About Laban.

A biographical sketch of Rudolf Laban 

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Rudolf Laban was born on 15 December 1879 in Bratislava, which was then of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and died in Weybridge, Surrey, on 1 July 1958. One important fact stands out from these dates: that Laban, who had turned 21 in 1900, was a child of the 19th and not the 20th century. 

Another important fact is that he took some time to settle on dance and movement as his field of activity; although there are records of earlier work on compositions, it was not until 1910 that he opened his first dance school in Munich. Before this, he had studied fine art and architecture and earned money as a graphic artist. In summer 1912, he joined an idealistic vegetarian community in Monté Verità near Ascona, Switzerland, where he ran summer schools and organised outdoor performances until the outbreak of war in 1914. 

In the winter months, he ran a school for dance and movement in Zurich until 1917. During these years, Dada-ists were per-forming at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich where some of his students, most notably the artist and designer Sophie Täuber, danced. Attempts to establish a permanent school in Zurich failed and so, after World War I, stateless because of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Laban sought work in Germany. Already Laban was engaged in activities that he would continue throughout his career – the creation of large-scale dance theatre pieces, research into dance notation, the creation of schools based on his ideas, the organisation of major conferences and his own kind of movement therapy. 

In the 1920s, he worked in Stuttgart, Mannheim, Hamburg, Würzburg and Berlin. This was his wonder decade seeing the publication of four books – Die Welt des Tänzers (1920), Gymnastik und Tanz, Kindes Gymnastik und Tanz (1926) and Choreographie (1926) – countless articles and manifestos, the creation and performance of choreographies both for movement choirs and his smaller chamber group, the establishment of a Choreographic Institute, the development of a form of dance notation, the inception of a network of Laban schools throughout Germany and the organising of two dancer’s congresses. This was the work of a life-time rather than a decade. 

He was appointed Mâitre de Ballet at the Berlin State Opera in 1930; at the age of 51, this was his first salaried post. When Hitler came to power in 1933, unlike col-leagues such as Kurt Jooss and Martin Gleisner, Laban remained in Germany and continued to teach, organise and create dance. After Goebbels (Minister for Propaganda) had seen Laban’s proposed ceremony to open the stadium for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, the performance was cancelled and Laban fell into immediate disgrace. (His four years working under the Hitler regime is dealt with in Part III.) 

1937 was a threshold year: he had spent the early months in Schloss Banz (not under house arrest as has been suggested) and spent springtime in Plauen with his secretary Marie Louise Lieschke. This reputation in Germany, he was a persona non-grata, and his huge network of schools had been closed down and any enterprise associated with the name ‘Laban’ was proscribed. 

With the help of Jooss and Ullmann in 1938, he managed to escape to Dartington Hall in Devon. After a few years, Laban had begun a new career adapting his ideas about Effort to industry. He moved to Manchester where in 1946 Lisa Ullmann opened the Art of Movement Studio giving Laban a fixed base for his activities. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Ullmann and Laban organised dance courses throughout England. 

The years in England saw a second flourishing of Laban’s creative energies. Maybe because Laban always had an expanded notion of dance and movement, he could apply his knowledge to solving problems experienced by manual labourers, particularly those of women working in heavy industry during World War II. Effort (1947), a book written with management consultant Frederick C. Lawrence, explained his theory and introduced a form of Effort notation (as distinct from dance notation). In addition, his ideas about movement education for children were adopted in primary schools throughout England. This was an extension of ideas and practices first described in Dance and Gymnastics for Children (1926) and led to the writing of Modern Educational Dance (1948). 

Laban’s ideas about Effort (the dynamics of movement) found application in drama, particularly through the work of Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop which resulted in The Mastery of Movement on the Stage (1950). As if this weren’t enough, Laban also developed his own form of movement therapy which informed his unpublished book Effort and Recovery (written between 1950 and 1952) extracts from which can be found in The Laban Sourcebook (Routledge, 2011).