For dancers of the German-speaking world, the 1926 publication of Rudolf von Laban's Choreography, vol. 1 [Choreographie, erstes Heft] marked an important moment. Since the turn of the century, Laban (1879–1958; née Rudolf Jean Baptiste Attila de Varalja) had been hard at work in his schools and workshops across Europe developing a new theory and practice of dance. The slim technical volume, part theoretical treatise, part practical guide, aimed in sum at “the mastery [Beherrschung] of movement through explanation” (Laban Reference Laban1926, 2, italics original).Footnote 1 Laban's model for this vision was simple: a free-stranding, freely moving dancer. Poised to direct herself independently at will—and able to recognize what Laban outlined in the text as “Gegenbewegung,” or “oppositional movement” undergirding all physical action and force—the dancer controlled her limbs, communed with her environment, and, through her swings, hinges, and leaps, conquered the space around her.
In other words, Laban defined dance as a form of freedom achieved through physical “mastery” (Laban Reference Laban1926, 2). This article examines the contours of Laban's vision, particularly as a form of positive liberty—what political theorists and historians of political thought define as an “autonomy-based conception” of freedom in which
a person is free only if she is self-directed or autonomous. Running throughout liberal political theory is an ideal of a free person as one whose actions are in some sense her own. In this sense, positive liberty is an exercise-concept [as opposed to an opportunity-concept]. One is free merely to the degree that one has effectively determined oneself and the shape of one's life.” (Gaus, Courtland, and Schmidtz Reference Gaus, Courtland, Schmidtz and Zalta2018, italics original)
In contrast to negative liberty, defined by a long tradition of political thinkers from Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) to Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) as a freedom from restraint, positive liberty locates freedom as the outward expression (“exercise”) of an internal (“self-directed”) state: the founding premise of European expressionism (Kandinsky [Reference Kandinsky and Sadler1911] 1977, 29).
For the purposes of this article, I define liberalism as a set of beliefs that “accord liberty primacy as a political value” (Gaus et al. Reference Gaus, Courtland, Schmidtz and Zalta2018). Similar to Laban's vision for dance, liberalism centered around the image of free, individual movement, and contained a set of views grounded in social contract theory (articulated first by Hobbes and later by Jean Jacques Rousseau [1712–1778] and Immanuel Kant [1724–1804]), supported by a subset of beliefs in private ownership, the rule of law, political reform, and individual rights. Finally, in the case of both positive and negative liberty, the relationship of the individual to the law is key. In the former, law blocks potential threats to self-expression, while in the latter, free individual movement extends from it. Though not a term Laban himself employed, positive liberty describes his approach to movement as a form of self-direction and mastery rather than the absence of restraint.
Laban developed his theory in a series of articles and monographs published throughout German-speaking lands from 1919 to the end of the 1920s. In these, he described a way of moving that required a balance between the physical body, the psychical self, and the rational mind. This balance formed the basis to remake contemporary society, whose many conflicts–between the political right and left, labor and capital, warmongers and peace lovers–would harmonize through dance. The free individual dancer showed through skillful action what Laban understood to be a set of universal laws of governing all people and the cosmos: what after World War II would come to be known as his “Harmonic Theory of Movement” [Harmonielehre der Bewegung, also known as “Choreutics”] (Laban Reference Laban and Ullman1966).
As early as 1919, however, Laban described how the active exercise of body, mind, and spirit revealed the “spatial configurations, shape transformations, and their laws” [“Raumformen, Formwandlungen, und ihre Gesetze”] (Laban Reference Laban1926, 2). Laban envisioned a process by which a singular dancer, optimizing her freedom through “shape transformations and their laws” (2), symbolically and physically united the multiple bodies surrounding him or her—of a given group, community, or society at large. Through displays of physical mastery, the dancer authorized the rule of law, which for Laban encompassed a system of rules regulating physical movement and space onstage or in the studio, as well as society, culture, and everyday life. Laban's theory of dance, in other words, was a theory of politics.
To show this, I combine two bodies of scholarly literature: the history of German dance and the history political thought. Scholars of German dance have called for a more precise understanding of Laban's politics. Marion Kant, for example, has exposed Laban's “high conservative” and “anti-Enlightenment” values (Kant Reference Kant2002, Reference Kant, Jackson and Shapiro-Phim2008), while Kant, Lillian Karina, and others have documented Laban's alliance with National Socialism beginning in 1933 (Karina and Kant, Reference Karina, Kant and Steinberg2003; Guilbert Reference Guilbert2000; Manning Reference Manning1993; Müller and Stöckemann, Reference Müller and Stöckemann1993). More recently, Susan Manning has reconsidered the significance of dance in the Weimar and Nazi periods, thus “illuminat[ing] the stakes of dance historiography” for the study of culture and politics more generally (Reference Manning, Kowal, Siegmund and Martin2017, 397).
Bringing their analyses into contact with the history of political thought helps make sense of Laban's complex, and often contradictory, body of ideas. Crucially, Laban developed his approach to freedom in response to two overlapping historical contexts: the collapse of European liberalism following World War I, and the early years of the Weimar Republic beginning around 1919. Legal and political historian Henning Grunwald has recently shown the intersection of political thought and performance during the Weimar era, demonstrating how political party lawyers on the right and left transformed courtrooms into a “revolutionary stage” in which ideas about political justice, ideology, and order developed through live displays of theatricality (Grunwald Reference Grunwald2012, 4). Meanwhile, political theorist Hagar Kotef has shown that the “freedom of movement remains at the heart of liberal conceptualization of freedom,” (Reference Kotef2015, 4) articulated within the history of political thought as the abstraction of an individual's physical or embodied motion. Thus, if political liberalism has historically been understood as movement abstraction—and if during Weimar the “revolutionary stage” transformed law via performance—Laban's theory reveals how abstract movement (i.e., modern dance) functions as a theory of politics. As I will show, despite Laban's clear “anti-Enlightenment” attitudes such as his völkisch heroism, Nietzscheanism, mysticism, and romantic anti-capitalism, he grounded his theory of dance in an essentially liberal approach. Thus, just as scholarship by Kotef and others reveals the “illiberal” values (e.g., imperialism, racism, ethnonationalism) contained within liberal theories of freedom (Bell Reference Bell2014, Reference Bell2016; Kotef Reference Kotef2015), I hope to show how dance enabled Laban to yoke together contradictory positions toward individual liberty, the rule of law, and the nature of the human self.
At a moment of extreme political instability, Laban articulated how universal law could reconcile existing and foreseeable conflict between people, while dance formed a cosmic totality for nature and society, “the total immersion in the flow of movement that permeates all life” (Laban Reference Laban1948, 95). As a totality, dance enabled both individual and collective bodies to discover cohesion in movement, which, moreover, existed as something dynamic and vibrant. In contrast to cultural practices, modes of thought, or institutional structures—state, religious, scientific, economic—out of step or time with human needs, dance as a “flow of movement” liberated social subjects of tired practices and values that hindered peaceful coexistence. Dance revealed social order as flowing harmony through each individual's active exercise of freedom extending from law.
Much like his contemporaries in Germany, Europe, and the United States, such as Mary Wigman Émile Jaques-Dalcroze and Isadora Duncan, Laban confronted what he believed to be a brittle social order caused by conflicts between its members, and instead offered dance as the new basis of the social contract. In contrast to Duncan and Jaques-Dalcroze, Laban did not account for its origins. Instead, like Wigman, his colleague and eventual rival, Laban focused on strategies for his contemporary moment, envisioning the key to social stability in an individual's boundless movement.
Laban's dancing subject is the anchor for what I label in this article as “embodied conservatism,” a conceptual and practical orientation of positive liberty (i.e., dance) toward the goal of reshaping society according to principles of harmony as universal law. Practiced by Laban, Wigman, and others, embodied conservatism was not a comprehensive program for politics or aesthetics, but a framework to understand dance's mission in a modern (i.e., industrial technological) society. Over the course of the 1920s, embodied conservatism worked in service to the political right, as it activated a number of illiberal features embedded in its notion of freedom (e.g., nationalism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, the belief in an elite leadership and social hierarchy). Put differently, embodied conservatism was a social theory that accounted for the contradictions of contemporary life by fashioning the collective body according to the movements of each of its moving members, who, through a mixture of nonrational feeling and rational recognition, thus authorized its “grounds of assent and social order” (Shapin and Schaffer Reference Shapin and Schaffer1985, 100). Seeking to “conserve” harmony through dance—and to harmonize society—embodied conservatives revealed the false dichotomy splitting the modern social self: a Kantian model of rationality, on the one hand, and Nietzschean (as well as psychological and psychoanalytic) model of nonrationality and desire, on the other. Rendering traditional binaries between mind and body irrelevant, embodied conservatives showed that there could be no Zarathustra without strong institution, no kingdom of ends without tragic culture.
My reading of Laban departs from many of his biographers, who have noted his liberal origins (Bradley Reference Bradley2009; Preston-Dunlop Reference Preston-Dunlop1998a, Reference Preston-Dunlop and Coen1998b, Reference Preston-Dunlop2013; Dörr Reference Dörr2005, Reference Dörr2008; Dörr and Lantz, Reference Dörr and Lantz2003). In his memoirs, Laban underscores the influence of his family, members of the educated, liberal Habsburg elite (Laban [Reference Laban and Ullman1935] 1975). For these authors, Laban's liberal upbringing offers explanation for what they, and Laban, claim as the disjuncture between his theory of dance and his involvement with the Nazi Party: his embrace of Nazism had little to do with conceptual or political interests but stemmed from personal naiveté, “lack of reflection,” and “political ignorance” (Dörr and Lantz Reference Dörr and Lantz2003, 26). Susanne Franco and others have offered important challenges to these accounts (Franco Reference Franco and Franko2018; Karina and Kant Reference Karina, Kant and Steinberg2003; Guilbert Reference Guilbert2000); like them, I offer an alternative reading. Although Laban claimed dance as a German national project, he also claimed, along with many others, the free individual dancer as the symbol for transcendent universalism. This orientation provided a flexible approach to politics at a time of tremendous upheaval, allowing him to strategically position himself along a shifting political spectrum at will. Precisely because Laban never self-consciously identified as liberal, he—as well as Wigman and others—was not bothered by the collapse of European liberalism during the 1920s and 1930s.
This article proceeds in three parts. First, I outline Laban's early career, focusing on his initial characterization of dance as positive liberty connected to universal law, and his vision of the dancer as a balance of nonrational feeling and rational thought. Then, I turn to Laban's writing in the early 1920s to examine the contours of embodied conservatism and demonstrate his theory of dance as an intervention in the history of Weimar political thought. Finally, I trace Laban's ideas from the mid-1920s to 1926 in his stage works as well as in Choreography, vol. I and show how Laban's notion of Gegenbewegung revealed a fully developed theory of dance as politics that contained within it ideas developed in his early writing.
Dance as Positive Liberty
Born in Bratislava in 1879 to a family of Habsburg elites, Laban began his artistic career at the fin-de-siècle with a series of failures. Laban lived briefly in Paris before relocating to Munich, where he made unsuccessful attempts as a painter in the artistic circles of the Blaue Reiter and the literary circle of Stefan George (Preston-Dunlop Reference Preston-Dunlop and Coen1998b). A series of early performance experiments around 1912 led him to choose movement as his primary medium, and he relocated the following year to Switzerland to cultivate his dance career. Yet his exposure in Munich to Kandinsky's spiritually oriented color theories—and his involvement in Paris with mystical practices of Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism—formed the durable core of his ideas about dance. At the time, Laban read work by Heidelberg crystallographer Victor Goldschmidt, who argued in On Harmony and Complication [Über Harmonie und Complication] (Reference Goldschmidt1901) that a set of geometric structures displayed the unity of all organic and inorganic matter as material, visual, sonic, physical, psychic, and physiological “harmony” (Goldschmidt Reference Goldschmidt1901). Laban would return to Goldschmidt's arguments throughout his career, citing his work as proof of universal law as harmony. Laban took cues from Goldschmidt, frequently employing the image of the crystal as a symbol for harmonic order, arguing that human physiology and motion—from the most pedestrian actions to elaborate, intricate movements—all mirrored crystalline structure: the “forms, tensions, and proportions of a [body that is] determined by the same harmonic laws as the generation of shapes of the crystal” (Laban Reference Laban1920a, 36).
In the summer of 1913, Laban divided his time between Munich, where he had opened his first dance school, and the life-reform artists’ colony of Monte Verità in Ascona, nestled in the mountains of southern Switzerland. Assisted by Jaques-Dalcroze Institute students Mary Wigman (then “Wiegmann”) and Suzanne Perrottet, Laban created masonic-ritual performance pieces and taught expressive movement courses entitled Tonkunst (sound-art), Wortkunst (word-art), Bewegungskunst (movement-art), and Plastikkunst (sculptural-art). Laban would condense these categories a few years later into his motto for the basic principles of harmonic order: “Dance, Sound, Word” [“Tanz, Ton, Wort”]. Meanwhile, Laban's professional reputation grew, and the next summer, following the outbreak of war, Laban, Wigman, and Perrottet moved to Zurich, where they remained for its duration at Laban's school and where Laban began recording his ideas for a notational system for dance (Preston-Dunlop Reference Preston-Dunlop and Coen1998b, 2).
Laban welcomed Zurich as a change of pace from Germany, where prior to Reference Laban1914, elites controlled the centers of its cultural production, making it difficult for emerging artists like Laban to gain traction (Repp Reference Repp2004). Around 1914, Laban wrote to dramaturge and theater critic Hans Brandenburg expressing his professional frustration, noting that “in the coming months I would have [in Germany] only limited prospect towards the development of my goals.” Switzerland, in contrast, offered new potential. “On all sides [in Germany] I see an aversion to ‘aesthetic’ interests, almost an animosity, particularly against dance, which is so distant from what is going on. Here in Switzerland, a powerful aesthetic wave is building—it's apparent who [goes in for spiritual comfort], since bodily comfort isn't working” (Laban ca. Reference Laban1914, 1–4). In contrast to the staid mores of Wilhelmine culture, Laban sought to cultivate a community that celebrated the embodied experience of the world, in which “aesthetic” faculties—the physical senses, the emotions, and a love of movement and beauty—could flourish alongside intellectual or rational concerns.
As the war spread across Europe and the opposing powers dug deeper into their trenches, Laban, an artillery cadet on reserve for the Austro-Hungarian military, waited to be called up for service (Laban ca. Reference Laban1914, 2). Working intently in this uncertain climate, Laban built upon his networks from Ascona and shifted his energies to experiments in collective living that combined dance instruction with new social order. In 1915, for example, he sought to recreate an Asconian life-reformist community in the Swiss countryside, opening a “life-arts school,” the Labangarten (Laban Garden), whose motto, “each does all” [“Jeder macht alles”], emphasized individual cultivation, antispecialization, well-roundedness, and spiritual and physical balance as the basis of communal life. Promising courses in handwork, healthy living, mysticism, and movement, the school failed to garner enrollment—whether due to the war or lack of interest among the local population—and never opened (Dörr Reference Dörr2005, 95–96).
Laban increasingly discovered that his vision for dance fell out of the “wave” of Swiss artistic experimentation, and he struggled to fit in in the circles of the Zurich-based Cabaret Voltaire. In his private correspondence, his optimism shifted to contempt. In August 1916, he wrote, “Cubism, Simultanianism [Simultanismus], Futurism flower here with strength. We have let these currents vegetate as seemingly unproductive. Many interesting things will be made, yet [their] main feature is weariness [Mattigkeit] and perversity” (Laban Reference Laban1916, 4). Given his emphasis on individual cultivation and social harmony, Laban's dances fit poorly with Dada, whose credo Tristan Tzara articulated in 1918 as “a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: Dada … the abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; the abolition of prophets: Dada” (Tzara Reference Tzara and Motherwell1918, 81). Despite their basic differences, Tzara's approach reveals how Laban conceived of harmony synonymous for law: “harmony, the science that finds everything in order” (79). Dance, in contrast to Dada performance or poetry, offered the promise of cohesion, logic, and structure; harmony, in contrast to “protest with the fists,” deepened one's emotions, awareness, and experience of the world. This was a form not of self-expression, but of cosmic law. As Laban later phrased it, “It is erroneous to take dance as the language of emotionality only. It is rather a language of action in which the various intentions and bodily mental efforts of man are arranged into coherent order” (Laban Reference Laban1948, 43).
In 1919, Laban was denied a Swiss visa and called up for military service. Despite his earlier hesitations, he relocated to Germany, a country that possessed as much order and harmony as a Dada manifesto. Worker's strikes and guerrilla clashes between communists and paramilitary groups turned politics into daily sources of fear and violence, while the rocky formation of the Weimar government that year inaugurated the new Republic with a tenor of doubt and disappointment. The signing of the Treaty of Versailles left many Germans uncertain about their economic future, and Article 231, the “war guilt clause,” led many to question whether peace signaled freedom from conflict or a new kind of imprisonment by the Allied Powers. Weary of politics, many Germans turned to the seemingly safe space of culture—and Laban was no different. This retreat mapped onto a generational trend between the Gründerzeit (i.e., “Wilhelmine”) generation whose values were shaped by life under the Kaiser and whose careers rose to prominence during Weimar (e.g., Gustav Stresemann [1878–1929], Thomas Mann [1875–1955], Albert Einstein [1879–1955]); and the “front” or “wartime generation” involved in avant-garde artistic and political experiments (e.g., Walter Gropius [1883–1969], George Grosz [1893–1959], Adolf Hitler [1889–1945]) (Peukert Reference Peukert and Deveson1992, 17–18). Having grown up in the last decades of the nineteenth century in a family of Habsburg elites—Laban's father was a high-ranking military officer, his uncle a head municipal architect in Bratislava, his grandfather a chief physician for a central hospital in Budapest—Laban spent his youth in liberal, German-speaking lands (Vienna, Munich, Zurich); yet upon his return to Germany he encountered, through dance, a younger generation of artists liberated from tradition and convinced that it “was easier to make headway in the world of culture than it was in national politics” (Peukert Reference Peukert and Deveson1992, 18). Over the course of the 1920s, the wartime generation's—and wartime dancers’—cultural visions crystallized into a “nonpolitical normalcy” (18), while elsewhere across Europe, other liberals, likewise frustrated by the failures of party politics, asserted their own allegedly “apolitical” outlooks (Mazower Reference Mazower1998, 37).
Laban committed himself to the “world of culture,” though it was one never free from politics. Beginning in 1919, Laban wrote extensively on dance in the Jena-based periodical Die Tat, founded in 1909 by Ernst Horneffer, whose allegiances to Nietzschean philosophy and freemasonry Laban shared. The journal had been for several years under the editorial supervision of conservative publishing mogul Eugen Diederichs, who, as early as 1903, supported the development of new dance in Germany, publishing monographs by Isadora Duncan (Duncan Reference Duncan1903), Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (Dohrn Reference Dohrn1911, Reference Dohrn1912)—translating their works into German for the first time—and Hans Hackmann (Hackmann Reference Hackmann1918). From 1919 into the 1920s, Diederichs shifted the focus of Die Tat to the political center-right, curating articles on programs for German national renewal, mythic heroism, and “spiritual” and “organic” socialism, as well as mass psychology, education, and critiques of “new liberalism” [Neuliberalismus]. Celebrating nineteenth-century cultural pessimists (and anti-Semites) such as Paul Lagarde, Die Tat contributors offered sharp warnings against Weimar constitutionalist (and Jew) Walter Rathenau, Marxism, and Bolshevism, which as early as 1914 functioned as coded anti-Semitism, and after 1919 figured as part of the “stab in the back” theory of the war by the political right and notions of Weimar as a “Judenrepublik,” or “Jew Republic” (Mommsen Reference Mommsen, Foster and Jones1996, 19; Steinweis Reference Steinweis, Jones and Retallack1993; Weitz Reference Weitz2007, 92–97).
Die Tat featured writing on dance by Laban, as well as other authors and artists such as Brandenburg, Rudolf Bode, and Rudolf von Delius, who extolled dance as a source of spiritual renewal for a crippled nation. From December 1919 to May 1921, Die Tat became a particularly important forum for Laban to articulate the explicit connection between physical movement and social order. Though Laban did not invoke the particulars of party politics, his writings—like those by Die Tat authors describing forms art and culture—argued against Max Weber's assertion that “politics is made with the head, not with other parts of the body or mind” (Weber [Reference Weber, Kaes, Jay and Dimendberg1919] 1995, 92). Laban's inaugural article “The Symbol of Dance and Dance as a Symbol” (December 1919), for example, described the dancer at the center of a unified world of mind, spirit, and matter who would revive the very “sense of power” Weber located at the heart of politics (Weber [Reference Weber, Kaes, Jay and Dimendberg1919] 1995, 92). Dance, combining head, body, and emotions, ignited political change. “Pure dance can first bloom when the moment is right. The first step of the awakening has happened, this renaissance is the transformation of the fate of our race, which has stretched its limbs for millennia. Art—the dance—has its part in it.… We dancers are the pioneers of this new dawn of art” (Laban Reference Laban1919, 675). Asserting that “every timely art can only first form from full blood [vollen Bluten],” Laban positioned himself right of the political center by linking together race, “fate,” and social progress. “If we have realized through dance [tänzerisch erfassen; also translatable as “to dancerly realize”] the eternal and highest symbol of life-will [Lebenswillen], dance, then we have overcome the sorrows and dispute between feeling [Gefühl] and intellect [Verstand]” (Laban Reference Laban1919, 675). Merging nonrational feeling with rational intellect, the dancer harmonized social conflict with movement. At the same time, her conscious “realization” of dance as a cosmic legal force—“the eternal and highest symbol of life-will”—enabled her to actively “overcome the sorrows and disputes” of social or political conflict. Dance, a project of cultural “rebirth,” entailed the awareness of one's fate as a leader, who, like a “pioneer” or colonial settler, sought, conquered, and inhabited new lands.
Laban elaborated his idea of “dancerly” realization as a form of positive liberty, invoking Goldschmidt's idea of the basic “harmony” between all organic and inorganic forms. Most basically, the dancer visualized a series of geometric shapes that formed an invisible calculus of physical space surrounding her. “Polygons delimit the plastic body, the simpler of which is the Pyramid, namely regular bodies of the tetrahedron. The cube, octahedron, and dodecahedron are the fundamental space-configurations [Raumformen] for dancerly [tänzerisch] directional sense” (Laban Reference Laban1919, 672). Linking these forms through her movement, the dancer unified metaphysical abstraction and material reality with outward action and an inner (spiritual, emotional, rational) state. This, in turn, authorized her to move freely through the space around her, as well as navigate her own, internal state of being or feeling. “The Eurhythmy of sequences of single form becomes in group dance the relationship between two visible subjects to one another. The single dance [Einzeltanz] is a duet between dancers and the environment [Umwelt] or dancer and inner world [Innenwelt]” (Laban Reference Laban1919, 673). As the optimal expression of freedom and harmony, dance functioned as the “arbitrator” in the clash of ideas, opinions and beliefs, “binding,” for example, philosophical idealism with scientific materialism into “artistic truth” [Kunstwahrheit] (Laban Reference Laban1919, 669).
Laban's notion of dance as a suprapolitical “arbitrator” distinguished him from some of his conservative contemporaries, such as Ernst Jünger. A member of the “wartime generation” committed to physical mastery as the basis for social rebirth, Jünger understood the embodied individual as always situated within the political fray. In works such as Storm of Steel [Stahlgewittern] (Reference Jünger and Hoffmann1920) and The Adventurous Heart [Das Abenteuerliche Herz] (Reference Jünger and Friese1938), Jünger envisioned the body as a site for political transformation that required the total subjection of the self to authority. Interestingly, despite his many conceptual differences with Laban, Jünger used a similar central image of the crystal to describe this. Like Laban, Jünger recognized the crystal as a symbol for social order, describing crystallography as a “device that illuminates the world and renders it transparent. As such … I find it useful for resolving a dichotomy that often takes a powerful hold on us—the dichotomy that exists between the surface of life and its depths” (Jünger [Reference Jünger and Friese1938] 2012, 3).
For Laban, as for Jünger, physical movement exposed the inner workings of the self and society and united them together under universal law. Laban and Jünger's respective appeals to crystal-life metaphors owed much to earlier traditions of German holism, vitalism, and scientific monism, which often employed images of crystals to explicate law governing the relationship of parts to a whole (see, for example, Haraway, Reference Haraway1976; Harrington Reference Harrington1996; Weir Reference Weir2012). Meanwhile, philosophers across the continent experimented with theories of interconnected energy, flow, and motion. French philosopher Henri Bergson, for example, described a “vital spirit” [“élan vital”] key to understanding human experience as based in feeling and intuition rather than rational deduction, scientific representation, or abstraction (Bergson [Reference Bergson and Hulme1903] 1913, [Reference Bergson and Mitchell1911] 1998).
Comparing Laban's early thought with Bergson's brings into focus the early contours of Laban's embodied conservatism, outlined in the previous section. Bergson imagined human experience not unlike modern dance—“a total immersion into the flow of movement”—yet it was through the break with traditional metaphysics (in particular, Kantian rationality) that would “invert the habitual direction of the work of thought” (Bergson [Reference Bergson and Hulme1903] 1913, 59). For Bergson, the experience of time as a flow opened up the unknown, unpredictable, and conflictual corners of the self. In contrast, Laban's cosmic vision of dance and all nature as a “flow of movement” asserted individual and collective bodies as timeless, stable entities, whose origins accessed a deep past that affirmed harmony as law: “movement, the well of life, which is no longer symbolized but lives eurythmically and represents itself” (Laban Reference Laban1919, 675). While Bergson's vision underscored change, contingency, and flux as constitutive features of the self, Laban's vision cast such elements as qualitative aspects of a human condition willingly, joyfully, governed by order and cohesion.
Bergson would have struggled to support the view that the dancer's access to “the well of life” gave her a stable position from which to act, feel, or think. Confidently rising above politics and social conflict, the Laban dancer turned shifting ground into stable unity. “The power of thought is corporeally realized through the mass of feeling of [vibration] and is refined in the intellect of the act. [The dancer] need[s] no words, [needs] no sound to unite and deeply experience will, feeling and knowledge—and to let flare the accrual of united dynamic engagement” (Laban Reference Laban1919, 675). Dance signaled physical freedom while revealing one's thoughts as “corporeal realization”: authoritative, embodied thought. Unifying physics with metaphysics, the “willing, feeling, and knowing” dancer harmonized disorder and disjuncture. For her, all was within reach.
Embodied Conservatism in Theory and Practice
In the early years of the 1920s, Laban codified his theory of dance as positive liberty and its practical application as social harmonization. Outlined in first a monograph, The Dancer's World [Die Welt des Tänzers] (Reference Jünger and Hoffmann1920), which incorporated passages verbatim from his Die Tat articles, Laban proposed two methods: the establishment and institutionalization of a notational system, and widespread pedagogical reforms established in schools and workshops. Laban envisioned the former as a lingua franca uniting individuals in the effort to record and restage particular dance works regardless of native language, nationality, or experience. Combined with education, dance notation as the universal, systematic approach to dance affirmed harmony as individual freedom and physical mastery. Summarizing his project years later, he noted, “The educative value of dance is twofold: first, through the healthy mastery of movement, and secondly, by the enhancement of personal and social harmony promoted by exact effort observation” (Laban Reference Laban1948, 102). As we will see in what follows, Laban's emphasis on education and notation underscored the vital role of institution as a tactic of embodied conservatism. By 1928, this vision would find practical realization in numerous Laban Institutes, training programs, and summer workshops across Germany and Europe, as well as the Vienna-based journal, Schrifttanz, oriented around his ideas.
Picking up the strands of his arguments from the previous year, Laban clarified that the dancer's social duty hinged upon the positive exercise of her free movement.
The dancer is to me that new human [neue Mensch], whose awareness [Bewusstsein] does not come from the exclusive brutality of thoughts, which creates feelings [Gefühlen] or desires. It is that human, whose clarity of apprehension [Verstand], deep perception [Empfinden], and strong will make him consciously strive to interweave a harmonic, balanced and, in the interdependence of its parts, yet still a moving whole [Ganz]. If you can find a better term than the word “dancer” for this human, such designation will not be a problem. (Laban Reference Laban1920a, 9)
“Consciously striving” to establish harmony—itself a paradox, as a stable yet “still a moving whole”—the dancer was not free from restraint, but free to move. Responding to visions of the human body advocated by schools of rational gymnastics, Turnen, or devotees of muscular calisthenics such as Jünger, Laban understood movement to be orderly and free. A “new human” at the center of harmonic wholeness, the dancer revealed her physical mastery, acquired through years of rigorous study, as seemingly natural. The Laban dancer thus accrued authority through displays of her “second nature,” “a rough synonym for habit, custom, and culture” employed by conservative thinkers at the time that served to “conflate nature with culture … in order to make the contingent appear inevitable” and, like biological and organismic social metaphors, “reinforces the belief that existing institutions are inevitable” (Muller Reference Muller and Muller1997, 19–20).
Emphasizing the idea of stability as movement, Laban noted that his aim was “not to advance norms and dogmas, but rather to arouse dancerly insight [tänzerische Einsicht]” (Laban Reference Laban1920a, 9). Distinguishing science [Wissenschaft] as knowledge systematization rather than standardization, Laban approached theory as a process and not an argumentative endpoint. Dance displayed logic, order, and purpose without abstraction, codification, or fixity. In this sense, it naturalized comprehension as the organic extension of one's physical and psychical self. “The experience of the dance is for the dancer the sense of the world,” Laban declared, echoing his earlier writing. “What the researcher searches for, what the dreamer desires, what the willing covets … the dancer experiences in dance. The dance is the limitless possibility of comprehension [Erfassen] and self-communication [Sichmitteilen]” (Laban Reference Laban1920a, 48). Dance revealed the world as the flowing extension of an individual's body, erasing binaries of mind and body, reason and emotion, rationality and spirit. As a “second nature” that transformed specialized skill into hereditary givens, “dancerly insight” cultivated a “sense of the world” deferent to universal law without fixity.
Laban's approach to dance here aligned with another element of conservative thinking: a tendency toward “positional” rather than “inherent” beliefs. Positional ideologies “do not reflect the interests and needs of a particular group. Rather, they depend on the relations existing among groups. . . . Positional ideologies reflect the changing external environment of a group rather than its permanent, internal characteristics” (Huntington Reference Huntington1957, 468). Embodied conservatism captured a similar ethos through its primary concern for the material “positions” of its moving bodies, situated within an unstable political landscape, while rendering as “natural” and “universal” the specific institutions and practices that developed from contingent circumstances and events.
“The attempt to organize the world as a shopping mall or a barracks,” Laban declared in June, 1920, “led to world war” (Laban Reference Laban1920b, 164). Facing a society in decay, Laban's new human revealed the flaws of Weimar social reform, including forms of “police brutality” and “state law” that failed to establish “true civilization” [wahre Gesittung], a curious phrase with Nietzschean allusions. “The entire ethic of our culture is lazy. The attempts of art, the church, and the State … have failed” (162–163). Potentially inspired by the brief period of relative job growth in Germany around 1920, Laban described pageantry, choric performance, and collective ritual as meaningful forms of gainful employment and the basis for new social, cultural, or political organization. “The recognition of the connection celebration [Fest] and work [Arbeit] should make every person [Mensch], and particularly all organizers of public holidays, celebrations, and amusements, as well as all Volk and youth educators [Erzieher] concern themselves closely with the nature of celebratory uplift [Wesen festlicher Erhebung]” (162). Freeing herself from poverty and shaky leadership by a government unable to provide for the welfare of its citizens, the dancer emerged as privileged member of an elite order—what Marion Kant has described as “Laban's secret religion” (Kant Reference Kant2002)—ready to transform society into flourishing, flowing stability.
Laban's emphasis on institution, self-cultivation, and a stable, hierarchized social order further placed him within a body of conservative thought and practice, whose origins are typically associated with writing by Edmund Burke in the late eighteenth century. During Weimar, conservative parties (e.g., Catholic Center Party, the German National People's Party [DNVP], the German People's Party [DVP]) offered political alternatives to movements on the right and the left; at the same time, forums for social and cultural criticism, including Die Tat and other journals such as the Deutsche Rundschau, Preußischer Jahrbücher, and Der Ring, provided thinkers of various conservative stripes forums to strategize social change beyond the thicket—and stalemate—of parliamentary reform (Steinweis Reference Steinweis, Jones and Retallack1993; see also Aschheim Reference Aschheim1999; Stark Reference Stark1981). Among them were the so-called Young Conservatives, such as Jünger, philosopher Joachim Ritter, legal theorist Ernst Forsthoff, and social theorist Arnold Gehlen, “the repressed right wing intellectuals of the Weimar period,” who, like Laban,
[rejected] mere progress in civilization, thus anticapitalism [sic], anti-Americanism, the development and glorification of the elite. . . . The heroic deed was to overcome what was common and base, action in itself was to serve liberation … [and to show] loyalty to what was one's own, safeguarding of roots, accommodation to the flow of history, to the depths of one's people. … All of pedagogy was permeated with the propagation of secondary virtues: obedience, duty, service, readiness for sacrifice—faith. (Habermas Reference Habermas and Wollin1989, 31–21)
Laban's embodied conservatism captured a similar urge toward action in pursuit of freedom, heroic triumph, and the “safeguarding of roots” in the “flow of history.” It also offered a clear program for religion and spirituality as socially useful tools to cultivate a “readiness for sacrifice—faith.” Laban reimagined the religious believer as a free mover, poised for harmony: “The Christian is the dancer of all dancers” (Laban Reference Laban1920c, 634). Nietzsche, Laban argued, had wrongly dismissed the church as a site to develop a balance of feeling and thought. “Christianity is more than a religion or philosophy: it is life-lesson [Lebenslehre], cultural form, religion, religious knowledge, research, feeling.… What must be done is: to approach the model of the dancing Christian with dancerly experience [tänzerischen Erleben] and to promote the development of the youth of our race [der Jugend unserer Rasse] according to the law of his dance” (634). Contrary to conventional interpretation, Zarathustra—the trickster, philosopher, and dancer of all dancers—in fact needed institution to move, while Christian and non-Christian alike could actively acquire the skills needed to move freely when placed under the tutelage of those versed in “dancerly experience” and “the law” of dance.
Laban's view of the necessary replacement of old institutions rendered useless by cultural or social decay resembled the attitude of Weimar “radical conservatives,” such as legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who argued that a basic antagonism, the “friend/enemy distinction,” formed the basis of political life and required radical alternatives to establish law and order (Schmitt [Reference Schmitt and Schwab1932] 1996). Yet, if for Schmitt liberal democracy entailed an irreconcilable antagonism between individuals, Laban believed otherwise, devising his own radical vision of democratic politics. “Democracy is based on the similarity of soul, body, and spirit among individuals. It will help each individual, to a certain degree, complete the development of his [human] qualities, and will provide a brotherly division of abilities [and] the achievement of life possibilities [Lebensmöglichkeiten]” (Laban Reference Labann.d., 1).
Other radical conservatives dismissed large-scale industrialization while also embracing ideas of technical mastery and authority for the “reassertion of collective particularity” and the “defense against the cultural and political effects of modernity on the body politic” (Muller Reference Muller1991, 697)—“modernity,” in this sense, meaning industrial technology and social rationalization. Laban's affiliation with Die Tat underscored his stance on technology and modern industry: printed in Fraktur typeface and lacking visual images, the journal valorized individual imagination over mechanical reproduction. Laban turned away from rationalization as the key to social progress—explicitly attacking in his later career the methods of Taylorism (Laban and Lawrence Reference Laban and Lawrence1947)—and sought to liberate the individual from a reified, mass culture. In contrast to the bold photomontages and sans serif print of its Weimar contemporaries, Die Tat offered an austere, inward-looking space for social and political visions: such was the world Laban sought in his classes, theory, and stage works. Taking cues from the journal, Laban included only a limited number of images in The Dancer's World, championing thick description over visual reproduction. Lucia Ruprecht has noted Laban's “aversion to dance photography” stemming from his sense of the “intrinsically dynamic nature of the gestural” (Ruprecht Reference Ruprecht2015, 29), yet viewed within this context it can also be seen as a declaration of conservative politics.
Institutionalizing Gegenbewegung
From 1921to 1926 Laban's institution-building efforts took on new force and became instrumental to his embodied conservatism. Despite his disdain for the state, capital venture, or institutionalized bureaucracy, he relied upon all elements to further his vision.
Building institution in Germany's postwar economy was no easy task. Prior to 1919, Laban wrote to Brandenburg about his interest in cultivating a private donor base for his work (Laban Reference Laban1918, 1), yet after 1919 he struggled to find private sponsorship. From 1921 to 1922, Laban turned to state and municipal institutions for support, and after his initial return to Germany served as a guest artist for the National Theater of Mannheim. In the summer of 1922, just as “galloping inflation kicked into hyperinflation” (Weitz Reference Weitz2007, 134), Laban set up workshops in rural Gleschendorf, near Holstein. In 1923, as Germans wheeled carts of paper money to buy a loaf of bread, Laban relocated to Hamburg, where he received municipal support from the Deutsche Bühne and founded a series of dance companies, including the Laban Ballet [Laban Ballett] and the Kammertanzbühne Laban, his chamber company (Preston-Dunlop Reference Preston-Dunlop1998a, 76). From 1923 to 1926, Laban remained based in Hamburg, touring abroad in 1924 to Graz, Prague, and Zagreb, and in 1926 to the United States. While in Hamburg, Laban created the Hamburg Movement Choir,
the amateur performing arm of his company. He was seeking to set up by the end of 1923 a similar institutional complex to the one he had in Zurich: a conglomeration of an amateur school which had to be financially profitable, a dance company which could earn by its performances, an amateur group which paid its own way, an office and secretariat where he could work on his books, his lectures and his movement research, and a room “over the shop” where he could live. (Preston-Dunlop Reference Preston-Dunlop1998a, 83)
The Kammertanzbühne Laban included a large number of dancers—twenty, including Kurt Jooss and Albert Knust—many of whom had relocated with him from Mannheim to Hamburg. Given the economic climate and Laban's own financial difficulties, this was no small accomplishment.
It also demonstrated the significance of stage works in the development of his ideas. In dances such as Tannhäuser (1921), Faust's Salvation [Fausts Erlösung] (1922), Prometheus (1923), Terpsichore (1925) and Don Juan (1926), Laban staged social allegory through themes of harmony, myth, and pioneership. Laban, for example, created works such as The Swinging Temple [Der Schwingende Temple] (1922), whose “overarching theme … was to present ‘individual personalities,’ and celebrate the possibility of their ‘harmonious interaction’” (Preston-Dunlop Reference Preston-Dunlop2013, 44). Inspired by Goethe's color theory, Laban grouped dancers according to hues (e.g., “Red,” “Yellow,” “Green”) with a highly athletic movement vocabulary (e.g., jumps, leaps, swings, arches). Demonstrating for stage audiences the process of social harmonization, the four part dance progressed from the clash of “chaotic movement” and “chaos and harmony” to “the development of space-order [Raumordnung] … over the connection of some dreamy, final disharmonies into a taming by regularity, in which the individual and the absolute unite.”Footnote 2 For Laban, such forms of harmony achieved through the encounter of various oppositions (individual and absolute, disharmony and regularity, dream and reality) were as much social and spiritual as they were corporeal and physical; moreover, individual and group forms of harmony depicted onstage also carried significant weight as metaphors or images of a harmonious social body. As Susanne Franco has recently noted,
The Swinging Temple is an example of [Laban's] commitment to this specific spiritual dimension, dealing with the transformation of a group of people not only from the primordial chaos, as Laban named it, to reality and the celebration of differences, but also from the affirmation of individualism, which led society into tensions and toward final transcendence and harmony. An oscillating group of people stands here for a communal moving body, able to create a virtual temple, a sacred space. This piece, like many others performed by the [Laban] Dance Group, combined abstract forms and organic movements, using principles of contrast and counterpoint, synchrony and asynchrony between individuals and the group, and structured improvisations based on the kinetic intention. (Franco Reference Franco and Franko2018, 153)
Expanding his idea of dance as the exercise of positive liberty, Laban developed mass dance as a space to cultivate individual privacy and ownership. Laban's 1923 Lichtwende [sometimes translated as “Dawning Light”] built upon themes from his choric works at Ascona to show mass movement as a version of the private sphere. The dance, which Laban restaged in 1929 for 500 performers, contained a physical lexicon specific to this task.
The movements were really simpler [than smaller stage dances] and the basic idea of the plays [i.e., choric works] were not stage or show biased. We conquered the space in common swinging and leaping, in measured, slow stepping or sprightly walking and running. It was soon evident that the interweaving paths as well as the bodily attitudes and kinds of movements accompanying them had an import whose significance is rooted in the human psyche. Audiences were excluded for the time being, except for the occasional chance visitor. (Laban [Reference Laban and Ullman1935] 1975, 155)
The mass chorus established an inward-looking space both for each individual and between the individual dancers. Comprised of a series of “pioneers” learning at once to “conquer the space” and master their own bodies, the group formed a necessary context within which this learning could happen. Similar to the dancing Christian, the dance in the movement choir redirected her spiritual and religious urges toward the maintenance of stable, social order. “But the main aim of the movement-choir must always be the shared experience in the joy of moving. Actually, the expression ‘joy of moving’ does not fully describe the fundamental idea. It is to a great extent an inner experience and, above all, a strengthening of the desire for communion” (Laban [1935] 1975, 157). In fact, participation in the group deepened (“strengthened”) the individual urge (“desire”) to connect with others. This, as Laban's onlookers noted, affirmed the role of ownership through dance as a pathway to self-determination and self-legislation: sovereignty. “Laban makes dance sovereign, in which he fixes law. He gives the dancer the proper material firmly in one's hand” (von Delius Reference von Delius1925, 93).
These small company and choric performances formed an early version of Laban's concept of “Gegenbewegung” [“oppositional movement”] outlined in Choreography, vol. I. As early as 1921, displayed in works like Swinging Temple, through muscular, tense poses counterpoised by relaxed or flowing movements, Laban showed how oppositional tension undergirded all movement. “Bodily tension is always the core of stage performance. If, therefore, movement is not predominantly or exclusively performed in its purest form, it still must be recognized as the fundamental condition of all representation” (Laban Reference Laban1921, 14). In addition to Swinging Temple, Laban experimented with oppositional movement in other stage works, such as Gaukelei [“Jugglers”], “a dance tragedy in five acts” for an ensemble cast that premiered in Hamburg in May of 1923. Dancers with painted faces and fanciful costumes depicted mimes and a cast of fairy-tale characters (“The Fool,” “The Princess,” “The Tyrant”), whose dancing throughout the performance displayed “movement [that] draws a countermovement. It swells and sweeps. It surges and ebbs. It throws itself up, and disappears” (Dörr Reference Dörr2004, 200).
With the publication of Choreography, vol. I in 1926, Laban formalized the idea of oppositional movement from his stage works at the center of his movement theory and notational system, which he codified in 1928 as “Kinetography Laban” [in English: Labanotation]. The book departed stylistically from his other writings, as Laban interspersed his concise prose with charts, line drawings, visual diagrams, and photographs; whereas he had previously offered heady descriptions of “dancerly insight,” ritual education in celebration, and harmonic law, Choreography, vol. I tersely outlined the “formal” rules and exercises for the study of dance. Yet the technical manual was of a piece with his early writing. Laban reiterated his approach as theory without fixity, “as a wave of living, shifting states of transformation” rather than as a codified doctrine of steps (Laban Reference Laban1926, 1–2).
Choreography, vol. I extended Laban's project of embodied conservatism, coding it in the language of scientific universalism. Stripped of explicit references to contemporary culture or politics, dance as a “science” sought to harmonize the social body through individual positive liberty. Laban's concept of Gegenbewegung, which he introduced in the book, taught the dancer to master movement and seize the space around her. The short studies, exercises, and études offered a roadmap for those seeking to institutionalize Laban's ideas in classes and workshops. Choreography featured the same methods of categorization, taxonomy, and classification as The Dancer's World, while the same set of geometric forms from 1919 modeled universal law. In the 1926 edition, this was shown through a series of photographs taken outdoors of individual dancers, naked, and framed by large, free-standing, twenty-sided geometric domes, inside of which they are frozen in twists, spirals, and other dramatic, dynamic poses. Other images throughout the text displayed simple geometric forms (e.g., triangles, cones, or pyramids) superimposed against the human body (e.g., chest, back, shoulder blades) revealing the structural affinities between crystalline structure and human physiology.
With Gegenbewegung, Laban merely reframed his vision of social harmonization. Shifting attention away from the details of contemporary culture to the details of historical dance, Laban coded social critique within the mechanics of dance technique. Gegenbewegung unified the entire body in a continuous flow of movement, encased within infinitely repeating series of harmonic geometric forms such as the icosahedron, thus offering a powerful counter to the founding premise of the danse d'ecole: the rational division of the lower from the upper body. Spatial positions, such as ballet's five port de bras, split the body into discrete parts, sacrificing organic movement of the whole for the temporary mobility of its parts. Though these positions were “valid as points of orientation for the spectrum of pathways”—which Laban himself relied upon for his own movement studies—they offered no “oppositional directions” characteristic of movement as a free flow (Laban Reference Laban1926, 11). As a result, the dancer's “arm directions lose ground to the slope of the foot positions” (11) reifying the body's division and limiting its freedom. Using an illustration of a svelte dancer, encircled by a dotted line, reaching upward with her hand and extending her leg downward in opposite direction, Laban noted that through Gegenbewegung, “harmony therein exists in the two uneven sections that the danced-circumference [Tanzumkreis] through this downward bending diagonal. The limbs, which create the oppositional swing, are therefore always closer to one another on one side of the body as opposed to the other” (11, italics original).
Gegenbewegung, in contrast, accounted for how intersecting directions, pathways, and tensions of individual and multiple bodies harmonized into stable order. “Dance is movement, its tendency is labile. The harmonization of movement is, however, bound up with a certain stabilization … symmetry, balance” (Laban Reference Laban1926, 15). In fact, such “stabilization” and harmony, which manifested on a most basic level as something physical and bodily, and which extended into social, spiritual, and cultural realms, was only possible through forms of counterbalance. Laban's very term carried with it a kind of linguistic as well as philosophical depth, as the preposition “Gegen” refers to processes of more metaphysical antagonistic opposition (e.g., “against,” “contrary to”), not simply physical repulsion or tension. Gegenbewegung proved surface appearances deceptive: asymmetrical movement did not signal disorder, while visual symmetry did not indicate harmony. The dancer's action and intent, therefore, ruled supreme. Thus authorizing the individual to move freely and independently, Gegenbewegung offered the connecting tissue of positive liberty and a vision of competing social orders. One, modern dance, showed how movement led to social harmonization. The other, ballet, showed how movement led to conflict and division. Thinly veiling politics in dance, Laban showed how those who failed to recognize Gegenbewegung were those who attempted to “organize the world as a shopping mall or a barracks” (Laban Reference Laban1920b, 164). It was up to the dancer, an elite yet “natural” leader, to master her freedom, balance her mind and spirit, and remake society.
Conclusion
From 1919 to 1926, Laban developed a theory of dance that was a theory of politics. With his vision of movement as positive liberty, Laban placed dance at the center of the social contract, crafting a vision of the liberal social subject with an essentially conservative, “anti-Enlightenment” view of nature and society. In his writing and stage works, Laban showed how dance, as individual freedom, actively oriented toward harmony, erased traditional binaries of the modern self—split between rational thought and nonrational action or feeling—that led to conflict and confusion.
By conceptualizing Laban's theory of dance as a theory of politics (i.e., embodied conservatism), we can also begin to recognize the close ties between the history of dance and the history of political thought. For readers of this journal in particular, this relationship has significant bearing on our understanding of the politics of German modern dance after 1933. Following the three German “Dancer's Congresses” of 1927, 1928, and 1930 (in Magdeburg, Essen, and Munich, respectively), Laban and others successfully realized his theory of dance through forms of institutional power into the early 1930s. Beginning in 1933, these Laban-oriented institutions adapted to meet the demands of Germany's new, National Socialist regime, yet they contained within them the same ideas from earlier decades. Although Laban was not alone in his support for National Socialism, his theory of dance enabled many to make sense of the radical political change around them, which, when viewed through the lens of embodied conservatism, looked less like politics and more like harmony.
