Review of Laban's A Life for Dance (1975)

Laban, Rudolf. A Life for Dance: Reminiscences. 1935. Translated by Lisa Ullman. London: MacDonald and Evans, 1975.

October 8, 2024 (updated October 10, 2024)

A Life for Dance is the autobiography of Hungarian movement theorist, dancer, and choreographer Rudolf Laban (1879–1958) and was translated into English from the original German by Laban's life-long collaborator Lisa Ullman (1907–1985). Originally published under the title, Ein Leben für den Tanz, in Germany in 1935 during Nazi rule, Laban curates a selective recounting of his life (which is, I argue, what the genre of autobiography inescapably is) up to the 1930s. He spends much of the book describing his dance works and choreographic practices, his training and career development, his childhood growing up in Bratislava (then part of Austro-Hungary), his ideas about dance and movement, and his multitudinous racist views of Black, Chinese, and Indigenous peoples and other people of color. He divides the book into three sections, the first of which deals with his childhood, his discovery of his love for dance during his military training, and concludes with his first clear interest in community and festival dancing with his arrival in Germany. Part two regards Laban's developing notions of festkultur, or "festive culture", and the relationship between what he calls at times "inner life" (an individual's internal motivations) and its outward expression through movement. Key to this part of the book is Laban's work in Munich prior to World War I, the economic struggles of company work in the interwar period before and during his residence at the Hamburg Zoological Gardens, and his 1926 tour of the United States for the purposes of "ethnographic study". Part three covers the arc of his entrance into career success in the late Weimar period and the further development of his ideas of community and festive culture and dance's role in fomenting these. The primary focus throughout the book is on articulating Laban's philosophies of festkultur, community dance, and movement and how these emerge in specific dance works of his. What the book does not cover are Laban's romantic entanglements or his children, who go unmentioned. While some significant political and economic events, like World War I and the period of hyperinflation in Germany which followed, do at times intrude upon the narrative, Laban leaves out any mention of developments like the disintegration of Austro-Hungary, the fall of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of Nazism.

There is quite a bit that could and indeed should be critically analyzed in close detail about A Life for Dance, much more than I will be able to accommodate in this brief review. Nonetheless, it remains to be noted that even with the frequency with which this book appears in bibliographic citations within dance history and movement theory scholarship, some major recurring themes still remain largely if not completely untouched even though they figure quite prominently in Laban's own narrative framing. Two important topics that I will reserve for analysis in my paper, "Hyperrhythms: Hyperobjects, Ecological Rhythms, and Dance without Nature", but that nonetheless merit brief mention here are: one, how race and ethnicity are constitutive of Laban's very notion of space (as well as movement expression) and not merely sociocultural artifacts found within and coincident with space, and, two, how Laban's childhood experiences of the Austro-Hungarian military presence in Bosnia and Herzegovina and his ethno-religious and racialized ideations around danger, land, and adventure were foundational to his colonialist embodiments in the spaces of Black, Indigenous, and Chinese people in the United States in the mid-1920s where his notion of "inner life" found its philosophical grounding. Both are immensely rich topics which add further evidence to a larger trend of cultural appropriation by white choreographers in Europe and the United States who mined exoticized cultures of the subaltern for movement, choreography, and performance thematics in the service of consecrating modern dance's identity and cultural capital. These are deeply vital topics that require the detailed attention that a longer piece of writing affords, which is why I mention them here but reserve that work for elsewhere.

At the level of philosophical importance and not strictly speaking word count, Laban's autobiography is as much about race as it is about dance. To say so requires no clever reconfiguration of what Laban tells us himself from within this piece of writing. Laban informs us of this himself, though in his own ways of structuring and expressing this thinking since his way of conceptualizing race reflects his particular habitus, which is, to be sure, environmentally and historically rooted. While racist statements can be found throughout the autobiography, part two, chapter three entitled, "The Titan", offers a particularly concentrated collection of Laban's racist thinking. In this chapter, the only chapter in the book which closes without an accompanying illustration, Laban discusses his travels to the U.S. for the purposes of "ethnographic studies" in 1926 just prior to the death of his mother, which we learn about through a footnote by Ullman but that the author himself does not mention. Laban covers his travels from New York, where he arrived for his tour of the U.S., to California, Arizona, New Mexico, Chicago, and "along the Mississippi"—a geographical reference which curiously does not correspond to any specific references to urban centers along the Mississippi River though we do know that Laban visited Illinois, a state whose western border is constituted by the Mississippi, from his description of his time in Chicago.

This chapter is pivotal for a number of reasons: first, it took place at a time prior to the majority of Laban's published writings, meaning that the potential for this trip to have been formative in Laban's evolving understanding of his movement theory is strong; second, it provides the clearest articulation thus far in the book of Laban's theorization of the relationship between "inner life" and its expression through outer movement; and third, it provides the author with the most diverse groupings of people with which to demonstrate his racism. Recounting his visit to a hotel in Los Angeles, Laban makes reference to workers who he seems to believe are mixed race Native American and Japanese, which, while certainly possible, seems unlikely given prevailing attitudes at the time about racial mixing among Japanese issei (first-generation) immigrants in addition to their hyper-awareness around the racial hierarchies in California and the U.S. The veracity of their mixed race status, notwithstanding, Laban nonetheless deploys the Spanish term, "Indios", to refer to these workers, which is itself a term rooted in a long racist history of Spanish conquest and colonialism in the Americas that corresponds more or less to the English near-cognate though it carries with it a different history of meanings and racialized suppositions that do not always correspond one to one with the English variant. Why Laban chooses here to use a Spanish term is itself a curiosity (it seems unlikely that this was a choice imposed by Ullmann's translation). Laban then offers this statement about the "nimble" workers: "A race eager to serve, their subordination inborn." (Laban, [1935] 1975, p. 117) Here the author redeploys a common racist trope with a long and storied history of its own which seeks to impose the myth of innate natural order to racial hierarchies, which are in fact deeply artifactual sociocultural constructions. To have described these unnamed workers in this way reveals far more about the objective and very real racial anxieties of the white people, like Laban, who would deploy it than it does about anyone else.

Other racist statements abound, but for reasons of space, I will examine here just one more to illustrate my point. The statement deals with another interaction between Laban and Indigenous people in the U.S. Southwest—either Arizona or New Mexico (Laban doesn't say which). In this case, the author's commentary is mediated by statements which conceivably could be construed, though incorrectly so, as complementary and therefore as possible evidence against an assessment of outright racism on Laban's part; however, it is precisely this untidy ambiguity that I believe gets at the heart of the complexity of Laban's racist imaginary and, in contrast to the last example, reveals the ways in which apparently positive attributions to Indigenous and other people of color does not in any fundamental way disprove racist ideation. As we will see, the supposedly positive—at least at a surface level—is interimbricated with negative attributions. Laban describes a Native dance ceremony, which he was invited to witness, stating at length,

The basic patterns of human movement are probably never so clearly structured as in the dances of the Red Indians. Therefore, to the casual observer they appear to be very simple, even unvaried and monotonous. Yet, the Indian possesses a high dance culture with definite ethical features. But the demon-like elemental powers which come to light are often completely inhuman. It is as if one senses the impact of natural forces, the inner reflection of the raging tornadoes, thunderstorms and catastrophes which sweep this part of the world. One feels the endlessness of open prairies and deserts, and the ruggedness of the towering rocks and mountains, amongst which these people live. (Laban, [1935] 1975, p. 127–128)

It is clear that with the references to "simple", "unvaried", and "monotonous", Laban anticipates transparently racist interpretations by other white observers or readers, which reveals at some level his understanding of how racism works to erase or see past complexity so as to impose a myth of simplicity. This also further suggests that he does not see these interpretations as unlikely, which could also indicate that he is responding in some way to his own impressions—even if he ends up disclaiming them—, and exposes the degree to which Laban understands his prospective reading audience to be white and racist. We know, then, that he writes for a colonizer audience which is precisely what necessitates the hedging statement. In the long tradition of early white anthropology, he is "sympathetically" translating the subaltern for consumption by the European colonial metropole in something akin to the Lacanian tradition.

Apparent sympathies notwithstanding, he proceeds in the very next sentence with emphasizing the "demon-like" and "completely inhuman", tethering inhumanity to the very moment of apparent sympathy and attempting to inscribe it within Indigenous dance ceremony. I mean this completely unironically when I say that this is precisely what white sympathy means in practice: apparent understanding modulated by and constructed from an otherizing gaze based in the presumption of absolute difference which is at once and indistinct from absolute distance in which the gazer's ability to comment with authority (about something that they are quite literally witnessing for the first time) is guaranteed by their racial position within whiteness and which is self-convinced of its sincere relation even as that very act of relating is the literal and metaphorical denial of the humanity of the observed. Laban surreptitiously and indirectly substitutes himself for the Indigenous dancers by rerouting their specific practices and embodiments through the waystation of supposedly shared "basic patterns of human movement" which is coded as an objective, and yet transparently underarticulated, universality. This coding, which is unimpeded by a sense of obligation to substantiate its claims through detailed analysis of the dancers' embodied expressions—the very thing we are supposed to credit Laban for "pioneering"—and is instead substituted for vague metaphorizing and sweeping adjectival descriptions, is precisely what allows us to read into Laban's statement his substitution of his own body and embodied experiences for those of the Indigenous dancers because we know through more than a half century of critical race theory and critical ethnic studies that claims to the universal are an operation of whiteness, white science (remember, Laban calls this trip an "ethnographic study"), and the effort to universalize particular, partisan, and deeply local European cultural practices without acknowledging them as such (hence, their ability to pass for "universal"). What Laban claims he witnessed is in fact an interpretive curation of what he believes is most relevant to translate for his audience of readers, which cannot but be rooted in how he has framed his own perception of movement as he has embodied, sensed, and intellectualized it. His white body—because of its whiteness—disappears into the interstices of a philosophy of the universal (which is different from saying a "universal philosophy") so that he can see through and past Indigenous bodies to his own bodily truth. Saidiya V. Hartman's crucial analysis of the white witness as voyeur in Scenes of Subjection (1997, p. 3) is apt in this analysis as well as her remark about "the interventionist role of the interpreter" (p. 11). The fact that Laban does not identify the specific Native group by the name which they have given themselves and which Laban erases in order to blandly subsume them under the visualist racial category of "Red Indians" is wholly consistent with his interpretation which wants to read inhumanity and the charged notion of the "demon-like" into his viewing because it denies them their claim to self-definition—a further effacement. Alexander G. Weheliye's observation about "how deeply anchored racialization is in the somatic field of the human" (Habeas Viscus, 2014, p. 4) is everywhere apparent here.

Another matter presents itself in Laban's description, which is the invocation of the trope of Native peoples' proximity to nature. His statement about sensing "the inner reflection of the raging tornadoes, thunderstorms and catastrophes which sweep this part of the world" in the dancing, which he phrases conditionally ("as if"), is a curious one. As already mentioned, the dance movements themselves are absented by Laban's description. Again we are left having to sort through a tangle of ambiguous metaphors to try and see past Laban's effacements, a task that, to be clear, cannot reconstitute the original movements without the help of additional sources other than Laban. This manner of erasure through recontextualizing metaphors undermines Laban's later stated conviction about the importance of preserving dance through notation, which he speaks so grandly about in the autobiography's closing chapter as he laments that "[t]he dances of Pavlova have already been buried with her. Must we also lose the works of our present dance-generation?" (Laban, [1935] 1975, p. 184) What I am not asserting here is an expectation that Laban should have been able to deliver to the reader the result of a near-instantaneous notation in real time of the complex dance movements performed by multiple dancers. Instead, what I am pointing out is the yawning gulf between Laban's poetically stated assertion about the value of preserving movement knowledge in written form and the complete absence of even one clear, literal description of the movements that these Indigenous dancers performed. "Ethnographic", indeed. What does emerge as important to Laban, however, is his desire to emphasize images of nature in describing the dancers' "demon-like elemental powers", which redeploys the "noble eco-savage" stereotype of Native peoples. Rather than a description of the embodied movements of the dancers, what Laban actually delivers is the projection of a nineteenth-century European colonialist trope in place of the dances that the trope claims to speak on behalf of. That Laban perceives no irony between his stated commitment to dance notation and his failure to deliver anything close to a literal description of the Native dances that he witnessed is not the result of mere oversight. It poignantly echoes the long history of European colonialists extolling their "universal" philosophies that were always and from the start never intended to be universally applied across the arbitrarily drawn racial boundaries that they stretched around the world. Importantly, we find in Laban's textualization without movement notation of these anonymized Indigenous dances a striking parallel to a process that Edward Said identifies in his analysis of the Napoleonic Description de l'Égypte texts, which is

to dignify all the knowledge collected during colonial occupation with the title 'contribution to modern learning' when the natives had neither been consulted nor treated as anything except as pretexts for a text whose usefulness was not to the natives; [...] to make out of every observable detail a generalization and out of every generalization an immutable law about the Oriental nature, temperament, mentality, custom, or type [...] (Said, [1978] 2003, p. 86).

Laban's hubris in his assumption of having understood, and to have believed to have understood so completely, so thoroughly, from the observation of a single ceremony without the need for Native explication, historical or cosmological context, or even the slightest sense for how the Indigenous dancers understand themselves, their dances, what they express or do not express in moving as they do, and to what or whom their dances connect them, in short, to not appreciate or concern himself with all that is and was meaningful and sacred in their dancing and yet to nonetheless have seen what he was already primed to perceive because it was central to the professional artistic identity that he was building for himself in Europe and because it was central to how he wanted to view his own capacity for understanding movement—from where it emerges and what it expresses—was a fait accompli. This is what makes possible such a confident assertion about what he believes are "[t]he basic patterns of human movement" without the need to discuss movement in any specific way, without the need to actually connect even one pattern to one motion. His confidence in asserting it to be so is clearly understood to be wholly sufficient and unquestionably so because, after all, the very fact of the presence of his white body and the expanse of his white gaze that sees through Indigenous dances into movement universals and plains and mountains and tornadoes has extracted such a rare, precious knowledge for the white audience back home in Germany justifies his authority. It is assumed, which is why it need not even be stated. It is the logic of Orientalism realigned with an Indigenous North American context that barely needs naming, whose specificity, whose names, whose group identity, whose specific location are somehow sufficiently described in the terms "Arizona"/"New Mexico" and "Red Indians". Far more important to Laban is the exciting novelty of the knowledge which he believes to have extracted in service of burnishing his status and identity as an arbiter of movement universals and articulator of a new philosophy of movement.

Speaking of hubris, Laban paints himself as the singular hero of his story and though he at times acknowledges the contributions of others, he does not do so by name—with there being only a handful of exceptions, namely Kasperl and Raphael. Everyone else is either anonymized or given a moniker like "Queen of the Night" or "the angel". The reader is entirely reliant on Ullman's footnotes for the names of exemplary students and collaborators. Detractors remain unnamed by Laban without exception. The meager attempts at humility that he offers come off as feigned on Laban's part and the role they play in softening the recurring statements of self-recognition appear more to facilitate their inclusion than to hold them at arm's length or to minimize them. These gestures toward humility are significantly undercut by his numerous references to his superlative reception and the grandiosity of their nature combined with the fact that these inclusions recur throughout the writing. One particularly eye-popping example from early on in the book stands out above the rest to demonstrate this point:

It also brought me the honour of being compared to Shakespeare. I am not recounting this out of vanity, but for the sake of dance-composers of the future to whom Shakespeare could indeed be an inspiration to create tragic-comic, comic-tragic dance-works which could open the eyes of the general public to the blessings of dance-experience." (Laban, [1935] 1975, p. 9–10, emphasis added)

The fact that the author thought this compliment worthy of the introductory chapter and less than a dozen pages in is telling and not inconsistent with a grandiose view of self. The author's choice in forwarding this wildly superlative comparison to the reader indicates at least some level of embrace, and it is equally notable that the ensuing comment about inspiring future generations of dance-composers does nothing to disclaim the comparison. Indeed, it does quite the contrary.

It is from this basis that I am left with the suspicion that Laban may have had what would now be categorized as narcissistic personality disorder. If this supposition is correct, it would go quite a long way toward explaining how his children—not the metaphorical ones to which he refers in his role as "father" to his dancers but rather his actual biological children—never receive a single mention in his autobiographical narrative, presumably because "a life for dance" is not one in which his offspring figure in any meaningful way for him, possibly because he did not see their inclusion as furthering his grandiose narrative. A narcissist who, by definition, views people as objects—mere means in the service of the grandiose false self—and not whole beings with their own complex feelings and aspirations worthy of consideration could hardly be expected to behave much differently. Whether Laban's sense of self rises to the level of narcissism in the clinical sense or simply corresponds more closely a man with narcissistic qualities is not mere conjecture for its own sake but rather reflective of a need to reflect critically upon Laban's self-understanding in the context of a man who on the one hand made the idea of community central to his philosophies of choreography and festkultur and on the other hand keeps locating himself at the center of meaning-production within the communities through which he moved. This is no mere tangent: I believe there "is a there there"—to use the phrasing of my colleague and friend, dancer and choreographer Jessie Young—when one considers the interplay between the role of a grandiose individual working to concentrate his social and cultural capital (in the manner of a charismatic leader), his advocacy of community (which can be read as fidelity to in-group identity), and the ways in which Labanist thinking and processes were amenable to certain notions of political organization and oppression (fascism in Nazi Germany in the 1930s). While the matter of ausdruckstanz being serviceable to the National Socialist state is a topic that has been well covered, the possibility of Laban's narcissism or narcissistic qualities and how these align with or become adaptable to the charismatic leadership model of fascist politics offers an area for further exploration.

So, in the end, who is this book for? Clearly those interested in German modern dance history specifically or modern dance or proscenium theater traditions more broadly will find something of value here. My hope with this review and my scholarship related to Laban more broadly is to help move these audiences toward a more thorough and critical engagement with the interthreading of race and racism with philosophies of space, movement, and performance as well as the history of dance performance practices, as is so clearly the case in Laban's work here and elsewhere. Certainly for this reason, critical ethnic studies, dance studies, and performance studies will find much to be teased apart here. What I think this book does not do, however, and in spite of claims to the contrary, is provide anything close to an objective presentation of universal performance and movement philosophies, whatever one may think about the possibility of objectivity to begin with. As I have sought to demonstrate here, this is a deeply racist text. To say so is really just to take Laban at his own word.