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.