Rudolf Von Laban - Life and Work

Life and Work

Rudolf von Laban was born in Pozsony (now Bratislava) in 1879 in the Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire, into an aristocratic family. His father's family had come from the French nobility (De La Banne, from a French crusader stranded in Kingdom of Hungary in the 13th century) and Hungarian nobility, and his mother's family was from England. His father was a field marshal of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the governor of the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He spent his childhood in the courtly circles of Vienna and Bratislava, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the towns of Sarajevo and Mostar.

Laban initially studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

During his stay in Paris, Laban became interested in the relationship between the moving human form and the space which surrounds it. He then moved to Munich at age 30 and under the influence of seminal dancer/choreographer Heidi Dzinkowska began to concentrate on Bewegungskunst, more commonly called Ausdruckstanz, or the movement arts.

In Zürich in 1915, Laban established the Choreographic Institute with branches later founded in Italy, France, and central Europe.

One of his great contribution 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. His theories of choreography and movement are now foundations of the modern dance. Later they were applied in Cultural Studies, Leadership development, Non-Verbal Communication, and other fields.

Laban developed the art of movement choir, wherein large numbers of people move together in some choreographed manner, but that can 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 Verità, Ascona in 1917, where he also set up workshops popularizing his ideas.

Laban had founded a summer dance program in Ascona in 1912, which continued until 1914, when World War I broke out.

From 1930 to 1934 he was director of the Allied State Theatres in Berlin, Germany. In 1934, he was promoted to director of the Deutsche Tanzbühne, in Nazi Germany.

He directed major festivals of dance under the funding of Joseph Goebbels' propaganda ministry from 1934-1936. Laban even wrote during this time that "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 that 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, some Laban scholars have pointed out that such words and actions were necessary for survival in Germany at that time, and that his position was precarious as he was neither a German citizen nor a Nazi party member. His work under 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.

He was allowed to travel to Paris in 1937 and from there he went to 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.

He was greatly assisted in his dance teaching during these years by his close associate and long-term partner Lisa Ullmann. Their collaboration led to the founding of the Laban Art of Movement Guild (now known as The Laban Guild for Movement and Dance) in 1945 and the Art of Movement Studio in Manchester in 1946. Laban was a friend of Carl Jung.

In 1947, he published a book Effort, Fordistic study of the time taken to perform tasks in the workplace and the energy used. He tried to provide methods intended to help workers to eliminate "shadow movements" (which he believed wasted energy and time) and to focus instead on constructive movements necessary to the job in hand.

He died in the UK.

Among Laban's students, friends, and associates were Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss, Lisa Ullmann, Lilian Harmel, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hilde Holger, and Warren Lamb.