Rudolf von Laban: The "Founding Father" of Expressionist Dance (Comprehensive Study Notes)

Rudolf von Laban: The "Founding Father" of Expressionist Dance

Introduction and Reevaluation

• Rudolf von Laban is a highly controversial choreographer of the early twentieth century, surrounded by myths as a leading intellectual in modern dance.
• Contrasting Views: Some dance historians laud him as a brilliant analyst of space and movement, while others condemn him for his role as a dance organizer for the Third Reich.
• Purpose of Article: This article, derived from Evelyn Dörr's doctoral dissertation (Rudolf von Laban: Leben und Werk des Künstlers (1879-1936)), aims to provide a critical dance-historical reevaluation of his work within the context of modernity.
• Key Comparison: It elucidates Laban's choreography, spiritual, and philosophical underpinnings, culminating in a comparison with National Socialist choreographic aesthetics, demonstrating significant differences in their conceptions of community formation and control, despite surface similarities in worldview.

Laban's Early Life and Intellectual Influences

• Birth and Family Background: Born in $1879$ in Pressburg, Slovakia, to middle-class parents.
  • Exposed to diverse thought: Grandfather (doctor/physicist) represented modern science, Grandmother embodied Romantic feelings.
  • Mother (socialist) had a liberal orientation, contrasting with his father (imperial officer) who embodied rigid order.
  • These family dynamics reflected larger nineteenth-century cultural shifts, specifically the crystallization of a capitalistic, secular culture, profoundly influencing Laban.
• Life-Reform (Lebensreform) Movement: As a middle-class intellectual, Laban saw this movement as an ideal to escape societal imbalance caused by the breakdown of social relations post-$1848$ revolutions, offering alternatives.
• Darwinian Revolution (1859): Provided scientific justification for a new ideology. Darwin's theory of a unified developmental history of man and nature shifted the previously fixed Judeo-Christian world into dynamic organic development.
• Intellectuals' Response to Meaninglessness: Liberal-minded middle-class intellectuals were horrified by a world organized purely by biological facts. To restore meaning, they sought a new relational system, turning to Romantic natural philosophy, which emerged as a reaction to earlier sociopolitical and scientific upheavals.
• Psychophysical Methods: From $1859$, theoreticians like Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Wundt developed rationalist