First published in 1998 by Dance Books. This edition is from 2008.
page 3
On one of his adolescent trips to the Balkans, probably to Constantinople, while under the guidance of an Imam, he encountered the Sufi brotherhood, Muslim lay brothers with special responsibilities. These were the Dervish dancers whose prayers were manifest in movement, in whirling until a trance was induced. In some instances, in states of high ecstasy, the dancer might drive long needles and nails into his cheeks, through his chest, into his arm muscles, with no sign of pain and no loss of blood. Afterwards no trace of a wound could be seen. This magic of the dance, this power of movement over man, was deeply impressive to the young Laban. He saw it as the conquest of the forces of nature through the dance. If this could apply to Balkan lay brothers, might it be possible for ordinary men and women to transcend the mundane, to find their own ecstasy in movement, not with cuts and thrusts but simply through dancing? He had as yet no idea how this might happen, or indeed if it could happen. But ten years later in Paris, in the company of spiritually aware people, he recalled again this magic and connected it with the psychic forces that he was introduced to there through his contact with the Rosicrucian brethren.
page 11
Harmony was also to become a keystone in Laban's theory and practice of movement; so too was the Golden Section. Rosicrucian subjects appear again and again in Laban's choreographic works. In what way he was part of the group surrounding Peladan must remain speculation, but that he was part of it and would have participated in quasi-Rosicrucian ritual is propounded as likely by the present Rosicrucian administration. The similarity of some of his movement concepts to those of the AMORC (The Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis) practices is hard to ignore. But since reticence and privacy are the hallmarks of the Rosicrucian brotherhood, more than speculation is difficult to achieve.
It is apparent that he had access to the psychic realm, which he termed 'the land of silence'. That he learned techniques whereby he could intensify inner energy and experience psychic events is likely. His concern with the centre of energy resonates with the Rosicrucian practice of locating and sensitising centres both within and outside the body. Listening to or intuitively becoming aware of the 'master' within each one of us, or the reality within our being, is an essence of Rosicrucianism. Laban seems to have developed the conviction that the body holds truths which, through sensitising practices, can be reached and should be sought. Movements of gathering and scattering, which any Laban student will recognise as common in his work, also have a place in the building up of energies and centres in Rosicrucian practice, which in turn lead to psychic energy flowing outwards. Profound advice is found at the centre of each individual, and focus on the centre, gathering to the centre, is one way of gaining access.
page 20
The sixth section of Kandinsky's treatise, entitled 'The Language of Foms and Colours' deals with the essential creative thinking required when representation is removed as an aim of painting. The contemplation of the medium takes on quite another role: it becomes the crux. The means to achieve art 'in the absolute sense' are, he wrote, colour and form and the 'inevitable relationship' between them. Colour can never exist without form, while form can exist independently. Form affects colour. Colours are grouped in pairs of opposites, and linked to neighbouring colours by gradual transitions.
According to Kandinsky's concept, the medium itself has expressive powers, making so-called abstract painting meaningful: non-denotive meaning refers to the spiritual, and is made visible through the properties of the medium. The link between Kandinsky's concepts and those which pervaded Laban's life work in movement is almost direct. Laban described' the medium of dance, untethered by its traditional limitations, as movement. He believed that this medium must have a syntax, for dance is always meaningful. It could not be totally abstract, for the body is the constant reference point of meaning. For Kandinsky, representation was the tether to be removed. For Laban, in relation to dance, representation was not the problem, but music and a set vocabulary of steps were. They must be removed, to reveal the medium - movement - in all its potential. A close relationship can be seen between Kandinsky's theory of colour and form interdependence and Laban's emerging rhythm and space theory for movement, soon to become his new dance subjects, eukinetics and choreutics.
page 22
Dalcroze believed that the rediscovery of rhythm would regenerate man as a social being and that this was the precondition for the higher development of society as a whole. With his emphasis on festivals and his concern to find the natural rhythms of the body, his aim could be said to overlap with Laban's. But there the similarity ceased, for Dalcroze turned to the rhythms of music and Laban to the rhythms of the body itself and its movement.
page 23
He began his impressionism/expressionism experiments not in movement itself but in the relationship of music to movement. 'Exercise + rhythm = expressionism,' he wrote, with the rhythm of music in mind as he had seen at the Dalcroze school's Hellerau performances. Dance of that sort is an 'impression of the music'. As long as dance gives an impression of the music it cannot be expressive in its own right, was his view. The expressiveness of the movement itself, separated from music must be found. The psychische in movement had to be studied, he wrote, to add to the rhythmic elements of the movement. The relationship of inner intent to movement itself, well known to exist, had at that time never been researched. Laban started at that moment on the long process.
page 24
He needed to experiment practically, so he gathered together a small group of students on an ad hoc basis. Perrottet described them as interesting people who were out of the ordinary: artists, actors, 'and a baroness'. They worked on sections of Die Erde, the trilogy that Laban had first conceived in his youth in Bratislava. He had tried it before, in Nice apparently. Rehearsing this second version enabled him to see how much further forward he was in understanding how to embed an idea in movement. The process encouraged him to try to form a regular Munich dance group. He advertised for dancers in the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten on 28 November. He told Perrottet that he had secured a place to rehearse, a Gartenhaus at Theresienstrasse 132. His painting, he said, would from now on be mainly for pleasure, and he packed away his canvasses to make room for movement classes. He used some of his designs to decorate the space as an attraction for students. They were indeed interesting, many being colourful working designs of his thoughts on the relationship of bodies and space. Geometric concepts of space and ideas of the crystalline structures of space were linked to ideas of a spatial harmonic system which might have a connection with the ratios in the human body. These were illustrations of what he called meine Sache (my things) - his Rosicrucian insights which he was to develop as choreutics, his spatial theory/practice for dance.
page 25
He decided to abandon melody and to accompany his workshops with a tambour. He found this 'excellent', for it freed him to move about as he played and gave a simple sound to match his search for simple elements in movement. He was transformed by his new mobility. Not only himself but his dancers could make 'music' while they danced. He and his dancers were now improvising, with percussion and voice, but he wrote that 'for an audience, music is still essential'. He did not yet present musicless dance, but composed his own accompaniment for demonstrations and performances.
[...]
Dance, he wrote, reaches the dream world; it is the way in which the human being reaches the deeper levels of consciousness. The rhythms and patterns of the dance mirror the rhythms and patterns of the mind and the spirit. They do not depict or denote but neither are they meaningless. Images of the dream world, things larger than life, smaller than life, faster and slower than life, more brutal and more feeble than life, are the dance image. Primordial forces, not the forces of daily life, are the dance subject, he wrote.
page 28 / 29
The exhausting winter season over, Laban went on a speculative visit to Monte Verità in early May 1913. By that time the 'Mountain of Truth', near Ascona in the foothills of the Alps in the Swiss canton of Ticino, was established as a centre for experimental living according to artistic, spiritual, and anarchistic principles. It had arisen as an antidote to the bourgeois intellectual society of fin-de-siècle Europe. In its promotion of alternative ways of living and thinking, Monte Verità shared a common philosophy with Munich/Schwabing as a place where life was lived in the spirit of the artist's life, life itself becoming a work of art. The original group, among them the Belgian Henri Oedenkoven, had met in Munich in 1900 to finalise plans to purchase the land in Ticino in order to set up a colony amongst the various and somewhat scattered groups of people who were settling there away from the suffocation of metropolitan life. Nature cures, vegetarianism, psychoanalysis, a refreshing look at the body, nudism and sexuality, together with various approaches to spirituality, including freemasonry, were all flourishing by the time Laban explored possibilities for his work there. Visitors and settlers had come and continued to do so from all over Europe, but the connection with Munich was particularly lively. Schwabing was well represented there, and Laban's choice of Monte Verità was an obvious one.
He went, he said, in order to explore possibilities for establishing a permanent school there. He had as yet not succeeded in doing so in Munich, and thought that Ascona might provide a supportive environment, both spiritually and financially, in which he could really get his work started. By mid-May plans for a Schule für Kunst, a School for the Arts, were in place, and also for his family and his somewhat ad hoc Munich group to join him, at any rate for the summer season.
Oedenkoven discussed Laban's role with him and embraced his ideas. It was agreed that he should arrange and organise the spiritual life of the colony through the arts. He should do it following his own religious conceptions. It is clear that the School for the Arts was more 'than its name implied. It constituted a vehicle for spiritual education and festive celebrations of the spiritual dimension, not only for the students of the school but for the whole colony. He was given the opportunity to tryout his growing belief that everyone should dance, could dance, and that a renewed form of community dance should be sought.
Laban's 'religious conceptions' combined his own ideas on the spirit with those of three sources, the Muslim Sufis, the Rosicrucians and the anthroposophists. From the Sufis he had formed a firm belief that he expressed to Perrottet: 'dancing has a power over man'. This power, this magic, he saw as 'choreosophic'; that is, as embodying primordial wisdom through dance ceremonial. From the Rosicrucians he had also learnt esoteric wisdom and skills to make use of psychic energy. Although Laban had no direct link with Gurdjieff, the latter's writings describe sacred practices that have similar sources to Laban's and give some insight into Rosicrucian and Sufi ritual. The purpose of their trance-inducing practice was to transcend the space/time limitations of the present and to gain a 'power of attention' and 'degree of control over the state of consciousness', as John Bennett put it in his writings on Gurdjieff. Thirdly, Laban was familiar with the Eurythmie of the anthroposophist Marie Steiner. Out of these experiences and his own researches he had to find his own method for his artistic colony.
page 29 / 30
Living in harmony with nature and the cosmos were essential features of Laban's spiritual sources and of Oedenkoven's philosophy. They achieved it through living the simple life absolutely, growing their own vegetables, cooking their own food, weaving plain cloth and making it into simple saris and cloaks. They danced outside, shoeless or with soft homemade sandals in order to feel the earth, minimal clothing and sometimes none - although Laban himself was never naked, nor did he regard it as necessary. The ground was to be touched, the air to be breathed, the wind to be felt on the skin, the night sky to be danced with. Every day had a festive moment in which the spiritual attitude filled the dancers with what Laban called a sense of mutuality and an appreciation of the personal integrity of each individual.
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[A performance at Monte Verità] On the evening of 18 August Laban's group performed Sang an die Sonne (Song to the Sun), a dance hymn, on the Asconan hill side. At 6.30 p.m. there was a 'Dance of the Setting Sun', at 11 p.m. 'Demons of the Night', at 6 a.m. the next morning 'The Rising Sun'. It was an extraordinary event, a mixture between an open-air theatre work and a ritual, with the sun, night, stars, and moon acting as the scenery, the audience sitting on the hillside. Laban described how they had erected a fireplace of boulders. After a solemn Reigen (choric round dance) around the fire, a speaker, accompanied by attendants, came up the slope. The moment when his head appeared over the edge of the bank was exactly timed so that the lower rim of the setting sun was just touching the horizon. Standing there, he spoke the first lines of his poem. The connection between mankind and universal forces was overtly made. The spectators were led away from the meadow. Shortly before midnight, a group of dancers with drums, tomtoms and flutes assembled them again, torches and lanterns lighting the way to a mountain peak where bizarrely shaped rocks looked down on a circular meadow. Here five blazing fires were lit and a group of dancers dressed as goblins performed leaping dances around and through them. Performers in body masks of twigs and grass approached, what seemed like witches and fiends crept out, tearing the masks away and burning them in a wild scene. The dance at dawn took place on the eastern side of the slope, the rising sun visible through the silky garments of the dancing women as they surged up and over the hillside in a joyous celebration of renewal.
page 49
Mary Wigman tells us that by 1918 Laban had fully established his Schwungskalen to use as his training method, based on choreutic and eukinetic findings . The octahedral space model was already there; so too was the icosahedron as a basis for mapping personal space. Kraft, Zeit und Raum (force, time, and space), Spannung und Entspannung (tension and release), eng und weit (narrow and wide) were all present as basic ways of finding and defining human expression.
Why was all this so fascinating? Why did people who came in contact with Laban become life-long devotees of his work? Much later Wigman was to write: 'Laban had the extraordinary quality of setting you free artistically, enabling you to find your own roots, and thus stabilised to discover your own potentialities, to develop your own technique and your individual style of dancing.' She went on: 'What years later was to become his dance theory and was called his dance philosophy was at that time still a free country, a wilderness, an exciting and fascinating hunting ground, where discoveries were made every day. Every new phenomenon was looked at with equal curiosity only to be jammed into one big bag, where it had to stay, to be studied, to be analysed, to be worked on later.'
page 50
During this period Laban became aware of the work of psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung who, having recently parted from his teacher Sigmund Freud, had set up his own establishment in Zurich. In Die Welt des Tänzers, Laban mentions the psychoanalyst Karl Abraham and also Jung. Jung's work on archetypes and on the four functions of the psyche - intuition, sensing, thinking, and feeling - struck a profound chord in Laban. That functions of the psyche were discerned in behaviour was one focus of the new psychoanalytic methods. Laban's insight led him to propose that there existed a direct relationship between psychic function and the four motion factors that he was by now certain were the crucial framework of movement: time, weight, space and flow. Although Laban's definitions of the four functions were not identical with Jung's, they served between them as a working model for the oneness of the body / psyche in human movement expression. Other writers that Laban studied in Zurich and mentioned in his book Die Welt des Tänzers were 'Harless and Kollmann on plastic anatomy for artists' and 'Faulmann and Kleinpaul' on the history of words and writing. On behaviour he studied Charles Darwin and Wilhelm Wundt. Together these led to the theoretical basis for his later diagnostic work in therapy, and much later, in Britain, in his ergonomic work in industry.
page 58
Jugend (youth) was a word on everyone's lips. Youth was seen as a problem and a challenge. Adolescents too young to have fought but old enough to have experienced family separation and loss of parents were in a majority in the population. Jugend became synonymous with the breakdown of social culture; jugendlich (youthful) connoted irresponsibility; jugendlich Arbeiter suggested aggressively socialist young workers. Youth clubs and organisations, already plentiful before the war, increased as a solution to the problem. Youth groups in which songs, open air and hiking were a focal point had long been a feature of German life. The Wandervögel was such an organisation. The Bewegungschor and the Sprechchor and the Singchor, radical art movements for amateur youth to dance, to declaim and to sing together, would become the alternative. Germany was sufficiently Central European still to have a strong folk culture ethic, but folk dance and folk music were rapidly declining. Social dancing was no substitute, especially the imported American dances, the Shimmy, the Tango, the Charleston. They were fun, but had no spiritual content, which community dance had always had, celebrating special occasions, weddings, births, and seasons. Urban German youth therefore received no art culture, something which formerly would have been handed down to them through their community.
page 59
All people were potential dancers, as he understood it - not potential performers of steps, but potentially in touch with their own souls through the experience of gesture and moving.
page 72 / 73
His experience of Parisian élite culture and dilettantism had had the effect of bolstering his admiration for how the proletariat cope. His mourning for the loss of the community culture he had known in his youth in Hungary spurred him on to suggest an alternative. He wanted to supply a vision to which men and women could affiliate. In 'Festwille und Festkultur' he put forward his key ideas. The rational person, he suggested, has propounded physical culture, sport and gymnastics as a way of providing what the body needs in an age of mechanisation. But, Laban wrote, the Festwille (the will to celebrate) is a natural drive, combining enjoyment of splendour and of play, and implicitly he compared these with the exercise-based concept of his Körperkultur compatriots. Lonely people, people denied communal cultural activities of any significance, epitomised the longings of modern man to participate together in symbolic activity, for the will to live is bound up with the will to live together, he wrote, and is given form in community action, whether in family, religious or political groups, as children and as adults.
The place for celebratory community action was the theatre, the concert platform and the open space, Laban proposed. The people who would find a way to make this happen were the artist, capable of creating symbolic forms, together with the arts enthusiast in the community, who could organise and galvanise the participants. Laban saw that people were searching for new ways to fill the gap of old rituals. They turn ‘to other existing forms, old church customs and masonic lodges’, he suggested. But these would not satisfy the need. Social activity, whether organised or improvised, was a human requirement. The present culture had no provision and yet the will to find one was evident everywhere. It would come, he said, through artistic forms of a profane cultural togetherness.
This article was published in February 1922, and written a year earlier. Laban was beginning to find and to build up the symbolic form that he could offer for community celebratory action: the Bewegungschor (movement choir). He had to experiment with it further than he had done already in Ascona and in Cannstatt, by creating dance works which were within the capabilities of the amateur. They had to be symbolic of human tendencies, able to be performed by large groups, economically, and be within the scope of community expectations and facilities.
page 97
As always, Laban was engrossed in several endeavours simultaneously. His first lecture-demonstration was with the Hamburg Movement Choir. He talked on the idea of the movement choir again, this time to the public. He addressed first his concept that contemporary physical culture needed to be artistic; the movement choir was the form of art proposed, with its central aim of a festive, joyous dancing experience. He supported this proposal by citing the longing within physical culture circles for a healthy, strong and lasting foundation for their work with a bodily, spiritual and mental basis. His stand was clearly put that recreation is achieved through a creative, artistic, integrated experience shared with other people, and he compared it, uncritically but definitively, with gymnastic exercise. He illustrated his view with extracts from Agamemnons Tod, performing the title role himself. The able delivery of his lecture and the 'strong concentration' of his performance impressed the reviewer of the Hamburger Anzeiger. He had replaced the Tanzbühne dancers, who gave the premiere, with young movement choir members, and their immaturity was noted. Nevertheless the reviewer congratulated the choir, and Laban, for lifting amateur work from the realm of play into that of art. 'Is that important?' he asked. Yes, for these young people live in a difficult time. They could become resigned, but Laban lifted them out of this world into another, one in which 'pain and weakness are put beside strength and happiness, melancholy beside joy.' The value of this amateur dance was obvious, he wrote.
page 101
Laban discussed the source of the movement material in free-standing exercise. There was not one but several, he wrote. Gymnastic exercises use idealised movement: they do not incorporate ugly, grotesque gestures, but clear lines, completed positions. But the dance turns to gesture for one of its sources, to behaviour, which gymnastics would never use. Dance presents the ugly as well as the ideal, untidy everyday movement as well as the neat. The free-standing exercise leading to liturgical processions and religious ritual had particular sources, handed down from earlier times: gestures of blessing, of prayer, of adoration, of supplication, addressed to an outer being. Similar movements might be used in the art of movement, he wrote, but their goal is not religious observance but deepening awareness of universals. Working movement, movements from martial arts, are sources for gymnastics. The dynamic range of these encompasses cut and thrust, push and press, he said. The art of movement uses those too, but also soft strewing, scattering flickers, sharp tapping, which counterbalance aggressive and contending qualities.
page 102
Any free-standing exercise, even gymnastics, could become valuable when imbued with a life philosophy, Laban wrote; not only the art of movement, but any movement without a philosophy was arid. While a philosophy gave an over-arching purpose to a movement practice, the detailed content of each movement phrase could only be achieved through awareness of its syntax. The grammar of each free-standing form was distinct, for each was a language that derived meaning through its own grammar, and that could be discovered through a study of its history and the source of its movement material.
page 105
He spoke out against 'drill', and insisted on the importance of experiencing the movement process. He concentrated on the skills of expression which a dancing child acquired. 'The stream of inner mobility breaks forth when the soul opens itself in the dance; he wrote. The forms of culture, forms of art, spoke of their era. Gothic arches, baroque curves, Hellenistic pillars speak of the soul of their times, but today architecture and dance have to speak of the twentieth century. The harmonic balance between the stability of the weight, with its verticality as in architectural buildings, and the positive impulse to move on with off-balance mobility, could be expressed in movement, in the dance. These were the experiences children needed, not drill.
page 124
Twentieth-century industrialisation had brought into language and to consciousness the idea of the 'mass', in contrast to the individual. Mass culture, mass media, mass production and the introduction of Taylorism (stopwatch time-and-motion study) into the industrial workplace lessened individual worth and power. Benign togetherness, much promoted in youth camps, and certainly in movement choirs and in the Labanbund, was matched by aggressive togetherness, a kind of link-arms-and-face-the-enemy outlook. Both were necessary to survive in a time of political, social, moral and economic instability.
page 163
The 1930-31 season continued with one work in February requiring new choreography, Strauss's Eine Nacht in Venedig. It proved to be highly successful, Bie commenting on the skillful way in which Laban intermixed soloist and ensemble, how he used characterisation and had composed a very funny 'Pigeon's Dance'. 'A feast for the eyes,' was Einstein's view.
It was Willi Godlewski in Singchor und Tanz who opened the discussion on the relation of ballet and expressive dance. This relationship, on the face of it an aesthetic one, was to become a political issue as nationalism became a more prominent part of cultural life, not only through the National Socialists but also through von Papen's National Centre Party. German dance, the dance of the German people - Wigman's dance, Palucca's dance, Günther's, Kreutzberg's, Laban's dance - became more and more a symbol of German superiority in this art form, and contrasted with ballet which was regarded as an importation.
page 172
A further aggravation occurred through the formation of the Deutscher Körperbildungsverband , an organisation of teachers which united dance schools with rhythmic gymnastic schools. The battle with the physical training, physical education, body culture people would not go away. Indeed under the Nazis it would intensify. The body culture people would never understand that dance was an art, an expression of the soul, the body being a means, not an end. However often, however succinctly, however well said and well demonstrated, the effort to explain was wasted. Dance had nothing significant in common with rhythmic gymnastics, though unfortunately plenty in common of little consequence. They could be watched as similar but never experienced as similar. Therein lay a problem that would haunt Laban's work till his death. Because the Körperbildungsverband had a solid power base, with both male and female membership, linked with male-dominated sport, the far less well organised female-dominated dance people were easily swept into joining with their stronger counterpart. Laban tossed these things aside, but they dug into his deepest hopes for the renewal of dance as an art for all.
page 189
It was he [Adolf Hitler] who wanted an open-air theatre on the site, for had not the original Olympians (whom he declared to have been Aryans) been both outstanding athletes and outstanding artists? Germany must have the opportunity to show evidence of her cultural achievements and abilities. An ideal bowl-shaped site in the adjacent Murellen Valley was shown to him. A Greek theatre must be built, dedicated to one of the great National Socialist poets, Dietrich Eckart. As the building programme of the Olympic complex began the heroic scale of the site caused great excitement, with its mammoth arena, Olympic bell tower, and parade ground for 250,000 people. The theatre was described as the jewel of the project, with a pine-covered hillside acting as a backdrop to the stage.
page 200
A time of crisis for him, he turned as usual to his crystals, his Rosicrucian belief, and found solace in coloured drawings, repeating again and again the same imaginative designs of man the mover in harmony with the cosmos, expressed through the interweaving of human bodies with icosahedral and dodecahedral forms.
page 270
Because his focus shifted throughout his life as opportunities offered themselves and interests erupted, people who worked with him in 1913, 1921, 1936, 1942, 1949 or 1953, for example, encountered his perspectives and priorities of that moment. All developed whatever Laban had given them, so that now we can trace his initiating ideas in dance theatre, dance scholarship, dance therapy, choreology, ethnochoreology, dance literacy, dance as recreation, drama, movement profiling and dance education. The breadth of influence of one man is astounding.
