when I watched two of her things the last time she came to England and I had tickets for the third, and I just couldn’t stand the third, I sold my ticket to a long queue of people right round the theatre. I just couldn’t sit through another one. I’d had too much bound flow. 

JH: I can still see one thing in it. She always has incredibly strong men. Hilarious. And everybody is taking it seriously. I felt very disrespectful, but it was really too much. 

VS: She emasculates men, I think. 

JH: That’s it. Well, that was exactly my impression. How could these people who look so strong, be so buttery? They just flowed away. 

VS: They are very female. Sad, because they’ve lost this thing which a man brings. I must say I find it terribly valuable having mixed classes. For many years I’ve had all women students and now, it varies, but there are three or four or two men, and two men in a group of thirty make the most enormous difference, even if they’re not terribly good. And I’ve got four men in the year twenty now and they really contribute, out of proportion to their numbers. 

JH: In the time you knew Laban, did you always find you would go back to him and get replenishment? I am always amazed at people like Warren Lamb who feels he has outgrown Laban, which I always feel

VS: I don’t feel that I’ve outgrown Laban, I think I very slowly understood what he was trying to teach me, which I couldn’t comprehend at the time he was telling me. And I am very aware that what I am saying to people now they don’t understand, and they won’t understand, but in another ten years they will, perhaps. And the penny drops as you become ready to take it in. And on another area I think I have explored far more deeply because of the penny dropping when it did. I began to see what he was trying to teach me and then I was able to develop much, much more thoroughly until I feel almost full proof in the security of what I am able to convey. And this gives me confidence so when … I might go to Canada… I mean I don’t know what the Canadians are like and so on, and I’ll be teaching Canadian mentally handicapped children but I won’t be at a loss, I don’t think, and this security comes from Laban. And it comes from Jung. 

JH: And it comes from understanding basic principles. Having assimilated them. I’m sure this is the point. If one could always go back to first principles. 

VS: I think you always question and you always find better ways of doing it and you get quicker to the place you want to get to. I have one friend who teaches like I do. And I taught her years ago and she’s now headmistress of a school here in Bristol. And she does the most fantastic things with her infants and I filmed her last week and I’m going to film her mothers and children’s class and it’s so nice; everything works, you see in her school. It’s an immigrant school with every difficulty you could think of. 180 kids and they carry the headmistress, they roll her, they pull her, they make a cave for her, they relate to each other, the children and to any adult who comes in. 

JH: That’s a fantastic sounding school, because I’m sure that’s another problem. If you can get that, if the headmistress is with that number of 

VS: And she teaches them all, you see. But I do feel lonely, because apart from the students I teach, and the teachers I work with, there’s only this woman, Margaret Kirby, who is really doing the same thing. And my colleagues like Marion North and Gerry [Geraldine Stephenson] and so on, I really feel on another world from them completely. 

JH: People like Marion seem to have gone for systematisation and have lost the spirit of the thing, And people like Gerry, I always feel sorry, because Gerry doesn’t seem to have gone on growing. 

VS: Well, she is a producer of performances, you know. 

JH: But she still should keep on finding new ways of working it and developing it. Because, again, one of the great things about Laban as a choreographer, apparently, one of his problems was, he would never like things to be static. One performance was enough for him. But she could do the same sort of thing as she could grow it towards a performance…

VS: Yes, but she’s got to sell it and if you want it to be sold, you’ve got to do what the public wants and she’s in a commercial set-up you see. 

JH: it’s true, but if she could bring a fresh life to it, because I don’t think that she’s getting any real life from her actors…

VS: It’s beautifully done. 

JH: Sometimes

VS: I think the quality of movement is so high. [jump in tape] They did Gurdjieff things in Catherine Mansfield and it was beautifully done and I thought, I wonder who taught them that? I didn’t know it was Gerry until I saw the credits. But I’m sure you get a formula, it’s successful and you go on repeating it, see? I think one reason why I don’t necessarily fall into this repetition thing is that I’ve never taught full time since I married, I’ve always had lots of time to cogitate, I’ve only done what I’ve wanted to do, I haven’t had to work, I haven’t had to earn money, and make it financially viable, I’ve done what I have wanted to do within the freedom I was given and I am very, very grateful. 

JH: is this why Laban could go one, because he had the time? 

VS: Well, he developed his industrial work. Have you heard all the stories about his … the crane-driver, how he changed the crane cabin so that the chap didn’t have accidents. He was asked by the Manchester Ship Canal to go and help with the accidents because their crane drivers kept having accidents. Not the man in the crane, but the people outside, because the crane moved. And he went into the cabin and he saw that when the crane moved right the man moved the lever left to go right and so he just, what we would say, rationalised the cabin. And this was a revelation and from then on they didn’t have accidents. And then he was asked to help with the Commandos landings. Have you heard that? Well the Commandos were breaking their legs and whatever …

JH: And what did he do there? 

VS: Transference of weight. Rolling. I think he got asked to do interesting jobs. 

JH: But he was able to think about them because he had sufficient people around him to assist…

VS: He wasn’t fulltime teaching. He wasn’t earning a living. He was given this room at Dartington just to work on his theories by Leonard Elmhirst. 

JH: According to Sylvia, in those days, when he first arrived, everybody thought, Here’s that old has-been. 

VS: yes, I think they probably did and then he went off and worked in Manchester and they worked in a Mars Bar factory in Swindon, er, Slough and handling motor car tyres and things like this, which women had to do. You see I am working with social workers in the University here. I’ve taught at the Old Vic School because somebody was ill, and I work in the University Drama Department, and I teach mentally handicapped and teachers of severely disturbed children – you couldn’t have a much wider …

JH: That’s also important, isn’t it, for teaching? I always think it’s always a shame for those involved, teaching only one kind of thing. You definitely need…

VS: Working with adults and with children, and I go right down to special care kids who are like vegetables. They are very little

JH: I wish more teachers could work with children and adults. 

VS: I couldn’t do anything else and Dorothy Heathcote says she’s got to work with children every week otherwise she feels ill. And I think this is true. You get refreshed from the contact with children and this term I’ve worked with these children at Reading and mentally handicapped in Bristol. And if I didn’t have that every week I would be lost. I can’t understand how my colleagues at Redland never see a child from year’s end to the next. And one of my colleagues, who I work mostly with, has had seven years and resents it terribly that we bring kids into the college. And we say individual teaching is absolutely essential to our students. You can’t teach the mass, you must teach the individual when they’re handicapped. And he has been trying to get rid of this individual teaching all along. 

JH: Interesting that Laban didn’t seem to have a lot of time for kids.

VS: I don’t think he could relate to children. 

JH: He doesn’t ever seem to have any interest in children. Either his own, or other people’s. 

VS: And Lisa is not very good with children either. 

JH: Because you would expect Laban to 

VS: And yet his ideas were related to school teaching and teaching and he went and watched classes and observed, and he could see what the children were doing and he wrote about the children from observation. But I must say, I never saw him working with kids. 

JH: Do you think he owes a lot on the educational side to Lisa, because she seems to … 

VS: I don’t that Lisa knows a lot about teaching Children. Not in the terms that I think of teaching. 

JH: So if he didn’t get Modern Educational Dance from you, where did the thing… how did it grow? 

VS: it grows from his philosophies about people all being different and needing to balance the opposites and having the opportunity in which to do your…

JH: So he’s really writing a book like that, because that was the thing that was demanded at that stage? 

VS: Well, he’d also discovered about space and had written German books about it and now it was an English book. He found the English language, he told me, much better to describe his Efforts than the German language. 

JH: His comment in the German thing, Gymnastics which he wrote in the ‘30s [Gymnastik und Tanz (1926), Des Kindes Gymnastik und Tanz (1926)] is quite an interesting educational book, I think. It’s fantastic, a present day, as so much I find in Laban… in the early days. He was obviously there having educational theories. 

VS: I think he had this compassion for mankind, so it would be for children or adults. He himself was working with industry and workmen and all these masses of women teachers, hardly any men teachers. I think he was sad that he got … it was only women who accepted his work. What the men have taken over in the PE world, they have just turned it into another set of skills. And I think this is a tendency in the drama world, too, it’s another set of skills. There’s a terrific influence now in the drama world on encounter groups, or ‘grope therapy’, or whatever you want to call it. That’s coming in and I find what I’m teaching, people say, Oh, it’s very like what the Americans teach. It’s isn’t. Mine is different. 

JH: Yes I hope so, because ‘grope therapy’ is so superficial. It’s like the games thing. People play games in a party sense, not in a develop…

VS: It’s meaningless. And quite nice people in Bristol have been taught these games by quite well-meaning people which they’ve all acquired probably from the chap in London, what’s his name? It’s a German name that begins with ‘E’. Ed Berman. And people I thought who were more perspicacious than that, so I always begin with throwing a bean bag to each other or a ball, and calling out each other’s names. Isn’t that super?  And I think, Well, there are much better ways of getting to know people, than names games. [jump in tape] He showed a film of himself working and all it was, himself dressed up in front with kids following behind and he showed off and he was the centre, and the children were manipulated. 

JH: Exactly in the same way I saw him manipulate this crowd of adults. [jump in tape]

VS: … marks out of a hundred. And I must not tell them their marks. And I thought I’d go and subvert this whole thing and say – Look you’re all going to get 80, whatever you do, because I don’t want you to feel threatened that you’ve got to participate madly keenly. I want you to be very natural. And we’re going to work through play. And I don’t want you to work because you’re threatened by the mark you’re going to get at the end of the two weeks. This is not the relationship that you want to please me. The relationship is that we should enjoy these two weeks and yet what do I say when the Canadians had brought me over at great expense to give a course? 

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[jump in tape]

VS: … exploring Dada. And he said for the first time he went in and became just one of the group. And they all made decisions and he was so amazed how well it worked. And I thought, How funny that you had to have this authority for so long. That you think you’ve made a fantastic advance because you’ve gone and worked with a tiny group of university students, man to man. [jump in tape 01.15. 44] 

Shifts to something completely different. A young man talking about sound.  

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The Doman Delacato method is a treatment therapy that was developed between 1955 and 1960 for “brain-injured” children, to use the term preferred by the developers. This category includes any and all children who have brain-related problems, including children with Down’s Syndrome. It was developed by Glenn Doman, a physical therapist and Carl Delacato, an educational psychologist. [http://www.cdadc.com/ds/doman-delacato-method-accurately-reviewed.html]

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._P._Jacks