Rudolf Laban

Rudolf (Jean-Baptiste Attila) Laban, also known as Rudolf Von Laban (December 15, 1879, Pressburg, Austria-Hungary (today Bratislava, Slovakia) - July 1, 1958, Weybridge, England) was a notable central European dance artist and theorist, whose work laid the foundations for Laban Movement Analysis, and many more exciting more specific developments.

One of the founders of European Modern Dance, his work was extended through his most celebrated collaborators, Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss and Sigurd Leeder. Through his work, Laban raised the status of dance as an art form, and his explorations into the theory and practice of dance and movement transformed the nature of dance scholarship.

He established choreology, the discipline of dance analysis, and invented a system of dance notation, now known as Labanotation or Kinetography Laban. Laban was the first person to develop community dance and set out to reform the role of dance education, emphasizing his belief that dance should be made available to everyone.

Biography

Laban's parents were Hungarian, but his father's family came from France, and his mother's family was from England. His father was a field marshal who served as governor of the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He spent much of his time in the towns of Sarajevo and Mostar as well as the court circle in Vienna and the theater life of Bratislava. He was educated in both western and eastern cultures.

Rejecting the military career planned for him, he became an artist. Through his studies of architecture at the Ècoles des Beaux Arts in Paris he began observing the moving form and the space surrounding it.

At age 30, he moved to Munich, the art center of Germany. There he focused on revolutionizing Bewegungskunst, the movement arts, spending the summer months at his Arts School on Monte Verita.

Laban established the Choreographic Institute in Zürich in 1915 and over the next ten years he created 25 Laban schools and choirs for the education of children, amateurs (including men), and professional dancers in Latvia, Zagreb, Paris and Germany, always retaining a 'movement laboratory' for his own research.

One of his greatest contributions to dance was his 1928 publication of Kinetographie Laban, a dance notation system that came to be called Labanotation and is still used as one of the primary movement notation systems in dance.

By 1929, his 50th birthday celebrations proved that he was at the height of an influential career, not only as a leader of the European modern dance movement, but as a recognized intellectual in the field of dance theater and movement study.

He was appointed director of movement and choreographer to the Prussian State Theatres in Berlin in 1930. In 1934, in a Nazi Germany, he was appointed director of the Deutsche Tanzbühne.

Some of his disciples believe he took a less active role when the Nazis took power, but in fact he directed major festivals of dance under the funding of Joseph Goebbels' propaganda ministry from 1934-1936. Retrieved December 14, 2007.Laban even published racist viewpoints during this time noting, "We want to dedicate our means of expression and the articulation of our power to the service of the great tasks of our Volk. With unswerving clarity our Führer points the way". Several similar allegations of Laban's attachment to Nazi ideology have been made. For instance, as early as July 1933 he was removing all non-Aryan pupils from the children's course he was running as a ballet director.

However, his falling out with the Nazi regime culminated in 1936 with Goebbel's banning of Vom Tauwind und der Neuen Freude (Of the Spring Wind and the New Joy) for not furthering the Nazi agenda. His name and work were destroyed by the very country where he rose to great heights in his career.

By 1937, he left Germany for England. He joined the Jooss-Leeder Dance School at Dartington Hall in the county of Devon where innovative dance was already being taught by other refugees from Germany. During these years, he was assisted in his dance instruction by his close associate Lisa Ullmann. Their collaboration led to the founding of the Laban Art of Movement Guild (now known as The Laban Guild of Movement and Dance) in 1945 and the Art of Movement Studio in Manchester in 1946.

At the age of sixty, supported by Ullmann, he started a new phase in his career. He worked in industry, introducing work study methods to increase production through humane means, and greatly influenced the movement education culture in Britain opening. Studying patterns of movement, he observed the time taken to perform tasks in the workplace and the energy used. He tried to provide methods intended to help workers eliminate "shadow movements" (which he believed wasted energy and time) and to focus instead on constructive movements necessary to the job at hand. After the war, he published a book related to this research entitled Effort (1947).

In 1953, the studios moved to a donated country estate in Addlestone. In his last years, he concentrated on movement as behavior, studying the behavioral needs of industrial workers and psychiatric patients. This enabled him to lay the technical basis for what is now the profession of movement and dance therapy, and a basis for the expressive movement training of actors.

Among Laban's pupils were Mary Wigman and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.

Work and Its Influences

Laban's ideas were heavily influenced by the social and cultural changes of the time and the contexts that he worked in. The traditional constraints against showing feeling were being questioned, opening the way for a freeing of the feeling body. Laban believed the best way to advocate this freedom was by mirroring it in dance and the movement arts. Freud’s discovery of the psyche, opened a previously closed door and the body’s sexuality need no longer be hidden. The movement arts were thought to be a great medium to express this new freedom, by men and women dancing barefoot and in little clothing.

In Paris and Munich (1900 - 1914), Rudolf Laban acquired his spiritual attitude and unique value regardless of gender, social status or educational standing. He interpreted this as valuing an individual's own choice of movement and self-initiated vocabularies.

Rudolf Laban witnessed the response to cultural changes by visual artists such as Klimt, Kockoshka, Shiele, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and Kandinsky. He asked himself what was the equivalent of the visual arts revolution for the movement arts? He abandoned the constraints of traditional steps, the reliance on music to inspire and structure dance, and the need to mime a story. They body was freed to find its own rhythms, create its own steps and revel in the medium of space. His search for the basic vocabulary of expressive movement identified the basic factors of movement flow, with weight, embodying time and space.

Rudolf Laban wrote articles and books and formed dance choirs of young male and female performers in his endeavor to introduce a contemporary mass dance culture for urban populations. He created dance works of a celebratory and participatory nature which often dealt in abstract terms with a social and spiritual agenda to educate socially aware dancers.

He removed the hierarchical system of ballet companies and replaced it with the democratic ensemble. Rudolf Laban created and toured works for his large and impoverished company. His works explored social themes just as his drama counterparts did (e.g. Brecht), as constructivist visual artists did (e.g. Malevitch) and as caricaturists did (e.g. Grosz).

Rudolf Laban and his pupil Kurt Jooss made dance into a social force, creating political anti-war ballets and anti-poverty ballets in the 1930's.

Death

Rudolf Laban was in poor health most of his life suffering from what we would now call spasmodic manic depression, which appeared during and after excessive creative endeavor and after what he perceived as rejection of his ideas. He was poor throughout his career, and never owned a home or possessions beyond his working papers. He married twice and fathered nine children, although his family life ceased when his career took off in 1919. He developed and relied on a series of apprentices to follow through his ideas, Mary Wigman being the first, Marion North being the last.

He continued to teach and do research, exploring the relations between Body and Spatial tensions until his death in his late seventies in 1958.

Legacy

Laban's theories of choreography and movement served as one of the central foundations of modern European dance. Today, Laban's theories are applied in diverse fields, such as Cultural Studies, Leadership development, Non-Verbal Communication, and others.

In addition to the work on the analysis of movement and his dance experimentations, he was also a proponent of dance for the masses. Toward this end Laban developed the art of movement choir, wherein large numbers of people move together in some choreographed manner, which include personal expression.

This aspect of his work was closely related to his personal spiritual beliefs, based on a combination of Victorian Theosophy, Sufism and popular fin de siecle Hermeticism. By 1914, he had joined the Ordo Templi Orientis and attended their 'non-national' conference in Monte Verita, Ascona in 1917, where he also set up workshops popularizing his ideas.

Currently, major dance training courses offer Laban work on their curriculum, but he would not deem this his prime legacy. He maintained that he had no method and had no wish to be presented as having one. Rather, he would say, a spirit of inquiry is the main legacy that unites the scattered and diverse body of people who use his work.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Dörr, Evelyn. Rudolf Laban : the dancer of the crystal. Scarecrow Press, 2008. ISBN 9780810860070
• Hodgson, John. Mastering movement : the life and work of Rudolf Laban. Routledge, ©2001. ISBN 0878300805
• Von Laban, Rudolf. Laban's principles of dance and movement notation. Plays, inc., 1975. ISBN 082380187X
• Von Laban, Rudolf and Lisa Ullman. The mastery of movement. Plays, inc., 1971 ISBN 0823801233
• Von Laban, Rudolf and FC Lawrence. Effort: economy in body movement. Plays, inc. 1974 ISBN 0823801608

External links

All links Retrieved December 13, 2007.

• Rudolf Laban Extensive biography from "official" site
• LABAN information about the BA (Hons), MSc, MA and PhD degree programs at the Laban Centre in London
• Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies LIMS NYC
• About Laban website of LInC (Laban International Courses) in UK
• Short biographies of Laban and some leading Laban practitioners
• Laban Ring

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