Beginning in the late 19th century, avant-garde European artists began to move away from representational painting. They wanted to create a new art that was non-representation, yet deeply expressive. For example, August Endell proposed “an art with forms which signify nothing, represent nothing and remind us of nothing, which arouse our souls as deeply and strongly as music has always been able to do.”
Thus music – expressive, abstract, free from any necessity to refer to the natural world – came to be seen as an exemplar for the new visual arts.
Around the time Endell proposed an abstract yet expressive “form art,” a young Rudolf Laban was studying art and design in Munich with Hermann Obrist, Endell’s teacher and friend.
It would be another decade plus before Laban shifted his focus from visual art to dance. But these early contacts with theories of modern art surely played a role in Laban’s theorizing of modern dance as a form art, one that is abstract and expressive, with a harmonic structure analogous to music.