I’ve had an ambivalent, lifelong engagement with exercise and movement, striving to balance an enquiring mind with an increasingly anarchic body. But alerted to dance historian Marion Kant’s online lecture, Rudolf von Laban, Reactionary Modernist (Insiders Outsiders Festival, October 2020) based on her revelatory book, Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich, I felt my life rear up before me.
Inventor of a Central European modern dance philosophy during the 1930s, Laban’s theories, terminology and practice still permeate an international umbrella of schools and academic institutions. Hearing that his mission had been to train teachers in the relationship of dance to the `spiritual’ world, I felt sickened to hear of his active compliance with the Nazi project, his ideas shaping dance politics and infiltrating the core of National Socialism. For I was an early member of a three-year teacher training course designed to introduce his movement concepts labelled Modern Educational Dance into the English state education curriculum, based at the Laban Art of Movement Studio, Addlestone, Surrey only five years after he died there in 1958.
Overseen by a clutch of devoted female acolytes in the thrall of a recently deceased, godlike figure spoken of in hushed tones, I’d only ever had a hint of Laban’s ill doings, seeing photographs of naked dancers, arms thrown wide, circling him during one of his annual summer schools on the shores of Lake Maggiore. I imagined they were all simply being continental.
My father’s oft repeated phrase: the cult of the individual held new meaning as a curtain of secrecy surrounded us. Cloaked in mysticism, this Svengali character who for some reason hated theatre and especially ballet (although he’d been Ballet Master at the Berlin State Opera and director of Prussian State Theatres in Berlin from 1930-1934) only liked abstraction, advocating an anonymous anti-narrative in which music was secondary to the far-off murmurings of one’s soul.
I was never a believer. I rebelled against a constriction into geometric structures and systems that never felt holistic to me. Laban’s theories compartmentalising human movement into combination patterns drawn from four key elements felt reductive and – like their title: Efforts – exhausting. I always felt out of kilter.
I remember the mantra flow, flow, flow pressed on this uncomprehending ingenue by principal Lisa Ullman, Laban’s long term companion and carrier of his flame as a dozen first year students stood rooted inside the Saltarium dance studio like arthritic branches.
“It’s her period,” someone murmured. “She’s passed out because she‘s forgotten her tablets.”
Janet Barrand had just collapsed on the sprung floor beneath us as we attempted to mark through a cycle of actions at full pelt. We froze, mid-swing, eyes fixated on her slumped body draped like a shroud over our trembling feet.
“Dance on! Just dance over her,” commanded Lisa with a wave of her arm.
Trapped in an open prison, I longed to rush to London, hit the racks of zigzag striped miniskirts at Biba’s Kensington Church Street boutique, slick on a purple lipstick and race to the US Embassy at Grosvenor Square to throw myself into the massed anti-Vietnam protest, pushed back by mounted police with batons swinging, then trail off to a basement party in Elgin Grove where all the walls were painted black.
“You’d better retrace your steps and come with me to the principal right now. I’m going to report you to the headmistress, after which you can go straight back to Edgware and apologise in person.”
We’d been farmed out to Cockfosters for a third `educational` year: Trent Park Training College, latterly Middlesex University, now luxury housing estate. It was a dark, chilly November afternoon. I’d sidestepped teaching practice at a girls’ school in Edgware to attend the Russian Hamlet at the Everyman Cinema, Hampstead on my mother’s birthday, 17th November, 1965. I was sneaking down the mile-long drive towards the pineapple obelisks at the gates: my exit to freedom, when I walked slam into the invigilating teaching inspector with her galumphing tread.
`The question is: Do you want to soldier on – or leave? In which case, you’ll need to pay back three years’ grant fees.’ (principal Dr Theakston).
Later reading Kant’s book translated from the German, I discovered that my instinctive aversion to Laban’s practice had been accurate from Day One. I’d never been convinced of his ethics of `higher purpose’. So much obeisance and misinformation, particularly over his exit from Germany, when he wasn’t pushed but simply ran: cravenly grappling to stay in the good books of Goebbels and Hitler, clinging by his fingernails to the top ledges of the Reich’s `artistic‘ policy as choreographic maestro, actively overseeing massed choirs feeding into the 1936 Olympic Games until internecine power squabbles turned against him.
Famed for his anti-fascist Green Table choreography, Laban’s student Kurt Jooss had seen the writing on the wall and left Germany in 1934. He’d been hosted at Dartington Hall, Devon – a haven for émigré artists fleeing Nazi persecution – by philanthropic owners the Elmhirsts. Generously supported by Jooss, Laban settled in Dartington but ended up diverting funds earmarked for his former pupil – to himself.
Over fifty years later, this new information was hitting me in the face. A perpetrator of Nazi concepts, Laban accepted an anti-Semitic racial ideology that permeated every aspect of the Reich’s detailed infrastructure controlling the arts. He evolved racist–pure `villages’ of dancers, Nazified his dance workshops and refused to teach Jews wanting to study his method. From as early as July 1933, he ruthlessly removed all pupils branded as non-Aryans from the children’s course he ran as ballet director. Scroll forward twenty years and that could have been this nonconformist, secular Jew he rejected. In a servile letter ending `Heil Hitler!’, he stressed that he was a faithful, reliable ally of the Nazis in `the great artistic rebuilding of our state’. He directed major festivals of dance funded by Goebbels from 1934 to 1936: `We want to dedicate our means of expression and the articulation of our power to the service of the great tasks of our Volk. With unswerving clarity our Führer points the way.’
This obsession with mass movement (and the music of Carl Orff) had propelled our group of shivering `two plus one year’ students into epic performances inside rainy Llandaff Cathedral circa 1965, marking through a bleak dance drama detailing the life of the Picts, heavily weighted down by oversized tin helmets.
A member of the right wing, occult Masonic Lodge Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) and other racial organisations advocating purity of the blood, Laban espoused number theory, mysticism, cult worship and the secret properties of crystals.His choreographed symbol of sun worship even integrated the Swastika. It turns out that those mind wrenching symbols comprising his form of dance notation known as Kinetography Laban were themselves derived from Germanic runes.
`From the waltz to the gas chamber: everything had to follow the correct administrative procedures.’ (Kant: Hitler’s Dancers).
As an employee of the Ministry of Propaganda promoting ‘Aryan’ movement `within a culture of homogenous ethnicity based on scientific racism’ (Kant), he supported the Nazi ban on jazz as `nigger dance’, to be replaced by the sidestep waltz: `a racially pure German movement for the white race.’ (Laban)
He was signatory along with Goebbels to an official Ministry of Propaganda letter inviting American modern dance pioneer Martha Graham to perform during the `36 Cultural Olympics in Berlin. Disgusted on moral grounds, the politically principled Graham commendably rejected an opportunity that would have granted her group international recognition and later danced for Roosevelt.
I shiver to recall the whispers and denials of collaboration detailed in ‘Dance under the Swastika: Rudolf von Laban’s influence on Nazi power,” a PhD dissertation by Christine Dickson I’d turned up on the Internet, (doubtless influenced by Kant’s own research), whose contents I had inconceivably blocked out.
Coerced into a movement training – so insular, so narrow, untheatrical and suburban, I’d felt starved of inspiration save from dazzling TV choreographer Geraldine Stevenson, the only one with chutzpah. Gerry bequeathed me a passion for intricate dance steps that later fed into my own choreography enlisting fellow students: melding the poetry of Lorca & TS Eliot with the jazz tones of Darius Milhaud to give benefit performances for Medical Aid for Vietnam.
Apart from our hardy band of movement survivors, my only other salvations: a free-thinking art teacher who had prompted me to turn a dustbin into a Naum Gabo-style installation and erudite English teachers Jean Brooks and Susie Roseveare. Through a creative amalgam of challenging lectures, close reading and vivid commendation of everything I produced from poetry to prose, they’d paved my way forward when all else had threatened to block it.
Only when I’d left the narrow confines of the Studio and Trent Park did I begin to find inspiration from equally liberating influences: Sir Ken Robinson, doyen of creativity in education and promoter of boys’ dance in particular; revolutionary drama teacher Dorothy Heathcote, developmental movement pioneer Veronica Sherborne (a Laban student herself), creative listening guru Rachel Pinney, radical theatre director Joan Littlewood and a myriad other dance/theatre innovators.
Creativity had been a keynote of those formative student years and is still my guiding principle. That process was exploited by a man whose vision embraced fascism and whose dance ideas, masking his sinister politics, formed the basis of movement education within British schools flourishing from the 1960s. Art and culture can never be stripped of their founding impulse. However innocent, my association with the mindset of a complicit Nazi has left a taint that refuses to evaporate. Its half-life lingers. (Norma Cohen: Oct,2021)
Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich (Lilian Karina & Marion Kant, Berghahn Books, 2016)
Dance under the Swastika: Rudolf von Laban’s influence on Nazi power (Christine Dickson, 2016)