Interviews.

About these Interviews

There are two sets of interviews in this section: the first were conducted by John Hodgson in the mid-1970s, the second were conducted by me between 2000 and 2013. 

John Hodgson conducted his interviews as part of his research for a biography of Laban, as task left unfinished at his death in 1997. He interviewed many of the leading figures who knew and were taught by Laban. As I noted in the About section, some of the cassettes on which the interviews were recorded no longer functioned when I began to digitise them in the 2010s. Nonetheless, he has left a rich archival resource. I transcribed most of the interviews in 2020 during the Covid crisis. Cat Harrison transcribed the Kurt Jooss interviews which I corrected and edited. 

My interviews were mostly conducted with Warren Lamb and Geraldine Stephenson both of whom taught me. I drew on the interviews with Lamb between 2003 and 2006 for my first book An Eye for Movement which accompanied a DVD documenting his Movement Pattern Analysis. The interviews between 2008 and 2013 explored his ideas in greater depth. Lamb was in the first intake of students at Laban’s Art of Movement Studio, Manchester studying between 1946 and 1949. He developed Laban’s work in industry between the 1950s and the 2010s. Geraldine Stephenson was in the same class as Lamb and went on to become a prolific movement director and choreographer on stage, television and film. Between 2001 and 2007 she gave me 211 three-hour lessons after which we gave workshops together and she closely continued to closely monitor my teaching. The other interviews were with people that Geraldine knew and encouraged me to meet and often study with.