From Dance under the Swastika to Movement Education: A Study of Embodied Culture

By all accounts Rudolf von Laban, Germany’s most famous theorist of dance, was an extraordinary man- a visionary, a mystic, artist, dancer, choreographer, womanizer, charismatic teacher and theorist. And he led an extraordinary life, one intimately bound up with the political, social and cultural upheavals that formed the turbulent backdrop of modern Europe. In the decades following his death in 1958 surprisingly few of his pupils or scholars have attempted to analyze the ideological aspects of his work which has tended to evoke either unconditional support or immediate criticism, although the practical utility of Laban notation is widely recognized.

Laban worked willingly with the Nazis as Germany’s dance master before incurring Goebbels’ displeasure on the eve of the Berlin Olympics. He became one of a number of Hitler émigrés who were given refuge at Dartington Hall, a unique arts and educational community in the Devonshire countryside of southwestern England. The Dartington ethos, and his later emphasis upon dance as an educational force - especially the cooptation of his work by female physical educators- had a widespread and relatively unexamined impact upon British primary schools in the years after WW2.

There does not seem to a safe guide through the complex and confusing mindscape of Laban, and it is important to question the ideological moorings of embodied practices – especially in the ways such practices have reflected the cultural landscape of modernity in schools, colleges and other arenas of disciplinary power. Attention to the things human do with their bodies opens up a whole realm of analysis that has been largely ignored until recently and as Marcel Mauss noted cogently, “It is generally in these ill-demarcated domains that the urgent problems lie… this is where we have to penetrate.” My critique will borrow views of body culture and notions around techniques of the body from Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu and Henning Eichberg as well as Marcel Mauss.