Rudolf Laban: The Dancer of the Crystal (review)

Rudolf Laban's life does not easily submit itself to the demands of biography. The almost overwhelming volume and variety of his artistic, professional, and romantic pursuits, not to mention the overarching grandiosity of his vision, resist linear narrative and thematic structure. Evelyn Doerr's admirable attempt, Rudolf Laban: The Dancer of the Crystal, provides an impressively thorough description of Laban's life and work from his childhood in turn-of-the-century Bratislava through his death in the UK in 1958. Meticulously researched and annotated, this account offers readers detailed information about every facet of Laban's life and work in chronologically ordered chapters. While much writing on Laban tends to overlook his artistic achievements in favor of his theoretical work, Doerr writes extensively about his choreography, going so far as to include an elaborate year-by-year listing of individual works in the appendix. The scope and depth of this information will be useful to those studying Laban, who will no doubt be able to sample relevant selections and discover new and fascinating facts about their subject. However, because of the sheer quantity of these facts and because they are all presented with equal emphasis, the book is slow going for those who might wish to read it from start to finish.

The "Prologue" imagines Laban on 1 August 1936 secretly watching Mary Wigman's choreography for the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Berlin. In Doerr's day-dream, Laban somewhat bitterly muses about his own rejected choreography for the program (a piece here translated as "Of the Thaw Wind and the New Joy") and then, as "Ode to Joy" blares from the amphitheatre loudspeakers, renews his sense of hope and commitment to dance. It's a lovely image, but I would have much preferred an introductory chapter laying out Doerr's concerns, arguments, or thematic considerations. While Doerr offers up minutia such as the menu at a sanatorium at which Laban stayed in 1912 (oatmeal, pumpernickel, hazelnuts, and honey, among other items), she doesn't give us much in the way of interpretation or analysis. The chapters are divided into short subsections with titles like "Laban Falls in Love," "No Dada Soireés without Laban Ladies," and "The Fulfillment of a Dream," which can seem to trivialize the material. Originally published in German in 2005, the writing in this edition feels stilted, perhaps because three different translators (including Doerr herself) worked on the project. In addition to the odd subchapter headings, awkward sentences like, "The Tietjen-Reinhardt-Project was meant to bring a fresh wind into a theater life lamed by the worldwide economic crisis" (148) further jolt the reader out of engagement with the narrative.

There are many rich tidbits about Laban's personal life—for instance, his reliance on women, not least his mother, for economic as well as intellectual support—and important explanations of the development of his work. Doerr's description of the evolution of Labanotation (a term coined not by Laban himself but by Ann Hutchinson Guest) is especially edifying. However, because of the information overload and the absence of a clear focus, one misses a sense of Laban's position within dance and movement studies and the arts more broadly. Laban interacted with an amazing array of the most important artists of his time, including Émile Jacques-Dalcroze, James Joyce, Rainer Maria Rilke, Isadora Duncan, and many of the Dadaists, and his work has influenced fields from theatre to sport to ergonomics to psychotherapy. But Doerr presents Laban in a quasi-mystical light that deflects historical and cultural contexts.

However, Doerr does delve into critical issues in one section that focuses on Laban's involvement with National Socialism in the years leading up to WWII. This is a controversial topic, and in the past students of Laban's system of movement analysis (myself among them) were told a comforting story of Laban fleeing the Nazis, as did...