Laban Resources
Interview with Tonya and Gerard Bagley, April 18 2007
Biography
Tonya and Gerard Bagley met at the AMS Manchester where they took the three-year course. In 1953 they formed their own company for young people, The Dance Drama Theatre, which they ran until the late 1980s. ‘The aim of our company was to create items to a professional level to work in the areas of music, drama, physical education and the arts generally.’
Summary of Interview
Learning with Laban at the Art of Movement Studio, Manchester: Laban, Ullmann, Bodmer and Geraldine Stephenson. Detailed accounts of their different teaching styles. Critique of Laban’s teaching. Warren Lamb and Effort Training. The Curriculum at the AMS, Manchester. Laban and the Nazis. More on the course at AMS, Manchester. Their company. Final reflections on Ullmann, Laban and Stephenson.
The Interview
Learning with Laban at the Art of Movement Studio, Manchester: Laban, Ullmann, Bodmer and Geraldine Stephenson
Tonya: My first experience of Laban was in 1950 when I was at a summer course in Foxhole in Dartington. I had heard of Laban in Holland. After that I went to study at the Art of Movement Studio in Manchester for three years and was, I think, the first student from Holland. I got a grant to study there from the British Council. We learned Laban movement, which is certainly not what happens now in the so-called Laban centre.
Gerard: Laban was great for actors because it gives them choices about how they can move. When you meet a group of dancers they are waiting for orders. With actors, they tend to be more independent in their nature.
T: When you got to the Studio you found that the teaching of Laban, Lisa Ullmann and Sylvia Bodmer were so different from each other. Laban was already in his seventies. He had a morning class with the men on Mondays. The girls didn't see him a great deal. He was ill a lot. He was a guru. If you asked a question sometimes you would get a good answer and sometimes you would get an answer like, 'I am not the Pope! I may be wrong.'
G: He said that once. He would be surrounded by these adoring girls and I would be thinking, 'What do they see in that old man?' He didn't affect me in that way.
T: He disliked being adored. Lisa didn't, she did her job. She taught us much more than he did. Sylvia was a superb woman with marvellous ideas, mainly in a group dance. But she was so chaotic, completely chaotic. People would literally bang their fists against the wall when she was teaching.
G: You see she'd change her mind. You worked and worked on something and then she'd change her mind.
T: I remember a group dance at Dartington and Sylvia taught us. I remember all these very organised PE teachers standing in a circle and Sylvia said, 'You are the light ones and you are the strong ones, then you Light ones step to the right.' They asked whether they stepped with the right or left foot first and she wouldn't answer. All these people got so frustrated. Then Margaret Dunn would run around and whisper, 'Right foot'. Sylvia’s approach was qualitative - she didn't care whether you stepped with your right or your left. Lisa was very organised, and she told me 'If you want to teach a group, think about it beforehand, close your eyes and think about the theme you want to teach and how you are going to teach that particular theme to this particular group at the Art of Movement Studio. I was in with the five or six 'specials' that was called the 'training college' which consisted or lecturers and dancers. Gerard was in with the teachers group. Lisa was our main teacher and Geraldine was there in her first year as a student teacher. She was very organised.
Gerard: She was on the Training College course. Geraldine had just come from a P.E. college [in Bedford].
T: When Laban was more ill in the 1950s she used to do a lot of his teaching in Bradford [at the Northern Theatre School, at the Civic Theatre, directed by Esmé Church]. She was one year younger than me but we all looked up to her as someone who had much more experience than us. Geraldine and Lisa were both very organised but they both taught in a very different way. Geraldine devised and constructed all the technical side of the training with Claire Sumner.
G: There's another publication about to come out called, 'Memories of Lisa' by Lydia Everett. Claire Sumner came to us through the health and beauty movement.
T: There were some three or four men in the Studio and about twenty four or five women, and the men always made fun of us. The men used to work in the smaller studio and called it his refuge from the women.
G: Laban once came in having put his fist through a tambourine in an argument. He came up the stairs and then sat down with a big sigh and said, 'Women!'
T: He was very keen on ritual dance. He was quite a ritualistic person because of his experiences with his father who used to travel around. He used to quote from Curt Sach's book about the history of dance. There was a lot of background to the ritual of dance. He would ask the boys to do a dance and we had to sit with our faces to the wall: we weren't allowed to watch. He said, 'That's what used to happen.'
G: 'He was quite a male chauvinist pig!' And somewhere in the background there was also the charlatan. He was very attached to the fact that most of the big questions of dance were answered by the ideas expressed in Plato's dialogue Timaeus. He was very tied to that. He was quite fanatical about that. This mystical and religious aspect of him must be addressed because scientists aren't going to accept his claims if they are simply supported by a belief structure.
T. Gerard was a scientist, like Warren Lamb is a scientist.
G: Returning to Claire Sumner, she was a Registered Nurse who had come from the ‘Keep Fit’ movement. You should ask Geraldine about her. She used to teach folk and period dance, which of course Geraldine went on to teach. My sister, Celia Bagley, or Lustig as she later became known as, was there at the same time as Geraldine and Claire. I was at a training college when I was changing over to teaching - they were short of teachers and this was an emergency training college where a huge amount of knowledge was compressed into eighteen months. One of the visiting lecturers turned up and it was Warren! The next day after Warren' lecture we were passing around the medicine ball like all students of Physical Education and they would say, 'After you, Claude!' It didn't make much impression on the men. In our class there was a man called Graham a former Medium Weight Boxing Champion, from Carnegie College of Physical Education. He was asked to thrust by drawing his arms back. He said, 'I'm a champion boxer and you don't thrust like that!'
Warren Lamb and Effort Training
G: He was a middle-weight champion. After that Laban never mentioned it again. The affinities of the Effort Cube are very useful for transitions. I still don't fully understand how Warren's system of Effort and Shape works, but I suspect that it works in industry. He must be about the only man who can read it. Laban never ever in the decision-making process used any of the three elements - Attention, Intention and Decision - without also thinking of Precision, which is flow, the lubricant of all movement. Flow is about being at home. If you're not at home in your job you can see it in your flow. For example of you're handling [stage] properties, you become aware of the mechanics and dynamics of it. It becomes part of you. If you have a big cape and you run around it fills with air - the body has become completely identified with the robe. If someone is wearing an uncomfortable shoe you will see this in the flow pattern.
T: Warren was a very good observer.
G: I am amazed at how Warren managed to learn the Lingo of management and industry. Laban used to have a lot of difficulties translating his terms into English.
D: Could you describe what you learned at the Studio?
The Curriculum at the AMS, Manchester
T: In the first two years we learned all that you could learn; in the third year I think we really wanted to go to study with Sigurd Leeder in London to pick up some dance technique necessary for performance.
G: We should have done.
T: If we'd done that then we would have learned more about body techniques and steps. The lack of the Studio was in teaching normal technique. That's what Marion North jumped on, but now they've gone the other way - all they do is teach technique.
D: So what did Laban teach if it wasn't technique?
T: Mostly the meaning of movement. He taught us to observe people in the street - how they walk and sit. He would say that every movement has a meaning. There is the famous photo of Laban and Lisa where he stands in a diagonal, and she is square. She was very straight and I am very much in sympathy with her as a person. Laban was very much more flexible, sometimes even avoiding the issue because he didn't want to be too definite. On the other hand he was like a sergeant major when he took a class.
G: One must say this. At College I took PE as my non-academic subject and I was alarmed at what Laban wanted to do with just ordinary people. He asked them to leap, roll (that is, forward roll), fly. There was one young psychologist and you could see bruises along the vertebrae of his back. Laban had no idea of physiology - he couldn't have. You'd never get away with teaching like that now. Think of the old boards of the Art of Movement Studio! And there weren't any mats.
T: Even so it made our life! It also made Warren's. I was so happy there, every day was a new surprise. In the last year we both felt that we'd seen it all. Two years were more than sufficient.
G: It was the same for my sister. She was there for a year and paid her own fees, since there were no grants in those days. She had to go to the office and practically shake them to pieces for information. They ended up giving her passages which were from a book that Laban was writing in English. I came to the Studio as a recovery from my days as a teacher and to help myself adapt to civilian life after having served in the Air Force. I was lost and just wanted to have a break, and that break lasted three years.
T: It attracted a lot of drifting people, and still does. He was a real genius. He was a great man and made a great difference. We all knew about Mary Wigman, and had seen her dance in Holland. I saw Kurt Jooss’ Green Table in 1946 in Holland, immediately after the war. They were both pupils of Laban in Germany before the war. Yoma Sashburg who did choreography for us was in The Green Table. Seeing Laban himself was marvellous since he was the master-teacher of all these other people – including Sigurd Leeder and Lisa Ullmann. When Lisa sat an examination in front of Laban she told me that she was shaking with nerves. I can well understand this because he was so strict and Sylvia was so chaotic. We learned more than we realised at the time. We still observe people now. We’re not like Warren but Laban taught us to watch the shadow movements. Lisa and Geraldine told us about the meaning of how people walk and sit. You, for example, are sitting in a diagonal. We learned all these things and they become part of you.
Dick. It is odd that you talk about Diagonals because it was after four years into my training with Geraldine that I began to develop a feeling for diagonals. It’s not just a 45 degree angle.
[A discussion of my life and my PhD on Mikhail Bakhtin who was 20 years younger than Laban.]
Laban and the Nazis
G: Someone wrote a book about Laban that was very critical of his collaboration with the Nazis. I cannot remember who the author was. He created a piece for the 1936 Olympics called The Wind of Change.
D: True he did stay on after the Nazis took power in 1933 until he was disgraced, but that doesn’t mean he was a collaborator. I think it is very easy for intellectuals in the 21st Century to criticise Laban.
G: Put yourself in his position.
T: He really believed in his art, and of course he did everything to do to fit in. The famous Dutch conductor Mengelberg cooperated with the Germans. After the war he was accused of this and said, ‘I wanted to keep Art going in Holland. That’s why I did it. I didn’t do this for myself.’ You can understand this. Can you blame them? Artists are not politicians.
G: During the war, like many Irish Catholics I made the journey to Trotsky and to atheism and to dialectical materialism. Freud and his mechanistic views was my pin-up boy at that time.
More on the course at AMS, Manchester
T: I was a Jungian at that time. I remember Laban in those days, he could be very funny. There was one person who was doing some movement study – they’d do one tetra-hedron, then he’d say ‘stop’ - he said, ‘Gerry Horton, you just look like a dog pissing against a lamp post!’ This is historical. Laban also taught us Mime. He taught a very small group which also had Gerard in it. It was of a burglar who was climbing through a window. We really needed to go out of the door because this was like a performance, so we needed to make an entrance. He said, ‘No, you stay here so that we can see how you prepare to come on stage.’
G. How you prepare to come on.
T: There were four or five of us and we all had to do exactly the same movements. He taught us exactly how to push the window up, and then the looking to the right and to the left. Then putting your hands on the ledge and stepping over into the room. There was no music, it was pure mime. It was quite long – it took about five minutes. You had to really concentrate very hard. But it was one of our most successful items: you could put it into the show anywhere.
D: Were these like fixed studies?
T: Yes, he would teach you them straight. On the other hand he did help you develop your own individuality in movement. He could teach you perfectly straight and tell you exactly what to do or on the other hand he and Lisa would let you explore. When you arrived at the Studio you had to do your own solo.
G: That was something that said a lot to him. He could see what sort of person you were from the piece you’d devised.
T: In general we created our own dances. Claire Sumner taught us a piece that was based on the three levels – low, medium and high. Just about every member of staff had a go at this theme and still do! It is a basis of many movement choirs. She taught us like Laban did. But remember that Laban had Typhus in our second year so we didn’t see that much of him, but much more of Lisa.
G: We thought that when he couldn’t face something that he would choose to be ill.
T: Well he was very often very tired. And he hated all these teachers. He couldn’t stand all these female teachers who wanted extra attention. They were on a one year course. As three-year students this meant that we had three different groups to work with.
D: When did you start your company?
G: It was 1953. The first piece that we created was called Harmony, or, Man and Woman, set to Satie’s Gymnopédies. We did it for an examination in front of Lisa, Sylvia, Laban and Geraldine. It was quite a Symbolist piece of dance. The woman is praying and cradling a child while the man makes gestures to heaven and digs the earth.
T: Afterwards there was a big row between Lisa and Sylvia in German about how I should have held the baby. Sylvia said, ‘You can’t hold a baby like that! It will drop through the hole in the arms.’ Then Lisa would say, ‘Sylvia, it’s a dance.’ Lisa and Sylvia were always arguing.
G: And at the end of the row was Geraldine, sitting up very straight. We used to call her Stephenson starch! She was very stiff when observing.
T: You wouldn’t recognise this in her now, because she’s become very soft. But she had to get out of the Studio.
D: Her career was beginning to take off so she had to get out.
T: We were quite lucky because there was no professional company working in the schools and training colleges.
D: What of Laban’s ideas did you take into your company?
T: we took as much as we could.
Their company
G: It was a very fortuitous time for us, particularly in education. The liberalisation of teaching methods was taking place and of course dance, in the sense that Laban practiced it, was very much cherished. We set out as serious artists in the art world and there was no place for us. We had our gifts but they were very personal, but they wouldn’t fit easily into the established companies – and we tried a few. Then we found that there was an audience in training colleges and so one of the first colleges we went to was Bingley. The aim of our company was to create items to a professional level to work in the areas of music, drama, physical education and the arts generally. We even thought at one time to create an improvised dance whilst painting. We did a demonstration within the piece using huge elastic bands.
T: The point is we were a creative company. We weren’t, unfortunately, with people who’d been Laban trained. One had been with Esmé Church in Bradford. We wanted a creative dance company and we created with the people. Lots of people knew what we were after. We tried to apply Laban principles. We had a month or five weeks in which we had to create a programme. The programme had to be very varied – you couldn’t have items lasting more than 20 minutes. They were between 3 – 5 minutes at the most.
G: We tried to make each item uniquely a technique of its own. Whilst there might be a slight bit of improvisation, there had to be a fixed structure – you were catching people! Tonya would decide on the amount of improvisation that would be advantageous to the programme.
T: At the beginning we all had to take part-time jobs. We got ideas from books and paintings – anywhere. All these different styles – lyrical, dramatic, rhythmical. Always a National Dance. Gerard always did a percussion item which was different each year. That was another thing that Laban taught – the use of sound and percussion. Geraldine was also interested.
G: I was once with Laban and he said, ‘You know Bagley, you create in the same way as Sylvia.’ I thought, ‘My God!, am I that chaotic.’ And I do tend to work from chaos, then I see form coming out of from it. When I did percussion pieces I would start by saying that there are no rules. I once took a swanee whistle, and as the plunger came up I asked them to rise up on their feet onto demi-pointe. There was a certain rhythmic logic holding the piece together.
T: Gerard was much more of fantasy while I was much more practical. We worked together alright as two opposites – just like Lisa and Laban in a way. To think that she coped with the Studio: all those different people and the office work. Looking after the secretary and dictating the letters. I remember seeing a recent piece by Merce Cunningham which was a tribute to Alwin Nikolais, himself an ex-student of Laban. It was group work.
G: We saw Nikolaia perform and at that stage the company was in revolt!
T: Because they weren’t being told exactly what to do by the ballet –master. Neither Laban nor Lisa were great respecters either of dance steps or of music. Lisa often worked without music. They both wanted movement to be an international art-form, independent from music. Just movement. Gerard is very musical – he can remember the music he wrote for pieces going back forty years ago. He wrote every note of it himself. And he was also the stage manager.
G: We had someone from Esmé Church’s company, John Armitsted, and he knew about how to present a performance. Ask Warren about him. Armisted was chosen by Lawrence to be one of the trainees along with Warren. He used to chew pencils as he pondered over assessments.
T: He lived in the same digs as me before I moved over to where Gerard lived. He once said to me, ‘It’s not just observing movement qualities, or the way that people move. It’s the rhythm in which you do things.’ That rhythm is repeated throughout what you do. Maybe he got that from Warren. I think it’s also about body attitudes. Once you started going into things, you start finding a lot of connections. I’ll never forget Geraldine’s lessons about successive and simultaneous movements. Does Geraldine teach you the three circles? Obeisance, Blessing (an Opening Movement), and … Laban would say that all over the world people bow (in the wheel plane) or they command (which is also in the wheel).
D: So blessing is on the inside of the arm, and commanding is on the outside of the arm. When Laban did the movement his hands were turned outwards.
T: It’s also liked Gathering and Scattering.
John Dalby, 4 September, 2006
Biography
1929 – 2017
He trained at Bristol Old Vic and Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. As well as being a singer and voice teacher, John Dalby was a musician and actor. In his early career he performed with Geraldine Stephenson and worked on Laban courses. He created many cabaret shows where he wrote and performed his own songs. His shows were a success both in London and New York. He worked on several films. He worked with Jean Newlove writing music to accompany exercises, and provided drawings for her Laban for All (2004).
Summary of Interview
Early days with Geraldine Stephenson. Touring around England with Stephenson in the late-1950s up to the mid-1960s: ‘Our recitals were really a kind of up-market cabaret.’ His impression of Laban and Ullmann, Marion North and Valerie Preston Dunlop. The current state of the Laban Guild and the Laban Centre.
The Interview
I was asked to take on the musical side of the religious drama society Summer School in 1955. I got a letter from Norman Ayrton (but it looked like Norma Ayrton!) and it said that he and Geraldine Stephenson had been teaching on the previous year’s course and they’d been asked back to do a recital of historical dance. Would I like to collaborate with them on this recital? My first thought was that doing minuets with two ladies wasn’t really my up of tea.
I went round to meet Geraldine who was very much Lisa’s girl: she had a long skirt and white socks and sandals – and a lovely sunny personality. Then we got together with Norman and rehearsed these historical dances. That’s what started Geraldine off on all the historical dances that she did for the television. Michael McOwen who was head of Lamda (where Norman was teaching movement) and suggested that we did a proper recital and called it The Centuries in Dance. We did that at a strange hall in London and then toured all over the place doing it. We did a television version of it, not with Norman but with Gerald Mordan. His trousers fell down in the middle of a shoot. In those days you couldn’t do retakes so it was shown – but fortunately it was a long shot so it wasn’t very noticeable unless you knew to look out for it. From that Geraldine got involved in doing the period movement for all those big productions that they did on television. That really launched her career. In our historical she had four solos in each of the periods – Elizabethan, Georgian, 18th Century and Victorian. She did a solo in the middle of each of these, one of which was the French Revolution. One of these was the Lady and the Unicorn. We then decided just to do a recital with the two of us which was not historical. There were lots of solos from her, and I would do some piano solos to break them up. That was when I started suggesting various characters that she could do. I wrote the music for all her new solos as well as those solos that she had been doing because when she’d started she was doing them all to 78 RPMs. There wasn’t a great deal of selection in those days so you had to make do with what you could find, and of course then you’re stuck with it. We were very good together because she would start prancing around the room and I would immediately think of the music for it, and then jot it down.
Moving on to 1964 I got asked to do the music for The Rose and the Ring at the Theatre Royal Stratford East – this was a couple of years after Joan Littlewood had left. I read the script which was available in a French’s edition and said that it was absolutely awful! There were only two lines of the original book in it. So I adapted it, writing the lyrics as well as the music. I wrote this in six weeks while I was on tour with Beyond the Fringe. It was very stimulating. I got Geraldine to do the choreography for it, and I think this was her first stage show of any significance. She did some lovely things in that. The director and I decided that we needed another song for the countess in Act Two, because she didn’t appear for a long time, and that wasn’t good if you were going to have a star in the role – we had Thelma Ruby. She was a big review star. I created a bit of a plot so that she could be on a horse disguised as a soldier. I said to Geraldine – ‘that’s the idea for the plot, but I can’t think of the music’. She started prancing around the room and the music came straight into my head and it was one of my best songs. That’s the way that we worked. She had only got to move around the room and the music would come to me. From the movement came the music. That was very significant.
We used to tour these recitals throughout the country. First of all we would get a list of all the Arts Clubs, which is a dwindling list now, but then there were a lot. Television was fairly rare in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. We wrote off to the Arts Clubs and then they would book you. I think that we go £10.00 each. It wasn’t a bad fee except for the fact that you didn’t get it that often. One day when we were in Devonshire we performed the recital three times in one day – morning, afternoon and evening. By the time I got to the evening I didn’t quite know where I was. We also did colleges – many of them several times. There was Lady Mabel College, which has now gone, but was somewhere in Yorkshire. And there was Bretton Hall, whose head of drama, Margaret Dunn was a great Labanist. We used to meet some extraordinary people. Lorn Primrose organised a performance for us at the college where she was teaching and afterwards invited us back for a bite to eat. She said, ‘What would you like to drink? I have anything that you could care to ask for.’ I thought that would test her out so asked for an Arum, which is rather a rare liquor. But she had it! I was when we were playing in Workington that I wrote a fanfare for the Queen’s entrance in a pageant that Geraldine had been commissioned to create at Grey’s Inn. This job came through Robert Atkins who started the Open Air Theatre in Regents Park and with whom Geraldine did an awful lot of work. I think that she took the role of a nymph. I was up in the musicians’ gallery with my small band. We started off with a fanfare for four trumpets as the Queen entered and then the whole assembly sang ‘God Save the Queen’. I was very worried that as the Barristers from the Inn, a very vocal lot, would all be looking at the Queen and not me, and then chaos would ensue. Quite out of period, I grabbed a yellow pencil, and conducted them, facing the Queen. I looked at her, and she looked unflinchingly at me throughout. Happily the whole thing went off perfectly.
When we were preparing for an Irish number I actually made the dress – it was green. Valerie’s [Valerie Preston Dunlop] comment was, ‘for that dance you need important shoes’. She was quite right. We knew about these recitals because, of course, we did them at the Studio. We got shoes that had thick, high heels – which, of course, Geraldine was not used to. These recitals revolutionised her quite a lot. And then I suggested that she did the Lulu Blues; it was about time that she did something sexy – she had the figure for it. She didn’t baulk at the idea. She wore a dress with a slit up the side and fishnet tights. I can’t remember what the top was, but it was probably low cut. And we needed a wig for her. I was passing Harrods and saw these models with blonde wigs and knew immediately that this was just what we needed. I asked them who made the wigs and it was Adele Routestein. We asked her whether she would make it – it was solid and it weighed a ton! But it did the trick. But she got trouble with it at Bretton Hall. It made a change. I wanted to make Laban a bit more ‘with it’ and sexy. Everything was so earnest and serious – and yet he wasn’t. Laban had a great sense of humour. Even though he was on the way out, I could see that he was full of fun. I think that he approved of my input.
We toured throughout England and got as far as Aberdeen where the organist there was called John Dalby. We met – and he told me how he’d just been praised for playing Mozart in a recent recital in Bath. Of course this was what I’d just been doing with Norman Ayrton and Geraldine. The only way that our work crossed was that he was a great encourager of school’s percussion – getting everyone to play something rather than nothing. I’d done a lot of that – and Geraldine had too in the early days of the Studio in Manchester. I just took the work a bit further and got quite good percussion orchestras who would perform with quite a variety of cross-rhythms and colours. In fact the summer school that I led the year before meeting Geraldine (it must have been 1954) I asked people who had instruments to bring them, but that everybody would be somehow included. One old lady came along with a battered old recorder that only played one note. I said to her, ‘we’ll use that note in a piece’. This is where Laban and I came together. Like him I believed that everybody could contribute – you don’t have to be a brilliant pianist in order to perform. Otherwise people feel inadequate and out of it. I wanted everybody to be able to play something, so I compiled a concerto – a very short one – for this lady’s one-note-flute. She was thrilled. I thought that this was living. However, I didn’t want to make a career of teaching.
Our recitals were really a kind of up-market cabaret. It really makes me cringe a little when I look at it now. In this kind of format you really need quite short pieces, usually while someone was madly changing in the wings. But I would put in longer pieces because I wanted to make my mark (which was wrong really). I would play pieces from a wide range of composers – from John Bull to Lord Berners. She would do four numbers in a row using very quick changes. Her pieces were a mixture of dance and acting. Once she was playing Madame Defarge in her piece on the French Revolution and exited brandishing a dagger – and nearly stabbing a latecomer to death. She was quite terrifying in that dance. The ‘Little Match Girl’ after Hans Christian Anderson was a very plaintive piece, I had very plaintive music for her, and she was in rags and had bare feet. As she passed by two ladies one exclaimed, ‘what big feet she’s got’, in quite a loud voice. I suppose that you could call them character dances. This wasn’t typical of the kind of thing that was being done at Addlestone because most of them were geared towards education. I don’t think any of them did recitals – everything was geared to something. Valerie would choreograph Bach chorales giving different voices to different groups of people – that was very clever. They were very impressive studies, but too cerebral to work on the public stage. Geraldine was not at all cerebral. When she was portraying her characters she used the Efforts (though she never said this to me). When she was doing the lady with the Unicorn it was all in Floating movements to go with the costume. Each character was a use of certain Efforts. Then I introduced her to a couturier friend of mine who designed quite a lot of her costumes, more or less on a napkin in a restaurant. For the Angel he designed this huge flowing thing of white pleats which looked absolutely marvellous for the movement. He was very conscious of how the dresses would move – and they did look marvellous. She would get hold of a story like the ‘Little Match Girl’ and we would work out the movement and the music more or less together. Selling the matches and then lighting them to keep herself warm, and then the last one runs out. The recitals took up quite a lot of work.
Geraldine also did the choreography for the review – One in the Eye - that I did at Guildford. And she twice choreographed The Rose and the Ring for me. We also went down to Paris to take a workshop with the French mime teacher, Étienne Decroux. I suppose one of us must have seen an advertisement for it. Maybe we just talked about it and decided to go. I went because I had been an actor before becoming a musician. I was in the first year of the Bristol Old Vic theatre school. I really got into the school because I could paint and they needed an assistant scene painter! I was painting scenery and doing small parts. It was very hard work because the standards in the scenery department were very high. We often had to work all night, and during these sessions I would go down and play rousing music on the piano in the pit. Knowing that I played the piano, one day the assistant director approached me to write some songs for a production of Othello. He had been stationed in Cyprus during the war, and had heard some of the local songs which he wanted me to write down. When he started to sing – it was really more of a groan – e la e la e la, copliamo. Each time he sang it, it was different. So he asked me to write original music for it by the weekend. The orchestra was a tea-shop trio – violin, cello, and piano – and I had to make them sound Elizabethan. So then I then thought that I really needed to know how to compose properly, which was the worst decision I could have made. A very beautiful actress in the company, a White Russian, who had been a mistress of Michel St Denis, took to me in a big way and since she knew the Elmhirsts, suggested that I study with Imogen Holst at Dartington Hall. It was a magical place, and the Elmhirsts were very much part of it. Every Thursday evening was a Shakespeare evening in their drawing. I read Malvolio, which rather thrilled them. I worked quite a lot with the students, and with Imogen. But after 10 days, she said that this wasn’t the right place for me, and that I should go to London. She was right. The staff were quite brilliant, but the students weren’t. What was fantastic about Imogen was that she thought everyone should compose. Since various students played different instruments you were encouraged to compose for the instruments around you - and the pieces were performed every Tuesday evening. You don’t get that at the music colleges here. I loved that idea – you would write something for piccolo and bassoon because they were there, and it would come to life. I’ve never seen that happen anywhere else. I was rather sorry to leave because of that. I then got a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and went on to win the First Year prize for composition which was the princely sum of £2. I lived on £4 a week, so it really was almost insulting small for a composition prize.
Of course it was through Geraldine that I got to meet Laban and Lisa Ullmann and to work with them. Lisa could see that Geraldine and I worked well together and I went down to the Studio and play various things there. In fact I was asked to take over the music there but I turned it down because of the travel and because it wasn’t quite what I wanted to do. But somebody, Lisa probably, had the idea of doing Saturday courses at the YWCA off Tottenham Court Road. Laban was there for the first few ones – he was there quite a lot. He was a lovely man and had a great presence about him. He was old and fairly infirm by this time, but he was always so human and friendly. You could tell that you were with a genius. I don’t think that I ever saw him move much. I felt I had arrived in his eyes the moment when he couldn’t finish his ice cream at lunch, so he gave it to me to finish. That’s my claim to fame! I remember Lisa dancing. She was quite a large woman but she was so graceful, so elegant. It was a poem to see her dance a Ländler. This demonstrated to one that a middle-aged ample woman can be wonderful to watch. But then she had that charisma. It did thrill and excite me and I found her quite inspiring.
I was very attracted to the whole thing when I met Geraldine, Laban and Lisa and got the whole feeling of this creative movement, that wasn’t Ballet. This has other things to offer. Ballet is very much for people who look right and who can do it whereas this was for almost anybody. What I liked about it was its freedom – that anybody could do and express themselves. Maybe you wouldn’t always want to see them doing it, but there again not everything has to be put on stage. I could see its worth for people who wanted to dance but who were not going to perform. I know it’s called Recreational Dance but that always reminds me of Ballroom Dancing. What I liked about Laban was that he said that there is nothing that should stop people dancing. Why should people not dance? And why do people not sing? I liked the idea that people participated and actually did it.
Two of the noticeable students were Valerie Preston and Marion North. Valerie nearly always wore blue, while Marion was in black. I was very stimulated by those courses, and I would write music for two pianos. I wrote one piece called Wimbledon with the two pianos alternating the theme or motif, and the movement would go backwards and forwards. I adapted Schubert’s Erl King for two pianos – we had great fun with things like that. The great problem was that it attracted scores of women but very few men. That I feel has been a problem for Laban. The Studio didn’t seem to encourage the participation of men. But I didn’t want to stay with the Laban courses after 1965 partly because the male input was so small. It did seem that one was training a lot of people who were not going to be dancers. I was quite conscious that playing for dancers meant that I would remain just an accompanist and I wanted to move on and be something. At that time I got much more involved in theatre and films and Geraldine was getting more and more work in television herself. I got tied up more and more with writing and performing in the theatre so we didn’t perform any more. I was being offered shows to write and had to accept these opportunities. But I still used her quite a lot as a choreographer.
Sadly the Laban Guild doesn’t have much effect nowadays: it is a lot of older people talking amongst themselves – they don’t really do anything, they aren’t powerful enough. There’s nothing to attract young people to the Guild and it’s heartbreaking. There should have been more of a challenge to the direction that the Laban Centre has taken, but the Guild has not taken a stand. The danger is that Laban’s work will just die out.
Joan English, 31 December 2006
Summary of Interview
Bedford College of Physical Education from 1943 to 1946 with her room-mate and friend Geraldine Stephenson. Joan Goodrich, a remarkable teacher at Bedford College. The inaugural course of the Laban Guild Courses in Sheffield January 1946, and a Laban Summer Course in Chichester 1946. A description of various Laban teachers, notably Sylvia Bodmer. Two Courses at the Art of Movement Studio in Addlestone where she discusses Lisa Ullmann and how she learned about choreutics. Laban’s teaching in Addlestone, and the drawbacks of the educational work. Portraits of Ullmann and Stephenson. Comments on other teachers at Addlestone: Preston-Dunlop and Yat Malmgren.
The Interview
Bedford College of Physical Education: 1943 - 1946
We were room mates from 1943 – 1946 and I think they put us together because we were both from Yorkshire, or maybe it was that both of us in our interviews had said that we were interested in dance. At college we were busy from morn to night – it was unbelievably busy; everything was structured. In fact we didn’t see so much of each other because I was in the first half of the alphabet and she was in the second. For almost all the work that we did we were in separate groups. Although we had the same material, groups react in different ways.
Joan Goodrich (nickname ‘Jogs’)
I think Geraldine will agree with me that we were both in the right place at the right time. Joan was an outstanding teacher of dance. I don’t know if she was happy at college because she was so different from everyone else. She wasn’t a PE person really, and it was a college of PE. She had a real understanding of moving, of dance, and of music. I can remember what I think was the first session we had with her. I had done folk dance and ballet – the usual girl things. And she asked us to be a tree. I couldn’t think how to be a tree, so I thought well I could be a Poplar since, only having two arms, I could only represent two branches. Of course what she wanted us to do was to move in the manner of a tree. When I looked round, there were other people who were moving!
She was so full of enthusiasm and so encouraging. I can remember saying to myself in the first term, ‘This is what I want to do.’ I went basically for physical education which would include dance. I had always loved dance and I danced for myself, and I went to class and all the rest of it. I’ve done a lot of folk dance in my life: all the folk dances from Northern America. I was also involved in the Early Dance movement. In my teaching I’ve drawn on them all. It wasn’t until towards the end of my college career that I wanted to specialise in dance. Although she has never said this to me, I think that Geraldine had always wanted to be involved in movement and dance. But of course she was outstanding as an all-round student. She was a games player, she was intelligent – since she was in the other group I don’t know what she was like as a gymnast, but I would imagine that she was alright. Although we also trained as physiotherapists that was a side-line for me. I can always remember we used to get so bored with it. When we did massage we would swop partners just to get a bit of variety.
At one point we were living above Joan and the soundproofing in those houses wasn’t very good so at some point we’d hear her banging on the ceiling with a broom stick or something! She must have been in her thirties at that time. We were both enraptured by Joan Goodrich. She was very clever. It was apparent that she wanted us to think for ourselves. She wanted us to be creative. She didn’t throw it at us. She did quite structured things which was a great help – because helps you regain your self-confidence. A lot of the modern creative people don’t appreciate this. She would teach us dances which were appropriate to what we were doing, and which we were based on Laban’s principles (although we didn’t know about that until later). We had very little theory – she always taught her theory through doing, which, again was the mark of a good teacher. I can’t remember whom it was that she studied with – Laban or Wigman – but I think that it was Laban. By the 1940s she had already developed her very theatrical approach to movement whereas ‘Jogs’ was very aware that what she was teaching was material to be used for children in schools. It was not for anything in theatre. She was teaching us to teach dance to children. There were another couple of dance teachers at Bedford but we didn’t come across them that much. One was called Miss Swallow – she was quite alright, but nothing compared with ‘Jogs’.
Laban Guild Courses in Sheffield 1945/6, and Chichester in Summer 1946
It was Jogs who suggested that there might be some places available at the inaugural gathering of the Laban Guild in Sheffield in December 1945/January 1946. We didn’t know that we had places on the course until a day or two before it happened. I remember getting a phone call and then having to frantically pack to go. When I arrived there was Joan Carrington, Sally Archbutt and Geraldine. Amongst the other people there was such a cross-section of society. I had always been involved in the education world and physical education, but firstly there were men and women, then there were young and old, then there were a lot of foreigners, then a whole lot of people with a drama background. We stayed in a school. It was bitterly cold; I shall never forget freezing there.
There were these amazing teachers who had worked with Laban. There was Lili Bauer, Silvia Bodmer, Diane Jordan, Betty Meredith Jones, and of course Laban and Lisa. We were working six hours a day or more. Laban, I don’t think had been well, and I remember the first time I met him he was sitting down as he was talking to us. But before we knew it we were doing gestures and effort exercises – while we were sitting down. That impressed me very much. I’m not quite sure what it was that Lisa did but it was wonderful. It was most satisfying to do.
There were two courses: the first in Sheffield and the second the following summer in Chichester which had the same people teaching. Sometimes I get them mixed up – what we did in each of them. There were two things I remember particularly about these courses. One was by Diana Jordan: she took as her starting point chapter 38 of the book of Ezekiel, about God breathing life into the dry bones. First of all we had to be dead and then we had to collect all our bones together and then gradually we had to come to life. It was quite an experience. The thing I remember was with Sylvia and she did a flying bird. I was part of the right wing. This was a group exercise, a movement choir. The wings moved up and down and moved in and out. I have a feeling, though I may be wrong, that she used music from Holt’s Things to Come. Those were two of the most memorable experiences. I can remember that in the Chichester one we did a Polka to music by John Field with Jogs. It was at the New Year course that there was a big meeting about forming a Guild. At the same meeting Lisa announced that they were going to start a school in Manchester. I also discovered that there was a dance circle in the West Riding. By that time Geraldine had definitely decided that she would dance and not teach. At college she directed and produced at least one play. I can’t remember what it was, but it was good; I enjoyed it very much. She was into everything: she was an organiser, a practitioner, she was a very good teacher – her theory was good – and she loved to dance. She never wanted to teach. She never wanted to do physiotherapy – we thought that that was something that we could do when we got old. I think she must have talked with Jogs and Lisa and Laban if there was going to be a school.
Sylvia was more interested in movement choirs: she had these wonderful ideas. I remember that in one of her courses – it may have been Chichester – the main hall had a double staircase and Sylvia decided she was going to do the Wheel of Fortune and she was going to use these staircase. I remember being very confused as we had to crawl up one set of stairs, cross the balcony and down the other stairs. It was, again, an unforgettable experience to do. She was great.
After Sheffield we went back to college to our strict routine of doing gymnastics before breakfast in the morning. We both realised at the time that we had to get a qualification. Whether we used it or liked it was immaterial. So we decided to stick it out. I think that it was during the summer term that Laban and Lisa visited the college. Geraldine said that she was going to talk to them about going to the Studio in Manchester. Jogs had apparently said that she would back her up when she discussed this with the Principal who was certain to disapprove – she was a good PE teacher. This was Miss Reid, who had taken over from the elder Miss Stansfeld, and she was not very into dance. Geraldine was told that she was a ‘traitor’: but her parents agreed that she was to go to the Studio. So she went to Manchester and I went to teach dance in a girl’s school in Newbury. I quite enjoyed it – being independent and not being told what to do. But of course over the next few years we kept coming together and drifting apart. Laban was ill again and she started helping him out with the courses in Bradford – she was always interested in the theatre side of things, in dramatic movement. That was always her thing.
Two Courses at the Art of Movement Studio in Addlestone
All my life I have danced. As I child I would dance around the room by myself. It was a part of my way of life. I didn’t think it was particularly important for anybody but me. I did ballet and country dancing at school and loved it. When I came into contact with Modern Dance I suddenly realised that it had a significance to other people as well as me. I enjoyed the teaching of these people – Laban and Lisa – so much that I felt that I could do something a little like that. Of course I also taught English country dance. But when I realised that I wanted to specialise in dance, and the only way that you could do that in school was to go into a training college. After four years teaching in Newbury and then Hartlepool I decided that I’d had enough, so I went to Denmark to a Folk High school and studied dance there. Then I came back and got a job in Matlock training college, but realising that I didn’t have enough experience, that’s when I went to the Studio.
The first time I was on a one-year specialist course at Addlestone with a small group of students. I wanted to teach dance to children. Some of the others were very artistic: they wrote poetry, sang beautiful, Ada Heynssen was there. Geraldine knows about her. She was a gifted pianist and had a beautiful voice: she had nothing to do with dance – she was a musician. I don’t know if she was resident there, but she originally came from Austria or Switzerland. I think there were other people there as private individuals, and in those early stages there might have been others, but not so many. It was only in the later years that more courses were developed. So many of the early students at the Studio – people of my generation like Geraldine and Valerie Preston Dunlop – were very strong individuals and developed our own views of what Lisa and Laban were like. I didn’t know him so well because he was always ill. But I always felt that he was interested in you, and my impression was that he was kind. In the Ballet world everyone is trained to think the same thing whereas in the Laban world everyone is trained to think for themselves, so you’re bound to get this tension between people. And he was involved in so many spheres of movement: industry, drama, education, recreation – I think he was more interested in recreation than education. Recreation is really about the pleasure of movement. There are lots of secret dancers in the world. They aren’t famous, they just enjoy dancing. I would say that the movement choirs were recreation, everything that Sylvia did was recreation. She wouldn’t have survived in education!
The second time I went to the Studio I went as an individual and as Laban had died by that time I wanted to work with Lisa and I didn’t want to work with some of the other staff because to be honest I didn’t think that they had what I wanted. Lisa was very good about it. Obviously she had other commitments so it wasn’t unfortunately on a regular basis but I joined in all the classes she taught. That was wonderful. Later when she’d retired I used to go over and stay with her for a couple of nights. I had a soft spot for her: of course like all artistic people she had her awkward moments. All those first people, as I call them, were so kind and generous in their giving of knowledge and so supportive. In a way everything after them was an anticlimax. We knew it was special but didn’t realise how special it was.
Although we all knew about the Efforts and Choreutics I don’t remember them being taught as such. It was from the ideas and the creative side, exploring and experimenting, that we learned so much. Then you got to a stage when you had to clarify your ideas, then you started to think in terms of Effort and space. If suddenly you get stuck, you can think of what you’ve done. You start thinking, ‘I realise that you’ve been very mobile and fluid, and that I’ve made all these movements in the icosohedron, but not those ones’, so you start to explore those parts that you’d left out, and maybe this would start you off on something else. I remember when I was in the States, although they had their own vocabulary of movement and approach to creative dance, which was on the surface quite different to the Laban; but each had their own vocabulary – and then I realised that it was a matter of different words, not different experiences. I use all my experience.
Laban was not well at the Studio in Addlestone. He didn’t teach very much and when he did teach he taught the scales and he was very dogmatic in the way that he taught them: ‘One, two, three …’ I think he taught them partly to give us a awareness of space and partly the relationship between the movements and the icosohedron, and then the interaction between the male and the female scales, the A and the B, and how these interacted with each other. But he was, unfortunately, ill most of the time that I was there. Lisa shouldered the whole responsibility for the Studio. Geraldine was there. I wanted to go into much more depth but it just wasn’t practical for most of the group. I needed technique. Not just the scales, but bodily technique. But we didn’t have the time to do this within one year. And there weren’t the teachers who could teach it. Geraldine, as far as I recollect, wasn’t resident at Addlestone – she travelled in. I don’t know that Laban and Lisa had any choice about teaching. It was either that or nothing.
In one way I always felt sorry for Laban and Lisa – well, really for Laban - because I don’t think that he was particularly interested in education as such. But when he came to Britain this was the only area in which he could get a foothold. There were a sufficient number of people who were interested in his work to say, ‘If you can organise a course in movement and dance in education, we can probably find students who can be given a loan to come to study with you for a year.’ That’s why he tended to focus on education, but looking back on it, I think it was unfortunate that he wasn’t able to go wider than that. Also, in hindsight, most of the people who went to the Studio didn’t have any dance experience and they only had a year. Laban had to decide what they could do in a year. He didn’t want them to do what they did in Ballet – technique and pretty little mimes – he wanted them to be creative and to think for themselves. Most of the people who came in the first place were in their twenties and thirties and from completely different backgrounds. They’d have a go – no doubt about it – but they had real difficulty appreciating what they had to offer. Of course, the teaching was superb but they couldn’t really appreciate it. I think some of them had a wonderful experience and it made them teach quite differently. But I felt very much that Lisa and Laban were restricted with the students that they had.
I remember before the Studio moved down to Addlestone occasionally going to the Dance Circle evenings on a Monday evening in Manchester. Sylvia Bodmer was fantastic – she would used any music, including pop music. She would make simple studies. I remember doing the lemniscates one time – it was so simple when she taught it but when I tried to teach it, it sounded and appeared complicated.
What I liked about their approach to dance was the widening of your experience, of movement and dance. It was the sheer indulging in the pleasure of being able to move well within my limitations. I would have been a hopeless ballet dancer, but within this particular approach to work, if you could work in your own way, then you could do something which you knew not only felt good but you knew also looked good. It doesn’t just impress you, it also expresses something to other people, so there is this two-way process going on all the time. With a lot of people’s methods it feels good to do but it looks awful to anybody else. The Ballet people start from basic movement, walking, running, jumping and so on, and gradually develop it into a certain style. Whereas with Lisa and Laban you didn’t start with this technique, you started with creativity, exploring things, having a go at things. It was likely opening a door to another world. And yet the first teachers could do more formal work if necessary.
Sylvia Bodmer
Then there was Sylvia. In theory she was the worst teacher in the world! She drove you crazy, but she came out with the most fantastic, wonderful ideas – if you could stand it. I can remember in later years, we would get together before a lesson with her and agree who was responsible for her: ‘You’re responsible for the first quarter of an hour, and you for the next one.’ We organised her and so took the pressure of the group. I remember in the early stages I would stand behind a pillar to calm myself down because she was so crazy. Whether she didn’t intentionally to confuse us I honestly don’t know. But she was the finest choreographer I knew. She had these ideas that blew your mind. They were always unforgettable – I can remember almost everything that we did with her. I can also remember sessions with her where we sat down for the whole session as she waffled on about something – no-one knew what it was. It was difficult for those who had little experience, but for those who knew her, understood her and were prepared to be patient with her, she was well worth it. She had these wonderful ideas but didn’t really think them through. She would go into a class with nothing but an idea. One succeeded by trial and error – we were the guinea pigs. It worked most of the time. She would say, ‘Going backwards, travel forwards.’ She would often describing a movement like this. She would move forward but do it travelling backwards. It does make sense. You can have a movement forward and at the same retreat with it. You got to know her vocabulary after a while. Her ideas just exploded – things that you would never dream of thinking up yourself.
Lisa Ullmann
Whatever Lisa taught was beautiful. She was on the whole much quieter than Sylvia. Except when we did Holst’s The Planets which we did outside. We didn’t do them all. We also did a Brahm’s rhapsody which was all wringing and thrusting. Lisa was very fond of wringing and thrusting. They always worked. You had so much pleasure movement-wise. I once remember being so frustrated because I could relate a wringing quality to a backward movement. When she taught it all seemed so obvious. I think that some of us there really thought that Laban’s work had channelled out our careers in a special kind of way. Laban was very interested in the dramatic side of things, and the movement choirs – which were Geraldine’s strengths.
Geraldine Stephenson
I admire Geraldine’s courage because when she started out there were very, very few people who understood anything about movement. She introduced a very sensible movement into theatre where there had previously been a very stylised and theatrical form of movement – that’s if they weren’t just standing still. She literally carved out a career for herself. She had to convert all these theatrical people into something that was going to contribute something to the production of theatre. I am sure she came against a lot of people who disagree with and were frightened of what she was doing. She had to fight all the way up. I think she enjoyed teaching on courses and doing the big pageants because people were willing to do these things – she didn’t meet with any resistance. I think she would like to have been a professional dancer.
I remember her doing one of her dance-recitals when I was teaching at a Training College in Matlock. She was touring with John Dalby. It was a history of dance through the ages: it developed certain points in history. I remember one scene from the French Revolution when she played Madame Defarge knitting beside the guillotine. I remember her sitting knitting and then lifting her dead up as the victim’s head fell into the basket. It was very dramatic – I don’t think I ever saw her do anything that was non-dramatic. I am not really on the drama side – I am more about dance. I remember her once working on a certain dramatic scene where it was important to know how to put on gloves. I remember her making us work on the different ways you can put on and take off gloves. She seemed to on for hours! I kept thinking, ‘Gerry, I really don’t like this’, but I stuck it out for a while. I got to the stage when I couldn’t cope, but the others (I always look round when I’m in doubt) were all happy as they wriggled their fingers into the gloves, smoothing down their arms. At least I remember it!
She had problems with so many people from the Early Dance movement because they criticised her for her period dances. Apart from having to fit into what the producer wanted from her, she was also trying to create an atmosphere. If there was a ballroom scene, she had to make the actors look at ease in the ballroom even though many of them couldn’t dance. So she would modify all these dances. I know that people wrote articles criticising her because she hadn’t been authentic, which showed a lack of understanding on the part of the early dance people. I remember once staying with her in London when I was doing research into Black Bottom dance. I went to the British Library and photocopied some material I’d found there, and since Geraldine also needed to do a Black Bottom dance I gave her a copy. She came back that night saying that it wasn’t any use since the producers didn’t want the formal side of the dance, but the scandalous side. She battled, she never stopped fighting all the way through.
I’ve been all over Europe and North America watching dance and I know that dancers like soldiers never die – they just go on and on! The very nature of contemporary work is that it is of the present. The Laban period, once he and the original teachers had died, others took over – like Geraldine – modified it and took it over according the needs of the present time, but it wasn’t the same. There are new people coming up and one has to accept this, even if you do not agree with it. That’s life.
Other teachers at the Studio
Valerie Preston Dunlop was a very good choreographer – a bit of a bully when she taught. She knew what she wanted and knew how to get it from you. But there were a lot of teachers whom I wasn’t impressed with at all.
Part time people came in. There was a Swede called Yat Malmgren who did a certain technique – I think that he’d studied a little bit with Laban. It didn’t look like Laban. He did technique. It was very much like Ballet – he said it was Laban, but I don’t think it was. It was disciplined and you knew exactly what you were aiming for. He had a particular aim, and if you didn’t do it, you were wrong. It’s a bit like swimming. I always enjoyed technique, because then you felt you had a discipline and a control and so you could do what you wanted to do. Unless you have the technique you can’t have the experience. Unless you can do a deep back bend you cannot have the experience of doing a deep back bend. Personally I needed some of that, and this is why I went to America – to get more technique. I got a great deal of satisfaction from this. In America they did a great deal of experimentation but it was all geared to the theatre which I didn’t particularly like.