Published in 1986 by University Press of New England.
Then we led a cortege out of the town up the hill above the lake —
We danced in the evening
Around a whisp of smoke
Ascending towards the clouds
Beyond where the sun was setting.
The five midnight fires flickered wildly
When the shadows of our crowd
Jerked among their flames.
And the pale dawn of the morning shone through the robes
Veiling their bodies …
Poem written in 1956 by Rudolf Laban for Mary Wigman’s seventieth birtday. The poem remembers the Ascona sun dances of 1917. (page 114/115)
page 33
Gebärde, with its Nietzschean implications of splendor and magnificence was a key word in the Schwabing-Ascona vocabulary. We shall find it prominent in Laban's works and also in such fringe Asconans as R. M. Rilke and D. H. Lawrence. It suggests the exaltation of the body to a larger than physical or psychological dignity it expresses a splendor of life that is at once sculptural (Rilke uses the word about Rodin's sculptures) and biological (see Rilke's and Lawrence's poems about animals, or Lawrence's horse in St. Mawr).
page 88
[Rudolf Laban speaking about his father.] Above all, "l was justifiably proud of my father ... and the pleasure I got from my own physical exertions [on military maneuvers] became associated with my admiration for the splendid display of movement." Thus even his vocation as a dance master derived in part from the military life. Parades, marches, military funerals, "showed a unity which I assumed could only come about through steady comradeship and loyalty...to the fatherland. All this made the civilian quite pathetically insignificant beside my picture of the professional soldier. Only art matched up to this idea." Thus Laban's mind was early fascinated by the military as much as by the aesthetic, by the specifically masculine as much as by the specifically feminine.
page 89
The first time he [Laban as a child] entered a theater he was scared because an actress dressed for that role bent down to kiss him, with her silver-starred mantle and tiara, her eyelashes like toothbrush bristles, and her coarsely painted face. He hated that, and developed a contrasting vision of how theater could be: "It must be a healthy festival of joy in the clear sunlight of daytime, without these pretences and trappings, which smother all the essentials."
[... Laban and views on the city]
He took his friends out into the country that evening, and they looked back down at Vienna, and he felt that "under the mantle of the glimmering gleam of the lighted streets and buildings a mighty monster lurked, which could with one deathblow bring all high-spun hopes and expectations to nothing. [...] He had the same vision as Henri Oedenkoven and the founders of Monte Verita in just about the same year (I900), which made them turn away from urban civilization to build a new life in Ascona. He felt the same horror of the city (linked to the theater through the artificiality of both) and the same strong love of nature.
page 90/91
As things turned out in 1900, Laban had to give up his satire on the machine. Instead he simply organized a number of traditional dances from all over the empire, including a whirling dervish dance from the ex-Turkish provinces. He was especially interested in such religious-cultic dances, and so was his greatest follower, Wigman. They adapted such forms (notably the whirling dance) to their own nonsectarian and sophisticated Dionysianism, a religion of ecstatic self-awareness and awareness of nature. The spirits of heaven and earth, he said, together form das Unbegreifliche "the impalpable" they can manifest themselves only through the sounds of men's voices and the movements of their bodies.
page 93
In the second part of his [Laban’s] autobiography, called “The Swinging Temple" (a temple of prayer built up by the movements of dancers), he describes how he left Schwabing after an artists' ball and found a better moral health in the countryside with the Bavarian peasants and their Schuhplattlertanz. He admired the force of their dancing. "In their group the dancers look like a machine which works methodically and vigorously at this rousing prayer [their dance is a form of prayer] .... It is something quite different from abandonment or ecstasy, a far more profound experience." The English-language reader must be reminded of D. H. Lawrence's description of the same dance in the same setting at the end of Women in Love. It must have been in the same years, 1912 or 1913, that both men saw this dance.
page 94
He moved his dance pupils to Ascona for the summer of 1913 and decided to return there in subsequent summers, to create a dance farm there. He wanted his dancers to rehearse and dance in contact with nature with the lake and mountain landscape of Ascona and also with natural work. "They must have," he reports himself as thinking,” as well as art, some healthy work to do, at best agriculture, gardening, or something like that.” This would give their art sanity and strength. They needed nature in order to discover, deep inside themselves, the authentic dancer spirit.
He found the perfect place for all this on Monte Verita, and from 1913 on he and his dancers were to be seen on those slopes in the summer months, he with his pipes or his drum, and around him the women (and a few men) leaping and writhing and rushing, evoking each her most hidden impulses. Discipline and taste were also part of Laban's teaching, but what first struck the dancers themselves and their audiences was the wild spontaneity.
Ascona had often been chosen as the site of life-experiments, as we know. [...] Laban was to create a feminist Modern Dance in Ascona, and it was a move for which he was well prepared.
page 97
Laban now [from 1914 onwards] planned to spend all his summers in Ascona, where his dancers could work, though not work for economic reasons or for any other aims. "A person's proper aim, in my view, is his own festive being." And festive being does not imply luxury but rather the reverse. Bedürfnislosigkeit "needlessness" or "demandlessness" (a virtue Gräser also recommended) is one of the most important sources of happiness, because one needs to have all one's energy and time free to devote to festive exaltation. That is the ultimate criterion in all decisions. It is in order to satisfy one's minimal demands without being sucked into the social system that one needs to be part of a group; and this was what Laban assembled at his dance farm under the name of an "individualists' commune."
page 110
We find this idea [the development of a nationalist ideology in Ausdruckstanz] in the other essays in his volume. Thus Mary Wigman's dance is German, it is said, both because it stresses expression and not form, and because it is the opposite of "international" formalism. The so-called international style was in fact dominated by French influence, they said.
