The Embodied Conservatism of Rudolf Laban, 1919–1926

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 1926, 2, italics original).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 1926, 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 2018, 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 [1911] 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. 2018). 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 1966).

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 1926, 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...