Joseph Levitan (Also written ‘Lewitan’) (Tape 60 - 71)

 

Biography 

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Levitan was a writer and teacher who met Laban in 1922/23, and left for the US when Hitler came to power. 

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Summary of Tape 60

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He first met Laban in 1922/23. Laban’s last job in Berlin after being at the State Opera. His condition in Paris in 1937. Laban’s attitude to other kinds of dance. Laban’s role in the Memorial Celebration of Anna Pavlova (January 1931). Laban’s appointment as Maitre de Ballet of the Berlin State Opera. How he made work. Levitan talked much with Laban who was ‘more a thinker than a dancer.’ The cultural ferment of the interwar years – Bauhaus and more. Laban’s choreography ‘an invitation to an improvisation’. Levitan’s Journal Der Tanz was part of a more general attempt to broaden a discussion and understanding of dance: Laban was an enthusiastic participant. Kurt Jooss’ Green Table. Resistance to Der Tanz, ‘the last thing they wanted to use was their brains’. Levitan’s explorations of ‘Movemental Phraseology’. Laban’s will to understand worked in Germany but didn’t wash with Americans don’t ‘give a damn for thinking.’ Those who influenced dance in the US. Laban’s personality and how he makes (or doesn’t make) relations. How he wasn’t accepted by most, excepting his loyal few. 

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Summary of Tape 71

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Laban’s Totalising Conception of Human Movement: a development of his thoughts about Laban the philosophiser begun on Tape 60. Isadora Duncan. The context of modern dance in the 1920s and Laban’s place within it. JL found Laban’s dances ‘awful’ – too cerebral. He couldn’t translate his philosophy into physical movement. Another account of Laban’s process as a choreographer. The connection between Laban and Wigman. Laban in Paris. His choreographies were acknowledged but never praised.

Tape 60 , Side A 

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Laban’s job in Berlin after being at the State Opera

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JL: The government department of Goebbels of course dealing with theatres and that was his last assignment after he has been Maitre de Ballet of the State Opera. And that was apparently too much for him and he found the possibility of getting out of Germany at that time with the intent of not to return, and I think that Kurt Jooss was a bit helpful because Kurt Jooss kept some relations in England and Laban was partly in France and partly in England. But by that he made an impression of half-broken man at that time.

 

JH: He was very sick, wasn’t he, very ill? 

 

JL: Well, yes, but still we walked miles and miles and miles in Paris and talked about all these things and he took it. 

 

JH: What was broken? His spirit, his belief in the dance, his…

 

JL: His outlook. It was a depression because he didn’t see anything but ruin

 

 JH: Of his work as well as of Germany? 

 

JL: You see with his work it was not something new to him. He was never absolutely convinced in the success of his work, even in the best of times. And he had a tendency over the years, he started by antagonising the rest of the dance world and by carving out for him some sector of theoretical, of the dance domain. And little by little he incorporated in his embrace the sectors which he was at the beginning might be not hostile directly, but it was theoretically he admitted they have their place in the spectrum of possible movements, but he didn’t like them, he ignored them, he paid not much attention. But later, the later it was the more embracing, he became mentally and theoretically. 

Memorial Celebration of Anna Pavlova

So, let’s say, 1931 Anna Pavlova’s death in January. At that time he was Maitre de Ballet of Staatsoper in Berlin. I arranged a celebration of her, a performance in memory of Pavlova and we have been cooperating with him. Now Tiching who was general director of the opera, because this was the second state opera house, gave me for this night the house, the orchestra, and he gave host to some performers. Glazunov happened to be there and played an overture of his, and Kreuzer and I don’t know who else, and then we arranged the end of the first part of the performance a mute, open scene with nothing happening but a light moving along the path of the dying swan and there played underneath in the orchestra San Saens’ dying swan. Well, I could not have arranged it in the state opera without Laban. And Laban was enthusiastic and did the whole administrative and behind the scenes organising that and he had made a speech. Because the first… it was the overture by Glazunov, then it was a song by Baklanov, Prince Igor, I don’t know, then it was a speech Heinrich Mann who has been the president of the Prussian Academy at that time. And in his outlook any dance form fitted in. 

 

JH: He wrote about her didn’t he? 

 

JL: Sure, he thought of his theory as universal, covering the whole field. It might be that is his strength and yet his weakness. Because he approached the dance not only through the subconscious motoric sense but also through his brain, his reflection. And theoretically, he understood and he grasped the interdependence of any movement. He analysed and created the theory of his [inaudible], his coordinates were physical capacities and the division of outer space and in this frame, of course he enclosed everything. Now, since the ballet sector existed before he started, so his active intent in dance was to fill up the gaps in this theoretical structure which were void when he began. And part of his disciples stuck the whole career within these parts which Laban added theoretically and ignored absolutely those which he accepted as already existing and given. Mary Wigman, the best example. Others, like Kurt Jooss, started, of course with the new possibilities which he opened up, the [inaudible]. But very soon started looking for somehow filling the gaps and filling in what he lacked in this new structure and that was my conviction, conform with Laban’s theory and with Laban’s thoughts.

 

Laban’s appointment as Maitre de Ballet of the Berlin State Opera.

JH: He wasn’t too popular at the state opera, was he? 

 

JL: You see, he became, I don’t know when it was, it was ’29 or ’30, when [Max] Terpis ceased to be Maitre de Ballet, there was a question who will succeed? And by that time, I don’t know who approached me, I recommended Laban. But there was a different influence working very much and very energetic for Wigman. They wanted to… Yes, and that was …

 

JH: What about Jooss, was he in the running? 

 

JL: No. And, well they decided and they took Laban, and I think rightly so, because, again his approach was universal. He kept the ballets which have already been in the repertory of the state opera and he could and wanted to and tried to continue to enrich this. Whereas, the candidacy of Wigman would destroy the ballet of the opera house, because it would reduce it to a small segment. 

 

JH: But he’s not a choreographer, Laban, I don’t feel. 

 

Laban as a Choreographer

JL: No. You see, there are very few choreographers in Germany, if you look around. Terpis was not a choreographer. They worked. They did not have, to my knowledge, they did not have the structure, the concept of the entire work which they had to choreograph. They approached it step by step, let’s say the pianist has been asked to play the first 32 bars of the music, and then they concentrated on possible movements and more often than not, it hadn’t results. Terpis [inaudible] with Laban. He asked the performers, Keith, or whoever it happened to be, to improvise. Then he picked out all these different improvisations what he liked. And then he gave to this modus vivendi, a theoretical interpretation that it develops the initiative and he assembles the sort of movements and of combinations which are congenial to this performance, so he heightens the artistic result. But it was partly this optimistic explanations, but it was partly because of the need to get inspiration from somewhere to get choreographic ideas. And since all these young men wanted to be stars and wanted to be choreographers and so on, and in the seclusion of their studios and their homes, every one of them had his idea, and every one of them performed somewhere, some solo dances and the Maitre de Ballet could combine the different elements which were represented. But at least he had the good sense, and of course the erudition, to keep it within a certain style, within a certain idea, where he wanted to get at and the result was not bad. And this, I would say, artistically liberal and creatively vital approach he conserved also when he came a member of the staff of the ministry. He had some authority, executive and legislative. That’s it. 

 

JH: Do you remember any of the dancers of that time? Do you remember Rita Zabekow? 

 

JL: Well, I saw Laban himself perform but that must have been mid-twenties. 

 

JH: When did you first meet Laban? 

 

JL: In the ‘20s. 

 

JH: Did his work impress you on the stage? What led you to …

 

JL: No, it interested me theoretically. You see that is the rare occasion because my instinctive approach to dance was to be the subject of a force, to be the passive half of the experience. And here I had to be active, it was a reflection, it was an idea which started to interest me. What does he think? You see when I saw Nijinsky [or others whose name were spoken too quickly to make out] I never asked myself, What does he think? You see? And I asked myself, What is it that caught me? And then analytically I got to my conclusions but it was secondary. With Laban, it started here in my brain because his movement by itself, I don’t know, when I first saw him performing something, well it was a man in morning coat, let’s say, and just got up from his bed after a good sleep at night and now he starts moving, yes. But what does it add to? Since he was not a charlatan, since I gave him the credit that he is serious and that it means something, so it was up to me to form an idea of what sticks behind. 

 

JH: Where did you first meet his theory? His theoretical approach to dance? Was it an article or a book or …

 

JL: It was a book, something in print.

 

JH: A Life for Dance? 

 

JL: Yes. And then, of course, I talked with him quite a lot. And then I talked with people who came out from him, people who were under his influence. And then we crossed of course our weapons often, because I wrote, and you see it was a time where the tradition of ballet was considered as last, unpopular and retro, and well, a thing which has to be done away. We came to grips on this. And I had common ground with Laban, of course, very easily because he was not aggressive. He denied nothing. We found in the whole spectrum of what we liked both. We found a reason and place for everything. And even in some conversations with him, as well as with [Jens] Keith, as well as with Kurt Jooss, somewhere they regretted not to have mastered in their prime time the whole range of possible dance expressions. And those who were a little bit younger, [for] Laban himself it was too late and Laban was more a thinker than a dancer. But for those who performed on the stage, they tried to complete what they lacked and if you follow up the choreography of Jooss, well [inaudible] exist 100% in the sphere of new expression forms. But later on, his Petrushka, his Viennese motifs in his ballets, wherever he could use traditional forms of dance movements he incorporated them. There was not conflict in no one of them, except Mary Wigman, Vera Skoronel, there was a seclusion within a limited range of possibilities. What was right and what was really good in Laban is his very broad and universal outlook. 

The Cultural Milieu in Berlin between the wars

JH: Now those days when he was in Berlin, were they artistically very exciting years? Or was the war already grumbling in the background? 

 

JL: No, there were very interesting things. We had first of all such a theatre like Kurt Jooss, we had an experiment with the Bauhaus, with playing with geometric forms, static and in movement. We had such single artists like [Harald] Kreuzberg which created a very interesting meteor-like dance career. But no succession, with no school, with no tradition, with nothing. Same, Mary Wigman. I can’t deny it. She found for some expression, words, purposes, she found her language. But nobody could make out of a school or a tradition or a style. It is very much individual and by that time, the span between the two wars, there were quite a lot, just in Germany, of dance artists which didn’t create traditions, didn’t create schools but by themselves were very… were fitting very well in the mood of the times, and brought … they had their voice and it was worthwhile to show it. Of course, it was not a school, it was not a tradition. 

 

JH: did Laban express his feelings about Bauhaus at all to you? 

 

JL: This experiment did interest him. Sure. Because he saw in it no conflict with his convictions, no. It fitted very well in. It was one of the theoretically possible forms of development of the sense of movement. Why not? Then, at that time we had wonderful, exciting experience with all sorts of exotic dance. I mean exotic, Argentina, with her interpretation of Spanish dancing, Escudero, he impressed me very much. Raden Mas Dodjana he arrived from Java and brought in … well all these things, all these movements, all these combinations were absorbed with very much interest. And in Laban’s spectrum all of them fitted in somewhere, it was not a conflict or contradiction for him, it was just, always an additional argument for him, proving how right he was in his broad outlook. 

 

JH: Did you ever see him work, did you ever see him work with dancers? 

 

JL: Yes, it was mostly, what I remember, an invitation to an improvisation. ‘Show me what did you cook to this music yourself?’ ‘I don’t think that the jumping here is…’ ‘Yes, but the turns, that I like.’ 

 

JH: Did the dancers find this insecure? 

 

JL: No, they liked it. They liked it because every one of them he felt himself somehow choreographically able, whereas, I don’t know. If I happened to work with a Fokin or with somebody else, they wouldn’t allow them to make one single step. And here he found that, well, his solo he worked out, Laban corrected, Laban refused to accept some parts, but still, let’s say, 60% or 70% of what he had concocted in his own mind stood and he felt that it was a creative result. So everybody was content. 

Levitan’s Journal Der Tanz

JH: Tell me a bit about Der Tanz. Did you actually begin this … when? 

 

JL: No, it was 1926. 

 

JH: How did it begin? Was this because there was an upsurge of dance in Germany? Was it because it was there was one beginning? 

 

JL: Well, I don’t know there were many young people, boys and girls, studying in different schools, dancing, ballet and modern. And there was no discussion, no problems, no form to talk about it. So, I thought this gap could be filled. By that time there were monthly magazines on dance in England, The Dancing Times [for which Levitan filed a large number of articles on German dance], even here in America. Well there was some need and, mainly in England and in America, and I thought, Why not in Germany? And then I started it. My wife had a dance studio in Berlin and it was the central school institution for the traditional classic dance. Around there were all these other schools and with the population of I don’t know, hundreds and hundreds of young people studying dance, and I tried it and I found my reading public. Later on, exactly ’31, after the death of Pavlova, I tried and it existed until the advent of Hitler, I tried to complete this dancing educational field by creating I don’t know, a sort of, let’s say, university, a faculty of dance, common to all these different schools with Wigman or whosoever, and again, I did it in collaboration with Laban. I invited him and he participated in it. We founded an Anna Pavlova foundation, I think. And we started giving a series of lectures to help dancers to cope with their problems. It was once a week, several lectures. For instance, Professor Fischel, I think, anatomy for the dance. What are all these legs and feet … what muscles do we use and what does it, to turn everything outward and not inward, and so on? Anatomy! With projections, with pictures, and with explanations of the specialists. Then Professor Sachs, his field was music. But he wrote a wonderful book of prehistoric dance, so he had a course of lectures on the dance before, let’s say, we were aware of its existence in the 17thC. From twenty centuries before Christ until the 16th Century, the Italian courts. Then, Laban had a course and lectured, well, his theory. Universal theory of movement. I had a course, the history of choreography, of creations of dance works from roughly the court of Estes in Ferrara and Noverre and the beginning of the 19th Century up to the 20th Century, up to the creations of, I don’t know, Nijinsky, and of Kurt Jooss. And then, we had 7, 8, 9, lectures in different disciplines which I thought must form a good, common basis to any dancer, anybody who is interested in dance, independently of the style and of the school and of their approach. That is something which everybody should know. And Laban was an enthusiastic collaborator. 

 

JH: Where did you give these lectures? 

 

JL: It was a public hall in Berlin. It was not the Bitnersalle, but it was a hall for about 200 – 300 people. 

 

JH: And did you have to finance this yourself?

 

JL: Well, yes. The participants paid some fee and since I named it in memory of Pavlova, the Pavlova Society, the widower, Mr D’André, he helped me to make a go. 

 

JH: Were you able to publish any of these lectures in Der Tanz? 

 

JL: You see it was so abruptly… in 1933, with the advent of Hitler…

 

[Break in tape]

 

Kurt Jooss’ Green Table

JL: Different functions, despite the change of the regime. I had some international dance competitions in Warsaw, in Vienna and usually I was invited to be in the committee to the Juries. 

 

JH: Were you on the famous jury that judged Jooss’ Green Table?

 

JL: Sure. 

 

JH: Can you tell me anything about that particular occasion? 

 

JL: Well there was quite obvious. 

 

JL: Was it? 

 

JL: Well, I think the second contender was… She taught in Luxembourg and Vienna. 

 

VB: Was it Chladek? Rosalia Chladek? 

 

JL: Yes it was her. Rosalia, it was Rosalia. And one of the Russians, I think it was Knazev or Sofi. He made a Russian ballet in the judgment of the jury it was quite a distance. You see it was not only the quality of the dancing, it was the theme and the construction of the whole ballet in ’31 – no, it was ’33. By that time the first act and the last act and all the sequence with the miserable lot of mankind, what happened around the table with the diplomats, what happened in the home of the woman or the child, and so on, well it was gripping. 

 

JH: I always feel that was a very historical occasion, in a sense is it right to say that that was the first ballet that took as its theme everyday political matters? 

 

JL: I will tell you more than that. It is now forty years later and the ballet is still alive. You can see it here in New York. It was performed and it is still actuality. So Jooss happened to find the nail and to hit it on the head. 

 

JH: Was it a breakthrough? Do you consider it to be a very important breakthrough? Other ballets followed it, or had it got some … 

 

JL: You see, anyhow, it was a facet of dance possibilities which was hidden before because, if to nowhere’s time, the breakthrough was to get Greek mythology onto the stage. You see, in the beginning of the 19th Century it was they replaced Greek mythology by the interior of a peasant’s home with a romantic tale, and then came half a century of Giselles and all this, and then right of a sudden, we had expression in terms of dance, of actual thematics. It was a happy idea. Jooss can consider himself lucky to have found it because up to this day he never created anything surpassing it. He made a few nice ballets, I don’t deny that. 

 

JL: Anything to touch it? No, but let’s say he made Petrushka ballets. It’s a possibility to feel Petrushka this way. He made a composit idealisation of the Viennese Waltz world and outlook. It was very nice. But it was never that strong, that radical as this. 

 

JH: We began talking about the first time you met Laban. Do you remember the date of that? 

 

JL: The first half of the ‘20s, of course. I could be ’23, it could be ’22, it could be ’24. I’m not very strong on…

 

JH: Had you started Der Tanz? When did that begin? 

 

JL: No, it was before I started Der Tanz. But before starting printing and talking publically I was of course within the dance world because the very first day in Berlin I was connected with all around the dance. I had within this period, to visit the performances in Germany of visiting troupes, let’s say, Romantic ballet. It was even financed, it was created in Germany, it was an owner of a huge cigarette fabrik in Dresden who financed it because one of these dancers was interested in creating a theatre. But she was not the artistical main asset of this, but they engaged Romanov, Nabukov and well, some case of good dancers and they created a series of … Then Rolf de Maré had at that time created his so-called Swedish Ballet. Then we had visiting ensembles and dancers. Well, Balanchine who is now the boss here. At that time it must have been ’21 or ’22, from Russia, arrived four young dancers, two males, two females. Danielova was one of them, his name was then Balanchivadze, it was contracted into Balanchine later. They gave a few performances. Then we had from time to time the theatre of Pavlova. The last time she was in December ’30; in January ’31 she died. In December ’30 she was still in Berlin. I know it because after the performances she was in my home to eat. She ate after the performance, not before. Then we had Diaghilev. All this was in these years. And of course, endless, all varieties of the new German dance. Valeska Gert and all these. Palucca. 

 

JH: Did Balanchine meet Laban and did they, you know… 

 

JL: Well, these circles were a priori hostile because the last thing which was involved in their dancing, their sacred dancing domain, the last thing was brains! You see? They took it from the other end. Laban demanded some philosophising dance. 

 

JH: You saw Laban dance. When you first saw him, when did you first meet him? Do you remember, recall anything? 

 

JL: Well it must have been ’22, ’23. 

 

JH: And did you have a discussion with him then? Was it a social occasion, or what? 

 

JL: Both. It was a social occasion and I used the opportunity of entering with him in some closer … 

 

JH: Was that the first of many meetings? 

Levitan’s Explorations of ‘Movemental Phraseology’

JL: Well, you see there was … I introduced the school of my wife. She taught ballet and, well, she had a Spanish dancer who gave special lessons of Spanish techniques. She even had an acrobat, a circus performer, a musical performer who gave training. Then we had some specialists in different disciplines of dance and I introduced there what I called ‘improvisations’. I had among the pupils who showed some personality and some creative abilities, we spent an hour or so in trying to create a movemental phraseology. Partly abstract, I mean an exercise when the transition or the combination of some movement which is built up high in the vertical as let’s say high jumps down to a prostrate state on the floor. Now emotionally this reflects something. So, to try a dancer who feels what he does, to combine, to get down from the height, or to get up from the bottom, in a coherent, with no voice, no emotion, no voice physically, a flow of movement which will bring him from one extreme to the other in different dimensions and in different moods. So, there were exercises where a geometric line had to be emotionally or geometrically or I don’t know, fluently, combined with no voice. If in the real performance somebody performs and you feel between his accents some floating where he loses himself and he doesn’t know what he does, just to feel the bar of the music, or the time. So, these exercises of phraseology, let’s say, in movement, brought me in contact with Laban. You see, from here, it was a millimetre to reach the things which interested both of us simultaneously. 

 

JH: What things did you find yourself disagreeing with him over? 

 

[break in tape]

 

JL: …started in the brain. The whole structure of his mind, it is as if a stranger stepped into the world of dance. It’s not as if a dancer, an instinctive dancer looked out of his domain and saw the horizons around. It is somebody from outside who for one reason or another, but for a mental reason, was fascinated by theoretical possibilities of this wide range of thinkable and possible movements. His prime impulse was to understand, to think how to understand, and not to move. I think he started here and not here. Well, he came down all the way. But, the relation between his conscious and his subconscious motifs were just the opposite with me. 

 

[Break in tape]

 

JH: In Germany he was very influential. 

 

JL: He? 

 

JH: Yes. 

 

JL: Sure.

 

JH: Not so in America? 

 

JL: No. 

 

JH: Why? 

 

[Break in tape]

 

JL: … The homeland of philosophers. And America is the best example where no-one of them gives a damn for thinking. 

 

JH: You know, quite eminent dance people in America today have never even heard of him or if they have heard of him, they don’t know what he stands for. Very strange. 

 

JL: In America… In Europe or in Germany if anybody wanted to dance you tried to get to the ballet school or Wigman School or somewhere. Once, being there, they wanted to learn and to grasp the whole amplitude of whatever Wigman understood as dance or whatever Anna Pavlova understood as dance. Here, you can open a dance school and you will have scores of people come and telling you that they would like to take lessons with your school, but they ask you to teach them to turn pirouettes. 

 

JH: But it’s amazing that he hasn’t become more recognised in the present. There are people using his ideas or using ideas which he seemed to initiate, [Jerome] Robbins, well I suppose Martha Graham and people, are building, I think, on the Laban grasp of the breadth of movement. 

 

JL: No, he did not create that. 

 

JH: He didn’t create it. I see. Because they have taken it from elsewhere or what? 

 

JL: He liberated them theoretically. Do whatever you wish and somewhere it will fit in. But probably he didn’t impose his day to day personality under whose guidance they were eager to get somewhere. [Unintelligible sentence] You know … in the somewhat ridiculous manner of traditional dance, young people adore their principal or their teacher, who happened to get into the class of Tamara Karsavina, let’s say, this fascinating influence did not exert. He found response, again, in the brain. In probably, Mary Wigman, got out of his words more than she out of his movements. 

 

JH: And Jooss too? 

 

JL: Jooss too. 

 

JH: So they might be considered to me more influential in America than Laban? 

 

JL: yes. 

 

JH: Would you think that Mary Wigman’s and Jooss’ work in the States is at the root of people like Robbins and Martha Graham?

 

JL: Yea. You see if you look into the American dance world, they will never concede and tell you that Martha Graham and all these dancers here, Charles Weidman and so on are the product of Mary Wigman’s or Laban’s influence. But they certainly are. They will tell you that, Oh that is a strict and specific American phenomenon. No! No! And they will bring you back to it might be Duncan, it might be Lois Fuller, who was the opposite of the ballet tradition, but never to Laban. 

Side B

JL: Relatively shortlived, so, what is it? About 10 years or so. I don’t know. 

 

JH: But a very important document for the dance of those ten years. 

 

JL: Yea. I don’t have the complete … I don’t have the dance here at my home, but in the public library here there is a set. You have to look it up from this angle. 

 

[Break in tape]

 

JH: … you remember him, his sense of humour, his …

 

JL: Nothing in particular

 

JH: Was he a very, did you notice his sense of humour, did you 

 

JL: Not much

 

JH: what about his… was he a serious…

 

JL: yea, serious discussion

Laban’s Personality

JH: Did he have a very compelling personality? 

 

JL: There was always a group of people who suggested, who formed an adoring group, but outside of this people specifically fascinated by some aspect of Laban, the rest of the world, no, didn’t catch all this. And that is since the last analysis. His life was not a very happy one and you don’t see his normal, his success, he was an underdog somewhere, and he didn’t live to a satisfactory acceptance of what he created and what he taught. 

 

[Break in tape]

 

JL: … relatively deep milieu. Of course there are scores and scores of people who adore him and his memory because he made out of them what they think they represent today. Life-feeling, contact, never existed. He was aloof. And he was not happy. Did you meet his daughter, she … [Break in tape] Some closely-knit family life. 

 

JH: He rejected it. He didn’t want it at all. 

 

JL: And he was, well… Kurt Jooss tried to be, during his lifetime, somebody more than pupil, but it resulted in some delicate, indirect, help … result Laban knowing exactly what happens behind the scene. But it did not develop from Laban’s side into an affection or a friendship. 

 

JH: Laban always rejected it, in fact? 

 

JL: So, I don’t know. My contact with him was, after all, also strictly intellectual. [Break in tape] … artists who do not live until they are recognised and accepted and so on. But a man in his domain doing what he did, deserved having been recognised earlier. 

 

JH: He still hasn’t been recognised at all, really. 

 

JL: Even, he his notation is a relatively unaccepted thing. [Break in tape] … nobody would know their names. But about Laban, it’s absolutely possible, in fifty years people will find out and will be interested in what Laban did and what Laban thought and what Laban wrote. [Break in tape]. Wigman used to be there. I have here somewhere an enthusiastic letter after this meeting with Mary Wigman which Lisa Sobel sent me. Do you know Lisa Sobel? She was one of her pupils and she was the wife of Karl Bergeest who came from Laban. He was, I think, Maitre de Ballet in the Hamburg Opera House. He never studied anything but Laban School. Still, he made his career.

 

[up to 09.43]

Tape 71

Laban’s Totalising Conception of Human Movement 

JL: I would say it might be more that by looking or feeling the, or exercising the motoric sense. It is a very interesting whole which he erected, but it was a brain construction more than a subconscious awareness of mechanics and of the motoric impulses of our body. And it might be I am wrong, I don’t know, but I think that what attracted him, and what captivated his imagination was the possibility of encompassing the whole width and the whole area of movement culture and artistic movement development by a single child of his brain. And that is why, from our very first encounters, as far as I can recall, he aimed not at compartmentation, segregation of the different schools, the different movement, well schools and ideas, but of encompassing them, of interpreting them as a new facet, a new possibility of this universal child which is the human body movement. Or it might be, well, the limitations, not every movement, he would exclude let’s say gymnastic movement or acrobatic movement. But artistic movement in his idea, artistic movement had to encompass the new school, the old school, or the future school or a school fifty years hence, or fifty years ago. He was not a fighter for one line of dance against another. He was somebody who thought himself capable of unifying of comprehending and of understanding all the facets. 

 

JH: But he came into the dance world and spent a lot of time within dance, and it must have been a time of great artistic development. The fact that you edited Der Tanz for so long must have meant that this was an unusual period in dance history. There has been nothing comparable in Britain, continuity, to touch the period that you edited it, is there? 

Isadora Duncan

JL: Well, he started thinking of dance in a period of decadence of the traditional dance and of very primitive steps of the nascent Free New Dance. Well, he … Isadora Duncan made the first steps, let’s say when he became of all these problems… 

 

JH: Did he ever see…

 

JL: Well, certainly he saw in her last, decadent, in her tragic period, because if I recall well, in the ‘20s, I would say ’22 or ’23… she died in ’28 or ’29, something like that … and somewhere in the ‘20s she came already from Russia with all these communist ideas and so on with her husband Yesenin, the poet, and with very much alcohol in the veins and everywhere, and with crazy ideas, and it was no more the previous Isadora because she was already in the domain of sociology, not of dance. She made the humanity happy by encompassing all living beings as soon they reach the 8th, or the 9th, or the 10th year of their lives and with no exclusions. Everybody must be communist, by the thousands, groupings, no limits to that. And everybody, the whole world has to enter dance. 

 

[jump in tape]

 

JL: Around the … before the first war, that time he must have been interested in dance at the time when she influenced already the theatre. 

 

[jump in tape]

 

The context of modern dance in the 1920s

JL: As the man who influenced Mary Wigman who was connected with a phenomenon in Germany which was called the Modern Dance or the Modern School. It didn’t start after I introduced my dance, I introduced my dance when it was already there and where it might be, on the other hand, it coincided it might be with the serious efforts of rehabilitated traditional ballet and classic dance. Because relatively, the modern dancing prevailed, but prevailed as I understand it, at the time, not because of this ideological … 

 

[jump in tape]

 

JL: The arena was free for nothing else. There was no tradition, no roots, no competition, nothing. Objectively, the situation was favourable on one side to new ideas and to new beginnings, I would say, to whatever [inaudible] you prefer because you don’t have to know or to be able to dance, to present yourself as a dancer. It became much more earnest in later years. 

 

JH: But he came in on a time when it was ready new ideas, but he met a lot of opposition. 

 

JL: Well, he met opposition, I would say, he met more success than opposition because among people who were influenced by his ideas there were new artists whose impulses were not from the brain but from a very natural artistic urge, they couldn’t explain themselves, to themselves and to anyone outside them why, but they were real artists who grasped subconsciously the truth in Laban’s push and they were Labanists because they felt free thanks to Laban. But they did not reproduce his constructions because his constructions were constructions of his brain and they were inspired by different things and these inspirations led them in comparison with Laban, to ten, twelve, fifteen different directions. Because you can’t compare what Valeska Gert did with Palucca with Mary Wigman with anybody else. They sprang from the same impulse, from the same subconscious liberation sense, but they went different ways. 

 

JH: Were there any traditional dance people who opposed his work? 

 

JL: Well, to begin with there were of course the epigones of the artistically very unproductive traditional classic ballet school. There was a romantic tradition. There were old Egyptian mummies who reproduced the classic dances up to Pavlova who as a live person was fascinating as a live dancer, but whose ideas, whose dance motivation, whose dance knowledge, whose dance forms were traditional, old with no innovations. It was only around 1910 when Diaghilev, not in Germany but in France, started assembling new creative brains, new creative artists where he looked for and found a few new lines of development of classic dance forms. One of the first was the [inaudible] who was influenced, among others, by Eisener, and whose ballets in the Greek were directly children of Eisener’s brain. Whereas Isadora attributed to the Greek principle and universal meaning, it was a universal law, everything must be Greek! All her brothers and so on, Greek tunics and then her Greek sandals and… Fokine made the conclusion, Well Greeks are wonderful. Wonderful idea. It liberates a form of dancing, it frees somehow the creator for the dancer and the executor of the dance, but it is not only Greek. Greek, if the subject is Greek, it is a wonderful Greek. But if we find something else, then it must be Polovstian if there are warriors, Prince Igor who dances. They can dance on toes, ballet pass – neither. So Fokine had the liberating idea that Isadora is right but we have not a Greek we have innumerable possible styles in which we can form future dances. That’s what tried to do. 

 

Laban’s dances

JH: You saw some of Laban’s dances.

 

JL; Yes. 

 

JH: Can you remember any of them in any detail? 

 

JL: I did see a dance which I don’t know how he called it. It was awful! 

 

JH: What was awful about it? 

 

[Jump in tape]

 

JL: … in which he was the central figure. He had a main idea which was understandable and discernible. One idea was good. I liked it. But it is also an idea of his brain. And the main dancer has not to be a feminine. Must be masculine. So he came out. He was dressed in a night robe, or something like that, and he invented from he, from here he invented… he knew that he has to move with the feet, with the arms, with the body, and it must be rhythmical, it has not to be musical, but it has to be rhythmical and he divided the group, I think so, into two parts, one defenders, the other aggressors, let’s say. So the movement is that the whole group moved from the right to the left, one forward, the other one backward and then reverse the whole design of the movement. But how to transpose this idea of masculine confrontation with … into rhythmical coherent chains of movements? That was beyond his capacity. He was not a ballet master. So, he knew that stamping or throwing out some limb is energy. Now, if he has a night robe, so his foot is covered, you can’t see, so when he runs, when there is a moment of aggression on his part, he opens with a hand. He needs his hand to open up the folds of his robe. He can throw out from underneath his limb, but I tell it to you because I have still the impression of this artificiality of the whole composition. 

 

[break in tape]

 

JL: … movement, of course he was aware of the movement but the first which came to his mind, the idea of the movement, the motoric subconscious feeling of the movement was the second step with him. His whole mechanism of his inner world was from here to the motoric sense. 

 

JH: And as a dancer, he was not very good either? 

 

JL: I never saw a real dance which remained in the memory as something that has to be preserved, or which has to be noted, which has to be call classic. 

 

JH: But as a performer did he have a good stage presence and a…

 

[break in tape]

 

JL: He was not an ideal body for a dancer, no. Proportions, legs, no. 

 

JH: It’s about electricity. Magnetism. 

Laban’s Process as a Choreographer

JL: Yes. And you see indirectly, I think that my feeling of interpretation must be more or less right because later, I knew him already, well, he came at the opera house, ballet master, he got the opportunity of staging ballets and he did not compose these ballet works out of his imagination and brain. When he came in the morning to work with his group, he had not in his mind’s eye the idea of the whole configuration of the group and the soloists. He came with a blank mind and then he started looking at the tempi of the music and so on and so on, at his soloists, at his group, and then he started looking for ideas and inspirations coming out of his, well, it was [inaudible] theory that the more you give people the opportunity to be creative to have initiative, the better. But the truth is that he took his dancers, male and female, and said ‘Keith, would you try to do this thirty two bars, a chain of movements as you feel them’, and then Keith would start composing his dance. And Laban will tell, ‘Oh yes we can keep this beginning or keep this middle part, but in the beginning there are sequences, I can’t accept them, let’s try something else.’ It is a method of getting others to propose to him the visual realisation which probably something in his own nature didn’t allow him to rely on himself 100%. 

 

[Break in tape]

 

JL: Keith must know what he, Keith, is capable or doing or not. 

 

JH: Though Laban sometimes pushed him…

 

[Break in tape]

 

JL: …things that are important. There are things in his life where… and later on even, and even now, Astrid and Kasten, take a dancer and tell him, ‘You will dance this and this’. ‘Me? Never in my life. I will die. I can’t. I never did it. I am uncapable of doing even a tenth part of what you suppose me to do.’ And if you take musicians or Max Rheinhardt in the theatre, where he takes real talent among the performers, and forces him to perform things which this performer didn’t he [was] capable of doing. So he dominated not only by his will but by his profound understanding of the material. Now Laban did not possess this profound domination of the material on which he worked. He had [inaudible], yes, but he wasn’t confident of the ideas. It was a collaboration …

 

JH: But some of his dancers felt they were stretched very much, they were pushed into unknown areas. 

 

[Break in tape]

 

The connection between Laban and Wigman

JL: Of course people within his ideological reach and coming in touch with him, people went to the maximum of their creative ability of course. Having the chance of proposing and of suggesting to Laban whatever ideas I might have, well gave them the opportunity of getting out of themselves much more than would have brought out without Laban. There is no doubt about that. When he saw the beginning, the end of something, he felt that he understood it, he dragged it out. He had of course this sense of movement and of potentialities. And he had the clear idea of the unlimited possibilities and he had the feel of the liberated mind, he was not a slave of something. Those are all positive things which contributed historically. [Break in tape]… who went, who came from him. Mary Wigman told [Break in tape] … They felt estranged from him. They felt a historical tribute to Laban, of course, reverence to Laban. But they did not feel like [inaudible] careers that they continue or they represent, they show the heritage that they got from Laban. They all thought that they got a wonderful impulse from Laban, they owe him that and that. But every one of them thought that they, that for the development of the art, they brought [inaudible] which left Laban behind. I think that she died last year but Mary Wigman thought probably before dying that she surpassed the history of dance her teacher Laban. She got an impulse from him, he liberated something and he opened in some way her eyes, but then she created something which Laban didn’t dream of. 

 

[Break in tape]

 

JH: Though he had times when he moved away from Laban

 

JL: I think that. I don’t know what was in the mind of Wigman, but it’s a long career and it’s possible that there was a time when she felt herself trained and then came back. These [inaudible] are comprehensible and normal and well… Laban had never in mind to stamp pupils according to his… he didn’t feel himself to be a property. 

 

[Break in tape]

 

JL: Eventually, dance is whatever is danceable. [Break in tape] … so he proclaimed and that’s what he achieved. 

 

JH: And he achieved with through a certain amount of thinking, went with it a codification of some of the areas to help make that freedom clear. 

 

JL: There is no link between Martha Graham, dancers today here, and Laban. And still. The child of his brain. And he is acclaimed and, well, the freedom of her approach is exactly what Laban aimed at and that her partner, today, is Nureyev who came from classical ballet, is an idea which Laban anticipated. Why not? There is no contradiction. 

 

[Break in tape]

 

JL: … Might be the work. Was already proclaimed but it didn’t reach yet France. 

 

[Break in tape]

 

Laban In Paris

Jl: crushed and depressed by his experience of the government stirs in Germany. The last years he was dependent of the ministry of Goebbels’ ministry and, well, he was deprived of the most elementary artistic freedom. He was not in post any more. Neither choice of what he was doing nor in the way he was doing things. And since the whole climate was depressing, he was pessimistic. [Break in tape]  … not to spend the last two years in Germany, to emigrate from Germany. … Any chance outside Germany, Jooss found a place where one could continue to feel himself artistic, pursue his artistic ideas, his creative… [Break in tape]  There’s not a single conversation I could write down today in form of a dialogue, but it is an encounter with a man in a mood which I was not accustomed to see in him and which made me feel sad for him. I regretted the … [Break in tape]… then he was not sure of anything, who had no job, no income, no perspective, no plans, it was a mad moment in all our lives. What he… depressed by having over set… it might be at least one year or two. I suppose now that there is a domain which could be kept out of politics, what has theatre, what has dance, what has art to do with a political [inaudible]. So he thought that if I choose him of this island, dance, he will be the boss. What does it matter to Hitler or to the National Socialist doctrine whether he makes one ballet or another and prefers one dancer to another, and that was [inaudible]. It was not [inaudible] outside the politics. But so far as dance is concerned, he was not a boss. Neider Gebhardt who participated in the organisation was the chief administrator, I think, of this part of the Olympic Games which was theatrical, which could have interested Laban. So Laban had no active role in the 1936 [break in tape] … some middle class French boarding house or something like that.

 

JH: On his own? 

 

JL: I have the impression, yes. On his own. Jooss was in England and there was a correspondence, and, well I have seen letters, and there was the idea of getting him over and creating for him [break in tape] … it was a scientific acknowledgement, it was a respect. 

 

JH: Even in the press? 

 

 

JL: In the press. He was taken earnestly, he was given all the honours of, I don’t know, a thinker, a stage man, innovator, a teacher, an inspirator, but never as creator of an artistic dance work, or as a creator of a group dance or of a solo dance, never. I don’t recall a coherent text analysing or recommending or approving a choreographic creation of Laban. But columns and columns of respectful acknowledgement of the grandeur of what Laban is. 

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Vicente Escudero (27 October 1892 in Valladolid, Spain – 4 December 1980 in Barcelona) was a Spanish flamenco dancer. He was closely associated with the avant-garde of his time and brought modernist aesthetics to bear on his theory of dance.

Escudero was one of the few theorists of his time to comment on the choreography and presentation of the male flamenco dance and his 'Decalogue' or ten rules for the male dancer are still respected today. As well as being the leading flamenco dancer of his era, he was a talented painter in the style, and his studies of flamenco are frequently exhibited. His work was admired by the Spanish modernist painter Joan Miró. Escudero also appeared in the films Castille On Fire (1960) and With the East Wind (1966). [Wikipedia]

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Born in Yogyakarta, Central Java, he was kin to the royal court of the sultan, as well as the court of the regent of Madiun. N° 54 of Archipel features a very interesting article about him by Marcel Bonneff and Pierre Labrousse. We advise you to read it since we have only added here a few documents that have been kindly lent to us by his daughter, Dr Chavoix-Jodjana. Having learned from the earliest age, like every Javanese nobleman, the arts of dance and music, Raden Mas Jodjana, went in 1914 to the Netherland to attend the High School of Trade in Rotterdam. He quickly and fully involved himself in dancing while perfecting in music, painting, sculpting and engraving. He became one of the rare Javanese professional dancers in Europe to be able to live from his art and to transmit it.