Around 1913, Rudolf Laban abandoned his career as a visual artist to enter the field of dance. At that time, dance was the perennial “poor relation” of the other arts, a discipline defined more by what it lacked than by what it offered.
Traditional and genre-bound in practice, dance depended for its existence on a body to perform it and faded away the minute the performance was done. It was an ephemeral art, like music or theatre. But unlike these arts, dance was exclusively ephemeral, largely lacking in literature, history, scholarship, and theory.
Laban focused his energies on altering such conditions. He championed the cause of dance: as a profession, as a recreational lay activity, and as a mode of education. He created a flexible dance notation system that allowed works of various genres to be recorded and restaged. He wrote and published, he performed, he choreographed, and he taught many others who subsequently made their own contributions.
Laban has left a rich legacy for future generations. His wide-ranging studies culminated in an empirical framework (Laban Movement Analysis) comprehensive enough to be considered a general theory of human movement.
Yet Laban’s legacy is in danger of being squandered. Find out more in the next blog.