The Art of Movement Studio
Rudolf Laban his life and work
Der Freie Tanz - The Free Dance
Laban and two women by a tree
Laban in Zurich
Laban schools in 1927
A floorplan for Titan
Schrifttanz
A drawing from the 1920s
Laban in Berlin
The 1936 Berlin Olympics
The Art of Movement Studio
In late 1937, Laban was in Paris. He was in terrible health; his spirits broken.
Lisa Ullmann, with whom he had worked in Hamburg in 1924, organised for him to come to Dartington Hall in the UK. Here Kurt Jooss (also a former pupil of Laban) and Sigurd Leeder had set up a dance school.
At Dartington, Laban met the management consultant, F W Lawrence, with whom he would create a new approach to industrial production. In 1947 they published Effort (London: MacDonald and Evans) where they introduced a new form of notation for the dynamic aspects of movement.
The previous year, Lisa Ullmann and Sylvia Bodmer had opened the Art of Movement studio. It consisted of two rooms on the first floor of a building on Oxford Road in Manchester.
It was very different from the glory days in Germany, but it was the beginning of Laban’s second life as an educator in the field of dance and movement.
His ideas quickly attracted the attention of two Schools Inspectors, Ruth Foster and Myfanwy Dewy. Laban’s ideas rapidly filtered into primary school curriculum.
Through his 60s and 70s, Laban pioneered two new approaches to movement: in industry and school education.
Dick McCaw
