Rudolf von Laban: The “Founding Father” of Expressionist Dance

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes *Laban's students Jenny Gertz and Martin Gleisner, who sympathized respectively with the Communists and the Social Democrats, used the Labanian Bewegungschor method in the service of politics and staged numerous group dances for their causes between 1923 and 1933. See Dörr, "Rudolf von Laban," Vol. 1, pp. 196–199. *With the term choreography one normally associates just the concrete dance performance itself. Derived from the Greek, however, the term actually indicates two things: choros suggests the dance space and the dancers themselves; graphein means "to write." For Laban, choreography thus meant the immediate relations between dance composition and dance notation usually suggested by the term choreographic theatre. See Dörr, "Rudolf von Laban," Vol. 1, p. 401. †The Klingberg settlement on the Great Pönitzer Lake near Lübeck was founded in 1903 by Paul Zimmermann, the son of an industrialist who had instead taken up teaching. As a nationalistic, racist colony it attracted a reactionary bourgeoisie who, unlike the liberals, twisted Darwin's theories of natural selection into a justification for political racial discrimination as a form of "survival of the fittest." Known as Social Darwinism, this extreme and reactionary development of bourgeois society came to its most perverse fruition in the Nazis' organized extermination of those who were "different." See Linse, Ulrich. Völkisch-rassische Siedlungen der Lebensreform. In Handbuch zur "Völkischen Bewegung" 1871–1918; Puschner, Uwe, Schmitz, Walter, Ulbricht, Justus H., Eds.; Verlag W. Saur: Munich, 1996; 406ff. *This "ethical-social-vegetarian-communist settlement," founded in 1900 by Henri Oedenkoven, Ida Hofmann, and Karl Gräser, was intended as a location for trying out alternative ways of living. Here in 1913 Laban founded his Schule für Bewegungskunst (School for Movement Arts). See Szeemann, Harald. Monte Verita: Berg der Wahrheit—Lokale Anthropologie als Beitrag zur Wiederentdeckung einer neuzeitlichen sakralen Topographie; Electa edittrice: Milan, 1978. *"Crystal space"/"crystal network": Imagining the space inside the twelve corner points of the icosahedron, connected one to the other, creates the "crystal space." The twenty-four connections among the same points viewed from outside produce the "crystal network." The resulting network of lines gives the spatial crystal its shape—a shape that corresponds to the boundaries of the outstretched human body. The crystal network is thus the outermost layer of the space surrounding the dancer, the so-called "kinesphere." The connecting paths of the individual points of the crystal network are called the "peripheral directions"; the connections of the twelve corner points of the crystal space are known as "central directions." In this context Laban distinguished between "central" and "peripheral" movements. See Dörr, "Rudolf von Laban," Vol. 1, p. 396. *Lemnisces are figure-eight shaped curves, like patterns made by ribbons (lemniscus) attached to a victor's wreath. †The concept of "geometric site" comes from Bourdieu, who wrote, "But the search for the geometric site of all forms of expression produced by a society or an age is due more to transcendental or mystical inspiration than to a scientific impulse" (Bourdieu, Pierre. Soziologie der symbolischen Formen; Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1991; 125). *During his lifetime Haeckel attempted to gain influence over the arts and, especially with the 1904 work Über die Kunstformen der Natur, used aesthetics to remove the boundaries of so-called scientific thinking. *Dörr, Evelyn. "Rudolf von Laban: Leben und Werk des Künstlers (1879–1936)," 2 vols. Ph.D. dissertation, Humboldt University, Berlin, 1998. The dissertation is available (in German) on CD-ROM and can be ordered from the author at ⟨evelyn.doerr@gmx.net⟩. The Laban monograph will be published by Henschel Verlag, Berlin, in spring 2003.