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The Motion of Memory, the Question of History Recreating Rudolf Laban’S Choreographic Legacy

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The Motion of Memory, the Question of History Recreating Rudolf Laban’S Choreographic Legacy OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Jul 03 2017, NEWGEN Chapter 7 The Motion of Memory, the Question of History Recreating Rudolf Laban’s Choreographic Legacy Susanne Franco The subject of this chapter is the dance works created by Rudolf Laban (1879–1958) in Germany in the early twentieth century, some of which have recently been recre- ated by Valerie Preston- Dunlop in the United Kingdom. Laban, one of the leaders of Ausdruckstanz, the German dance of expression was a protean figure who worked as a dancer, choreographer, ballet- master, writer, educator, movement analyst, and director of cultural institutions. Preston- Dunlop, one of Laban’s best- known pupils, who in the 1950s studied with him in Great Britain, thus becoming a leading figure of the Laban tra- dition, recreated selected works by Laban in partial collaboration with the choreologists and movement analysts Alison Curtis-Jones and Melanie Clarke, both former students at the Laban Centre (London) and later members of the teaching staff at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. This institution is the only one in Europe still carrying Laban’s name,1 and derives from the merger in 2005 of the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance in London with the Trinity Conservatoire of Music.2 These recreations, all performed by students first of the Laban Centre and later of the Trinity, have been partially recorded on a series of DVDs, each available independently, which include interviews with Preston- Dunlop and her collaborators, reflecting on the need to document and disseminate knowledge about creative processes as opposed to simply recording reconstructed performances.3 1 The only other institution is the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (New York), established in 1978 by Irmgard Bartenieff, a Laban pupil and a senior member of the Dance Notation Bureau (New York). 2 The Laban Center was founded in 1975 in London and derived from the Art of Movement Studio founded in Manchester in 1946 by Laban and his pupil and partner Lisa Ullmann. 3 The complete collection of recorded versions of these recreations is held at the Archive of the Trinity Laban, and the commercial DVDs have been published by Dance Books (London). A standard program oxfordhb-9780199314201-Ch1-10.indd 143 7/3/2017 9:11:37 AM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Jul 03 2017, NEWGEN 144 Historical Fiction and Historical Fact Laban worked in Switzerland during the 1910s, and in 1920s and the early 1930s had an intense artistic career in Germany; he moved to Great Britain in 1937, where he spent the rest of his life teaching and researching movement. Preston- Dunlop recreated only his solos and group pieces produced in the 1920s by the two companies Rudolf Laban founded: the Tanzbühne Laban (Laban Dance Group), and the related smaller Laban Kammertanzbühne Laban (Chamber Dance Group).4 Until Preston- Dunlop’s recre- ations, Laban’s pupils and scholars gave little attention to his choreographic work and the dance repertoire he created between 1912 and 1936, which did not survive as a living repertoire. The emphasis was rather on the master’s conceptual thinking on dance and movement as evidenced in his English- language publications,5 which became the basis for British modern educational dance and which are still a relevant influence on interna- tional contemporary dance.6 Nevertheless, it is striking that Laban’s work as a choreog- rapher should have received so little attention as a significant part of his legacy until the late 1980s. But, where can the traces of Laban’s choreographic work be? of the Chamber Dance Group included dances defined as ornamental, eucinetic [cinematic?], ecstatic, ritual, rhythmic, monumental, grotesque, satiric, country, and stylistic, and some longer dance poems. The recreations of Laban’s repertoire by Preston-Dunlop include solos such as the ornamental dance Orchidée (The Orchid, 1922), the grotesque dances Marotte (Obsessed, 1925) and Mondäne (The Chic Thing, 1925); and the monumental dance Rosetten (Rosettes, 1925); duos, such as the ornamental dance Krystall (The Crystal, 1925), the grotesque dance Bizarre (Bizarrer, 1923), the ecstatic dance Ekstatischer Zweimännertanz (Ecstatic Male Duos, 1924); a quartet, such as the rhythmic dance Marsch (March, 1923); and a group piece such as the tragic-comic pantomime Oben und Unten (Above and Below, 1922). In 2008, in collaboration with Alison Curtis-Jones, Preston- Dunlap recreated two other pieces, the grotesque pantomime Die Grünen Clowns (The Green Clowns, 1926) and, in 2009, the dance play Night (Nacht, 1927). 4 The first names given to the main dance group were “Ballett Laban” andGruppe für neuen Bühnentanz (Group for New Dance), then “Kammertanzbühne Laban,” and finally “Kammertanzbühne Bereska- Laban,” co- directed with his partner Dussia Bereska. The name and the concept of the Kammertanzbühne derive from the tradition of chamber music and therefore the emphasis is on a reduced theatrical scale. 5 Laban’s first book in English,Effort , was the outcome of his experiment in industrial work together with Frederick C. Lawrence (London, 1947; 4th edition, 1967), but he wrote most of his English books to sustain his teaching, and they were the outcome of his close collaboration with Lisa Ullmann, who also revised some of them after Laban’s death: Modern Educational Dance (London, 1948; 2nd ed., 1963); The Mastery of Movement on the Stage (London, 1950); The Mastery of Movement (London, 1950; 2nd ed. of The Mastery of Movement on the Stage, revised and enlarged by Lisa Ullmann, 1960; 3rd ed., 1971; 4th ed., 1980; 1st American ed., Boston, 1971); Ulmann also published the posthumous Choreutics (London, 1966), later republished as The Language of Movement: A Guidebook to Choreutics, by Rudolf Laban (Boston, 1974), and A Vision of Dynamic Space, compiled by Lisa Ullmann (London, 1984). She edited as well the translation of Laban’s autobiography A Life For Dance: Reminiscences (London, 1975), originally published in German in 1935. Laban’s Principles of Dance and Movement Notation (London, 1956; 2nd ed., 1975) was annotated and edited by Roderyk Lange. 6 On the website of the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, Laban’s short biographical profile reports that he provided a basis for development in the twenty-first century “in studio practices and theoretical methods driven by movement practice,” and a spirit of inquiry “that unites the scattered and diverse body of people who use his work” rather than in outstanding theater works of dance. See http:// www.trinitylaban.ac.uk/ about- us/ our- history/ rudolf- laban. oxfordhb-9780199314201-Ch1-10.indd 144 7/3/2017 9:11:37 AM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Jul 03 2017, NEWGEN The Motion of Memory 145 Laban invented a system of movement notation called Schrifttanz (dance writing) and later Kinetography or Labanotation, which is still in use. Despite the huge poten- tial of his system, his dance pieces have been notated only sporadically, and fragmented scores were dispersed in several archives with other kinds of documents (notes, reviews, letters, pictures, and drawings). Laban also speaks about his dances in many publica- tions, but only some of these have been translated into English; therefore some of his writing is inaccessible for readers unable to read German. Whereas Preston- Dunlop’s personal memories and archival research, as those of other former Laban pupils, have contributed substantially to the rediscovery of his theories and practice between the 1960s and the late 1990s (Maletic 1987; Hodgson and Preston- Dunlop 1990; Preston- Dunlop 1966– 1967, 1979, 1983, 1989, 1990, 1993, 1998), her recreations are still the only such experiment. A more recent attempt to collect the rich archival documentation concerning Laban’s choreographies, albeit not supported by a clear critical scrutiny, has been carried out by the German scholar Evelyn Dörr (2004, 2008), who also published two biographies of Laban, one in German that included his years in Great Britain but without any scholarly apparatus (2005), and one in English, limited to his German years, but containing detailed references (2007).7 The absence of footnotes in both Preston- Dunlop’s and Dörr’s contextualization of Laban’s theories and choreographic works makes these volumes appealing for a large readership, though rather problematic for historians. Finally, Rudolf Laban: Man of Theatre by Preston-Dunlop has provided a the- oretical compendium of her recreations (2013). In this chapter I argue that Preston- Dunlop made her recreations a central tool in reviving his repertoire, but simultaneously applied a very specific interpretation of the ideological substance of Laban’s thought and practice to them. Preston-Dunlop’s recre- ations aim at making some of Laban’s dance pieces available to contemporary audiences and new generations of students. However, in so doing she has focused exclusively on dance pieces created by Laban in the 1920s and has highlighted selected aesthetic and ideological features, interpreted as innovative and progressive, while disregarding the most reactionary and controversial aspects of his dances, which have been uncov- ered by other studies based on archival research and now widely shared methodolo- gies (Guilbert 2000; Karina and Kant [1996] 2003). More specifically, these scholars worked in the archives of the Propaganda Ministry of the Third Reich, bringing to the surface many forgotten aspects of Laban’s life and career. These studies foregrounded hitherto unfamiliar aspects of the ideological scope of Laban’s dance theories, partic- ularly his political engagement with the Third Reich, and furnished detailed explica- tions for his departure from Germany in 1937. They also agree that Laban’s involvement with the regime lasted for a period long enough to allow him to play a crucial role in the transformation of German dance and body culture into a powerful tool for the diffusion of Nazi ideology (Guilbert 2000; Kant 2016; Karina and Kant [1996] 2003).
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