The Motion of Memory, the Question of History

Transcription

1 Chapter 7 The Motion of Memory, the Question of History Recreating Rudolf Laban s Choreographic Legacy Susanne Franco The subject of this chapter is the dance works created by Rudolf Laban ( ) in Germany in the early twentieth century, some of which have recently been recreated by Valerie Preston- Dunlop in the United Kingdom. Laban, one of the leaders of Ausdruckstanz, the German dance of expression was a protean figure who worked as a dancer, choreographer, ballet- master, writer, educator, movement analyst, and director of cultural institutions. Preston- Dunlop, one of Laban s best- known pupils, who in the 1950s studied with him in Great Britain, thus becoming a leading figure of the Laban tradition, recreated selected works by Laban in partial collaboration with the choreologists and movement analysts Alison Curtis- Jones and Melanie Clarke, both former students at the Laban Centre (London) and later members of the teaching staff at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. This institution is the only one in Europe still carrying Laban s name, 1 and derives from the merger in 2005 of the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance in London with the Trinity Conservatoire of Music. 2 These recreations, all performed by students first of the Laban Centre and later of the Trinity, have been partially recorded on a series of DVDs, each available independently, which include interviews with Preston- Dunlop and her collaborators, reflecting on the need to document and disseminate knowledge about creative processes as opposed to simply recording reconstructed performances. 3 1 The only other institution is the Laban/ Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (New York), established in 1978 by Irmgard Bartenieff, a Laban pupil and a senior member of the Dance Notation Bureau (New York). 2 The Laban Center was founded in 1975 in London and derived from the Art of Movement Studio founded in Manchester in 1946 by Laban and his pupil and partner Lisa Ullmann. 3 The complete collection of recorded versions of these recreations is held at the Archive of the Trinity Laban, and the commercial DVDs have been published by Dance Books (London). A standard program oxfordhb ch1-10.indd 143 7/3/2017 9:11:37 AM

2 144 Historical Fiction and Historical Fact Laban worked in Switzerland during the 1910s, and in 1920s and the early 1930s had an intense artistic career in Germany; he moved to Great Britain in 1937, where he spent the rest of his life teaching and researching movement. Preston- Dunlop recreated only his solos and group pieces produced in the 1920s by the two companies Rudolf Laban founded: the Tanzbühne Laban (Laban Dance Group), and the related smaller Laban Kammertanzbühne Laban (Chamber Dance Group). 4 Until Preston- Dunlop s recreations, Laban s pupils and scholars gave little attention to his choreographic work and the dance repertoire he created between 1912 and 1936, which did not survive as a living repertoire. The emphasis was rather on the master s conceptual thinking on dance and movement as evidenced in his English- language publications, 5 which became the basis for British modern educational dance and which are still a relevant influence on international contemporary dance. 6 Nevertheless, it is striking that Laban s work as a choreographer should have received so little attention as a significant part of his legacy until the late 1980s. But, where can the traces of Laban s choreographic work be? of the Chamber Dance Group included dances defined as ornamental, eucinetic [cinematic?], ecstatic, ritual, rhythmic, monumental, grotesque, satiric, country, and stylistic, and some longer dance poems. The recreations of Laban s repertoire by Preston- Dunlop include solos such as the ornamental dance Orchidée (The Orchid, 1922), the grotesque dances Marotte (Obsessed, 1925) and Mondäne (The Chic Thing, 1925); and the monumental dance Rosetten (Rosettes, 1925); duos, such as the ornamental dance Krystall (The Crystal, 1925), the grotesque dance Bizarre (Bizarrer, 1923), the ecstatic dance Ekstatischer Zweimännertanz (Ecstatic Male Duos, 1924); a quartet, such as the rhythmic dance Marsch (March, 1923); and a group piece such as the tragic- comic pantomime Oben und Unten (Above and Below, 1922). In 2008, in collaboration with Alison Curtis- Jones, Preston- Dunlap recreated two other pieces, the grotesque pantomime Die Grünen Clowns (The Green Clowns, 1926) and, in 2009, the dance play Night (Nacht, 1927). 4 The first names given to the main dance group were Ballett Laban and Gruppe für neuen Bühnentanz (Group for New Dance), then Kammertanzbühne Laban, and finally Kammertanzbühne Bereska- Laban, co- directed with his partner Dussia Bereska. The name and the concept of the Kammertanzbühne derive from the tradition of chamber music and therefore the emphasis is on a reduced theatrical scale. 5 Laban s first book in English, Effort, was the outcome of his experiment in industrial work together with Frederick C. Lawrence (London, 1947; 4th edition, 1967), but he wrote most of his English books to sustain his teaching, and they were the outcome of his close collaboration with Lisa Ullmann, who also revised some of them after Laban s death: Modern Educational Dance (London, 1948; 2nd ed., 1963); The Mastery of Movement on the Stage (London, 1950); The Mastery of Movement (London, 1950; 2nd ed. of The Mastery of Movement on the Stage, revised and enlarged by Lisa Ullmann, 1960; 3rd ed., 1971; 4th ed., 1980; 1st American ed., Boston, 1971); Ulmann also published the posthumous Choreutics (London, 1966), later republished as The Language of Movement: A Guidebook to Choreutics, by Rudolf Laban (Boston, 1974), and A Vision of Dynamic Space, compiled by Lisa Ullmann (London, 1984). She edited as well the translation of Laban s autobiography A Life For Dance: Reminiscences (London, 1975), originally published in German in Laban s Principles of Dance and Movement Notation (London, 1956; 2nd ed., 1975) was annotated and edited by Roderyk Lange. 6 On the website of the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, Laban s short biographical profile reports that he provided a basis for development in the twenty- first century in studio practices and theoretical methods driven by movement practice, and a spirit of inquiry that unites the scattered and diverse body of people who use his work rather than in outstanding theater works of dance. See about- us/ our- history/ rudolf- laban. oxfordhb ch1-10.indd 144 7/3/2017 9:11:37 AM

3 The Motion of Memory 145 Laban invented a system of movement notation called Schrifttanz (dance writing) and later Kinetography or Labanotation, which is still in use. Despite the huge potential of his system, his dance pieces have been notated only sporadically, and fragmented scores were dispersed in several archives with other kinds of documents (notes, reviews, letters, pictures, and drawings). Laban also speaks about his dances in many publications, but only some of these have been translated into English; therefore some of his writing is inaccessible for readers unable to read German. Whereas Preston- Dunlop s personal memories and archival research, as those of other former Laban pupils, have contributed substantially to the rediscovery of his theories and practice between the 1960s and the late 1990s (Maletic 1987; Hodgson and Preston- Dunlop 1990; Preston- Dunlop , 1979, 1983, 1989, 1990, 1993, 1998), her recreations are still the only such experiment. A more recent attempt to collect the rich archival documentation concerning Laban s choreographies, albeit not supported by a clear critical scrutiny, has been carried out by the German scholar Evelyn Dörr (2004, 2008), who also published two biographies of Laban, one in German that included his years in Great Britain but without any scholarly apparatus (2005), and one in English, limited to his German years, but containing detailed references (2007). 7 The absence of footnotes in both Preston- Dunlop s and Dörr s contextualization of Laban s theories and choreographic works makes these volumes appealing for a large readership, though rather problematic for historians. Finally, Rudolf Laban: Man of Theatre by Preston- Dunlop has provided a theoretical compendium of her recreations (2013). In this chapter I argue that Preston- Dunlop made her recreations a central tool in reviving his repertoire, but simultaneously applied a very specific interpretation of the ideological substance of Laban s thought and practice to them. Preston- Dunlop s recreations aim at making some of Laban s dance pieces available to contemporary audiences and new generations of students. However, in so doing she has focused exclusively on dance pieces created by Laban in the 1920s and has highlighted selected aesthetic and ideological features, interpreted as innovative and progressive, while disregarding the most reactionary and controversial aspects of his dances, which have been uncovered by other studies based on archival research and now widely shared methodologies (Guilbert 2000; Karina and Kant [1996] 2003). More specifically, these scholars worked in the archives of the Propaganda Ministry of the Third Reich, bringing to the surface many forgotten aspects of Laban s life and career. These studies foregrounded hitherto unfamiliar aspects of the ideological scope of Laban s dance theories, particularly his political engagement with the Third Reich, and furnished detailed explications for his departure from Germany in They also agree that Laban s involvement with the regime lasted for a period long enough to allow him to play a crucial role in the transformation of German dance and body culture into a powerful tool for the diffusion of Nazi ideology (Guilbert 2000; Kant 2016; Karina and Kant [1996] 2003). 7 More recently, Evelyn Dörr has also edited a book with a selection of Laban s correspondence. See Dörr (2013). oxfordhb ch1-10.indd 145 7/3/2017 9:11:37 AM

4 146 Historical Fiction and Historical Fact Preston- Dunlop, like other former pupils and dance scholars, has recognized Rudolf Laban s engagement with the Nazi regime, but interpreted it as a consequence of a difficult political contingency (Preston- Dunlop 1989), rather than as a more complex genealogy of both Laban s theoretical and ideological foundation and of German culture (Baxmann 2000; Guilbert 2000). Her recreations, ultimately, reveal her defensive attitude with respect to her master and to a dance tradition that she herself has contributed to. A clear symptom of the emotional dimension of memory and of the lasting effect of repression is Preston- Dunlop s assertion, made in the documentary on her recreation of The Swinging Temple filmed in 2012, that in 1935 Laban, who at that time held an important position inside Nazi cultural institutions, was in danger in Germany (Preston- Dunlop DVD 2012). Preston- Dunlop s research work and recreations are the outcome of the entanglement of (auto)biographical and historical narratives. It is not inconsequential that all the dance pieces recreated by Preston- Dunlop were chosen by her because of her link with both Laban and her teacher Sylvia Bodmer, who was also a member of the Laban Chamber Dance Group. Preston- Dunlop affirmed that her discovery of Laban s repertoire was based on embodiment, described as a process which gives tangible form to ideas [... ] involves the whole person [... ] perceiving oneself [... ] with kinaesthetic awareness of creating and controlling the movement [... ] requires that the dancer identifies him/ herself with the technique s culture (Preston- Dunlop 2002, 7). She specifies that she was able to engage with the archival evidence with a muscle memory and perspective informed by four years of close practice with Laban (Preston- Dunlop and Sayers 2011, 12), but also through what she learned from other teachers and dancers who worked with him (mainly Lisa Ullmann, Sylvia Bodmer, and Albrecht Knust), and from a study of dance pieces of that time, especially by Kurt Jooss (Preston- Dunlop 2013, 31 41). I argue that the tendency to refer only to a genealogical line of direct pupils of Laban, which Laure Guilbert defines as the magical circle of direct affiliations (Guilbert 2000, 428; my translation), also reveals the aim of these pupils to redeem a legendary vision of modern dance and of Laban s legacy. Preston- Dunlop s recreations are the only attempts to breathe new life into Laban s repertoire, and as such they represent a precious occasion to investigate how memorial and historical narratives are at work in the contemporary (and performative) dimension of the repertoire. But can his works be effectively recreated while disregarding their ideological underpinnings? Such disregard is precisely the limitation of Preston- Dunlop s model of recreation, and it is a consequence of her limited vision of dance studies itself since it disregards well- established approaches to Laban s history. In this chapter I will discuss how a dance legacy can be carried on by both historical research and collective and personal (bodily) memories, two approaches to the past that answer to different needs and that articulate different temporal models. To focus on how Preston- Dunlop s personal embodied memory transmits a limited idea of Laban s legacy, I will follow Aleida Assmann s suggestion that active cultural memory is the outcome of what the institutions charged to preserve the past as present do perform as relevant, whereas the archive preserves the past as past or what has been forgotten, missed and oxfordhb ch1-10.indd 146 7/3/2017 9:11:37 AM

5 The Motion of Memory 147 unused (A. Assmann 2008, 100). The transmission of Laban s vision of dance and of his career still suffers from a binary opposing his pupils personal memories (both bodily and oral) to historical analyses performed by scholars in the archive. Aleida Assmann s model envisions instead an articulation of memory with history, based on their reciprocal recognition and on the idea that historiography and memory should be considered as complementary modes of cultural memory. I will argue that Preston- Dunlop s recreations confirm the selective nature of her personal memory and the defensive attitude of her engagement with Laban s legacy, one that inevitably produces an anti- historical reconstruction of the past. This chapter investigates as well how to reconsider the articulation of memory and history by taking advantage of the debates conducted in the new field of danced reenactment, considered as a creative and theoretical approach to both the restoration of past dances and the rewriting of history. Products, Processes, and the Performance of the Authentic As opposed to reconstructions, which aim at reproducing a specific dance work in the present as it supposedly was, Preston- Dunlop self- consciously focuses on the relationship between the past work and the present in which they are re- performed. She names her experiments recreations precisely to distinguish them from reconstructions: If reconstruction is defined as seeking to repeat the parameters of an original performance, by recreation is meant practices that establish a freer relationship to an original work and an enhanced dialogue with the past. (Preston- Dunlop and Sayers 2011, 30) On the one hand, Preston- Dunlop aims to return to dance pieces whose performative traditions have vanished: her embodied knowledge of Laban s theories allows her to act in the absence of living traditions. This approach assumes that bodily memory is an archive that allows her to (re)create something out of what no longer exists, and to bring about the possibility of what she describes as the potential for a freer relationship to an original work. On the other hand, her recourse to other forms of archival documentation and to theories about historical narratives is insufficient to mark a critical distance from the past (what she defines as to enhance a dialogue with the past ). In other words, her recreations seem more like ahistorical reconstructions of dance pieces of the past than theory- based critical reenactment. In a recent article, Preston- Dunlop specifies that with her recreations she aimed at bringing into focus this forgotten heritage and at providing a tranche of cultural, aesthetic, and choreographic discourse valuable and challenging to scholars and practitioners (Preston- Dunlop 2011, 9). Preston- Dunlop s point of departure was her belief oxfordhb ch1-10.indd 147 7/3/2017 9:11:37 AM

6 148 Historical Fiction and Historical Fact that Laban Dance Group s and Chamber Dance Group s repertoire could enrich the contemporary dance scene, the audiences of the twenty- first century, and dance scholarship. From her perspective, recreations are an effective tool to connect generations of students and teachers to the sources of their tradition. She has pointed out that her approach to earlier works is at once in- depth analytical and highly creative. More precisely, she affirms that recreations restore complex and multilayered creative processes to their prominent place by using the same movement and choreographic principles that Laban created for his dance pieces (Preston- Dunlop 2011, 43). She considers these recreations a testament to the endurance of Laban s choreological and choreographic principles, which have survived as embodied practices especially thanks to his pupils. For this reason, Preston- Dunlop is convinced that she could retrace a consistent part of this legacy by interviewing as many former members of Laban s companies as she could, and other pupils to whom he transmitted his theories about movement. 8 Preston- Dunlop adapted some elements of these experiments, such as duration, costumes, and music scores, to stage solutions that she felt more suitable for a contemporary audience. 9 Despite her attention to the creative process vis- à- vis the dance piece itself and the emphasis on the present, Preston- Dunlop does not explore theoretically the ways in which her recreations mediate knowledge by combining corporeal research with archival documentation. More specifically, her recreations set a past work in motion to relive it, but fail to critique it and to problematize the ways in which aesthetics and politics are mutually implicated in this repertoire. Rather, by presenting Laban s dance pieces and thought simply as a clear example of the most powerful period of Ausdruckstanz during the Weimar years, she demonstrates the evidence of their implicit political progressive value. Together with her own historical writings and the recording of these recreations, she also expects to enable contemporary readers and spectators to judge for themselves the value of Laban s choreographic production (Preston- Dunlop 2013, 4). Preston- Dunlop s attitude toward Laban s work in her recreations is ambiguous because she presents them in an apparently ideologically neutral or simplified way in order to make them understandable to contemporary audiences: this constitutes an erasure of the history of which they were a part and expression and implies that Laban s tradition is closer to a progressive and democratic than to a reactionary and proto- fascist oriented conception of culture (Green 1986). The theoretical frame for these recreations is what Preston- Dunlop defined as archaeochoreology, a new disciplinary formation based on the archaeological method used to recover lost dances (Preston- Dunlop and Sayers 2011, 5). As an archaeochoreologist, Preston- Dunlop affirms that her aim was to 8 Preston- Dunlop mentions the following names: Fritz Klingenbeck, Kathe Wulff, Gertrud Snell, Ilse Loesh, Aurell Miloss, Beatrice Mazzoni, Sylvia Bodmer, Albrecht Knust, Kurt Jooss, and Lisa Ullmann. She never met personally Laban s two main performing partners: Dussia Bereska and Ruth Loeszer. See Preston- Dunlop (2013, 33 38). See also the interview between Sylvia Bodmer and Valerie Preston Dunlop while watching a performance of Laban Kammertanz (ca. 1986). 9 See also the interview by Martin Hargreaves of Valerie Preston- Dunlop in Recreating Rudolf Laban s Der Schwingende Tempel 1922 (2012). oxfordhb ch1-10.indd 148 7/3/2017 9:11:37 AM

7 The Motion of Memory 149 discover from the sources what kind of reconstruction, representation, or simulation was appropriate for Laban s dance pieces, but her only reference is the concept introduced by Mike Pearson that [a] rchaeology is not just excavation (analysis). It must in some way synthesize (reconstruct, represent, simulate) the past (Pearson and Thomas, 1994, 135). Archaeochoreology is part of what Laban named choreology, a kind of grammar and syntax of the language of movement dealing not only with its outer form, but also with its mental and emotional content (Laban [1939] 1966). As described by Preston- Dunlop, a choreological perspective moves beyond theories of reading dance that place either the creator, the performer or the audience in a privileged position. It proposes a triadic perspective which examines the inter- relationship of these three positions given the distinct fact that dance [... ] is mediated by living, intending, feeling, thinking bodies. (Preston- Dunlop 2002, 11 12) In other words, choreological studies are an intrinsic theoretical and practical approach to dance form and content, and are considered by Preston- Dunlop as complementary to extrinsic studies such as politics, sociology, and aesthetics of dance, which bring the methodology of their own discipline to bear on dance (Preston- Dunlop 1979, 20). As Mark Franko has pointed out, an approach that aims at functioning as closely to dance as possible has a brand of anti- historical impulse with great debt to the eternal present implied in phenomenology, whereas the historical conditions of its possibility are displaced in the name of dance s immediacy (2006, 9 10). Preston- Dunlop s recreations are the result of multiple shifts from the past to the present, from the product to the process, and from the original work to the authentic bodily performance. Moreover, a recreation should contain something that is not necessarily bound to its time in order to facilitate the contemporary viewers in making theatrical sense out of its original context (Preston- Dunlop and Sayers 2011, 6). The shift from the past to the present also prompts awareness of the impossible task of retrieving a lost work in its original form, precisely because the very act of retrieval produces a new work. Therefore these recreations occupy a strange status in which they are supposed to be recognized as a representation of a work of the past while signaling that they are a representation of what is in reality a contemporary work. The presence of several generations of Laban practitioners Preston- Dunlop, Curtis- Jones, Melanie Clarke, and their students forms an additional layer in the relationship these works establish with their historical background and the personal memories connected to it. As Preston- Dunlop has affirmed, in recreating a dance piece from the archival traces, the bodily memory of the dancers considered as a living archive plays a special role in locating the authenticity of the past (original) work. In Laban s repertoire, she sees the authenticity in both the creative process of his choreography and in the experimental nature of his works, and she aims at reliving it performatively in the present (Preston- Dunlop 2013, 33). oxfordhb ch1-10.indd 149 7/3/2017 9:11:37 AM

8 150 Historical Fiction and Historical Fact Retracing Laban s Choreographic and Ideological Legacy The body of Laban s choreographic repertoire is large and covers three decades, from the 1910s to the 1930s. In Rudolf Laban: Man of Theater, Preston- Dunlop explains why her recreations are limited to Laban s dance pieces of the 1920s by quoting Alfred Schlee, an important German publisher and dance critic at that time, who affirms that this was the most remarkable period of Ausdruckstanz (Preston- Dunlop 2013, 2). She does not explain, however, to what extent this chronological limitation involves the possibility of dodging the production of the 1910s and the early 1930s. Before and during World War I, Laban made his first major experiments in Monte Verità, near Ascona, where choreography and dance were considered important tools to forge a new anti- bourgeois cultural community that would be able to carry the seeds of a social reawakening (Laban 1920). Here his thought and practice were markedly imbued with occultist and mystical themes and were oriented toward the building of a cultic community, and he shared his experiments with disciples of other trends and cults (among them nudists, theosophists, vegetarians), and joined the Ordo Templi Orientis, a version of occult Freemasonry. By adapting its teaching to the art of the body, Laban focused on his ideas of a Festkultur (festival culture) and also created new forms of ritual dance such as chorische Fest (choral festival) (Kew 1999). In 1930 Laban was appointed director of movement and dance at the State Theaters in Berlin (a role that included the position of ballet- master at the Berlin State Opera); after the National Socialists came to power in 1933, he took a leading role in reorganizing German dance, becoming the head of its most important institutions, including Deutsche Tanzbühne (German Dance Theater), the Deutsche Meister- Stätten für Tanz (German Master Studio for Dance), and the Deutsche Tanzfestspiele (German Dance Festival). Laban s vision of a choral (mass) dance for a cultic community was taking its ultimate form with the commission of Vom Tauwind und der Neuen Freude (Of the Spring Wind and the New Joy), one of the artistic events planned for the opening of the Berlin Olympic Games in The movement choir was a new genre Laban created in the 1920s primarily for lay dancers; it embodied his ideal of the communitarian dimension of both dance and society. This movement choir was conceived for more than one thousand participants and was disseminated via notated scores to lay dancers in thirty German cities. Of the Spring Wind and the New Joy was cancelled, however, at the last moment by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Enlightenment and Propaganda minister, who officially justified the decision by claiming that Laban s approach was overly intellectual, though the cancellation was more the result of interpersonal conflicts than of ideological differences between Laban and the Nazi bureaucracy (Guilbert 2000, ). Despite this disappointment, Laban aspired to maintain his politically advantageous positions, but newly appointed officials at Goebbels s ministry curtailed his leadership. In 1937, facing political isolation, he decided to leave the country, and the following year he migrated to Great Britain, where he portrayed himself as a victim of oxfordhb ch1-10.indd 150 7/3/2017 9:11:37 AM

9 The Motion of Memory 151 the regime and where he spent the rest of his life teaching and developing his theories. His artistic career was over. On her side, Preston- Dunlop, like many other pupils and some scholars, depicts Laban s practice and theory as part and parcel of an aesthetically revolutionary and politically progressive European modern dance and claims that the Nazis misused and exploited the irrational component of Laban s thought for their own ideological purposes (Preston- Dunlop 1988, 1998). Preston- Dunlop s decision to work exclusively on Laban s repertoire of the 1920s indeed functions to reiterate this interpretation of Laban tradition as aesthetically and politically progressive. In the 1920s, Laban started to collaborate with important theaters in Germany, founded a network of schools called Labanschulen, an institute named Choreographisches Institut (Choreographic Institute), and his two dance companies. In this context, the participants of his movement choirs became immersed in the flow of movement, taking pleasure in what Laban envisioned as a mystical merging in a cultic celebration. The context of these productions, the years of intense political instability and artistic and cultural efflorescence of the Weimar Republic, is what Preston- Dunlop assumes as the political frame with which to explain the ideological substance of Laban s dance pieces of that time. In doing so, rather than questioning their transformation in the present, her recreations contribute to determining the ways in which figures of thought and regimes of practice are received in the present time and are perceived as dispossessed of the discursive foundations of their historical background. This is even more problematic given the importance Laban accorded choreography as a way of experiencing and knowing the world, and embodying practices as ways of establishing social relations. Preston- Dunlop s recreations do understand dance as a form of knowledge production, but they do not recognize its potential to raise questions about the nature of the very knowledge and practices that are the object of her research. Recreations between Past and Present, Aesthetics and Politics An interesting example of how the multiple problems raised by Preston- Dunlop s approach to Laban s dance pieces intertwine is her latest experiments, the recreation of Der Schwingende Tempel (The Swinging Temple, 1922). Originally created during the Weimar Republic for the Laban Dance Group, and performed in two versions during the 1920s, the piece also represents a unique case in Laban s repertoire because it was partially recreated in 1952 by Lisa Ullmann with Diana Jordan and Sylvia Bodmer using non- professional dancers during a summer school in Great Britain. Probably they were stimulated by the same problem experienced by Preston- Dunlop and Melanie Clarke, who selected it to better understand and explain Laban s controversial spiritual research. Recently, Preston- Dunlop also collaborated on a movement choir dance film event performed at the amphitheatre of the Trinity Laban and featuring musicians and one oxfordhb ch1-10.indd 151 7/3/2017 9:11:37 AM

10 152 Historical Fiction and Historical Fact hundred dancers aged nine to eighty. This choir is based on The Swinging Temple and on the Dying Procession from the second section of Die Grünen Clowns (The Green Clowns, 1926) called War, both considered by the recreators as examples of Laban s response to war s aftermath, chaos, and suffering. 10 Their simplistic interpretation of the structure and the meaning of the piece and their use of it to commemorate the Great War s centennial are revealing of the a- historical perspective of their own work and of their difficulties in transforming this material into a contemporary performance suitable for spectators who have little knowledge of Laban s theories and his history. The outcome is that the historical complexity of Laban's thought and work does not materialize precisely because Preston- Dunlop s recreations and the audience's lack of context fuel one another, thus expanding a memory gap that becomes increasingly difficult to fill. In his autobiography Ein Leben für den Tanz, published in German in 1935 and translated into English only 40 years later, many chapters of which are named after a particular choreography, 11 Laban writes about The Swinging Temple as an image of a community whose goal was to find the perfect harmonic dimension after having experienced individuality and diversity depicted as a negative interlude of human evolution. In this text, Laban affirms as well that this is his vision for the future. Preston- Dunlop and Curtis- Jones refer to this book as one of the major primary written sources for many recreations, and consider the descriptions and critical inputs that Laban gives about some of his choreographies as a starting point to understand their structures and meanings. The genre of this work (an autobiography), the chronological distance between the first productions of these pieces and Laban s descriptions, and the fact that the book appeared in a radically different political context are all unexplored issues in their research work. It would be certainly too easy to claim that Laban only saw in the Third Reich an opportunity to fulfil his artistic vision since it was also a question of his survival. On the other hand, Preston- Dunlop and Curtis- Jones do not properly evaluate the historical context that made his words acceptable for publication. Laban s goal throughout his life was certainly to compose works in praise of the community and of dancing together (Laban 1975, 67) as much as to create communities or school networks where what he addressed as a new harmony could be experienced. Likewise, he decided to invest in dance in a specific historical context, post World War I, where the search for a new and true spiritual content for all the arts was a major interest, enforced by the need to discover a meaningful alternative to the evils of destruction and a way to deal with modernization. He was persuaded that through the ecstasy of dance, human beings could dwell in the realm of pure spirit. Laban s artistic and spiritual vision of the world rejected rationality and preached the 10 In Memoriam 2014 (2015, 30). For a description of the project, see inmemoriam2014.org.uk/ about.html. 11 The chapters named after a particular choreography are Nacht (Night, 1927), Der Schwingende Tempel (The Swinging Temple, 1921), Gaukelei (Illusions, 1923), Der Spielmann (The Fiddler, 1916), Titan (The Titan, 1927), and Alltag und Fest (Everyday and Festival, 1929), in which he discusses the life experiences that were the impetus for each work. oxfordhb ch1-10.indd 152 7/3/2017 9:11:37 AM

11 The Motion of Memory 153 possibility of transcendence (Laban 1920). His Masonic aspirations are mentioned by his pupils and by scholars, yet the social and political implications of this liaison have not been fully considered by his pupils. Not only did he never depart from the framework he constructed in his youth, but his active affiliation with the Masonic order and his engagement in this philosophy nourished his way of thinking about movement, dance, and choreography. For Laban, the communal body was necessary to incorporate the crucial knowledge about harmonic relationships into the individual human being s activity, and harmony was a goal to overcome bodily matter and to access a new spiritual dimension (Kant 2002, 46). The Swinging Temple is an example of his 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 conflicts, 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. The piece, like many others performed by the 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. In Preston- Dunlop s recreation, The Swinging Temple is presented as a dance piece nourished by Laban s spiritual attitude and profound mystical religious commitment, whose traces she has recovered in the sources of his creative process, such as prayer exercises and gestures, the trance- like revolving of the Dervishes, and his Rosicrucian knowledge. She explains Laban s attraction for this spiritual dimension and his tension toward an ideal and ultimate harmonic status of a human being as a typical expression of the German cultural and social context of the early 1900s, but she never binds them to the racist views that were the expression of the reactionary modernism of that time, and of Laban s (and others) aspirations to build a cultic community (Guilbert 2011, 55; Kant 2002). Neither does she inquire into them for their potential in transmitting Laban s occult practices and knowledge through embodiment and actions, and therefore in providing a formal structure for not only his spiritual vision, but also his social and political vision. It is not surprising that in the documentary on her recreation of The Swinging Temple, Preston- Dunlop admits to have introduced delicately these issues to the students learning, performing, and experiencing it. She recognizes as well the difficulties she confronted in transforming the sense of Laban s spirituality into inspiring material for them. This approach to the most problematic and lesser known aspects of Laban s practice and theory is not transmitted as part of a complex historical discourse, but rather as a simplified version of her personal critical perspective. The way in which Preston- Dunlop and Curtis- Jones display Laban s choreographic patterns, making them occupy a cultural and artistic space in our time, renders their recreations even more problematic. Laban s approach to dance was radically new at that time not only because it produced unfinished ongoing fleeting works, but also because it oxfordhb ch1-10.indd 153 7/3/2017 9:11:38 AM

12 154 Historical Fiction and Historical Fact involved the dancers in the creative process. Both companies were resident (in Stuttgart and later in Hamburg), both treated dance as a theatrical art form, and both challenged the audience with choreographic experiments that were often the results of an intense collaboration between Laban and his dancers that also included work on the costumes and the basic stage designs. The Chamber Dance Group, however, was specialized and could be defined as a small- scale repertoire addressed to an audience that followed the entire season and that expected to see a great number of new and varied productions. For this reason, each dance piece could have been repeated on different occasions with totally different costumes, music, and title, performed by a man and then by a woman, and adapted to different spaces and number of dancers. Often, some choreographic sequences and even entire parts of a previous dance piece were adapted to the new one with few changes. Laban did not invent a dance technique, as much as a way of moving the body, a way of looking at it and conceptualizing it through a basic vocabulary of expressive movement and a series of exercises based on correspondences between spatial directions and dynamic qualities and the concepts of weight, time, space, and flow. Improvisation and creativity were considered as crucial as movement theory since Laban s goal was to make dancers aware of internal impulses and their relationship with the possibilities of moving the body. Since most of the pieces were not created entirely by Laban, who also promoted the dancers creative autonomy, they made authoriality a fluid issue. Together with the performative quality of both these unstable artifacts and the process of recovery, the collaboration between the dancers and the choreographer is one of the aspects that Preston- Dunlop seems to have appreciated more about Chamber Dance Group s productions and that convinced her to make them the core of her recreation work. What makes her project problematic in presenting these pieces and their creative process to a contemporary audience is the way she links them to dance history and to its political dimension. The parallel she suggests between Laban s Ausdruckstanz and the postmodern methods of the two twenty- first- century artists is her way of attributing to the dancer- choreographer relationship of the 1920s the democratic political dimension of the 1960s and the 1970s and its relish for exploring process rather than making a fetish of the product (Preston- Dunlop and Sayers 2011, 7). Not only did postmodern dancers in the United States avoid framing dance within the institutional and commercial demands of their time, and took part in civil society s movements against government policies, driven by the need for a better model of democracy and a expanded vision of freedom, but with their practices and performances they also radically challenged the hierarchical model that governed most relationships between choreographers (authors) and dancers (performers) from ballet to modern dance, which involved a collective identification with the desires of one person (Banes 1987, 1993; Burt 2006). Laban s communitarian projects were not a model for egalitarian relationships that entailed the challenging of power dynamics, and the delicate balance between the dancers autonomy and dependency on the master was one of the ambiguous features of the pedagogic model of (German) modern dance (Guilbert 2000, 49). oxfordhb ch1-10.indd 154 7/3/2017 9:11:38 AM

13 The Motion of Memory 155 Circular Memories, Historical Narratives, and the Representation of Temporalities The relationship between archive and (bodily) memory has been largely debated in recent years, and the notion of dance and performance as anti- archive has become central to maintaining that their most constitutive component is ephemerality (Phelan 1993). Other scholars (Franko 2007; Franco and Nordera 2010; Roach 1996; Schneider 2001, 2011; Taylor 2003) have asked what kinds of political and epistemological opportunities are lost, precisely by considering performance as ontologically ephemeral. Together with a new inquiry into reconstruction and authenticity that starts from a conceptual reconsideration of repeatability and reproduction, the field of danced reenactment offers a new practical- theoretical approach to what an archive is with respect to embodied memory. More specifically, in his Introduction to this volume (Chapter 1), Mark Franko asks how the transference of memory operates in the absence of first- person experience. If, as suggested by Rebecca Schneider, reenactments are a form of counter- memory and of re- documentation (2001, 106), we are entitled to ask whose memory is at work in Preston- Dunlop s recreations. And what do they document beside her explicit intentions? In other words, to what extent does the affection for her mentor and the psychological implications of being one of the last of Laban s pupils still involved in the transmission of his vision of dance (but who did not dance them originally) enrich and/ or limit her critical perspective on the historical dimension of this legacy? And, last but not least, how could such great oblivion of Laban s choreographic body of work and more generally Ausdruckstanz, which is considered by scholars and artists as a central phenomenon for the development of European modern dance have followed for so long (Vertinsky 2010)? For a long time the majority of studies concerning Laban s life and career followed an account of the history that resulted from unclear distinctions of roles and professional profiles between artists, critics, and dance scholars. Laban s direct and indirect pupils have transformed their personal experiences and their bodily memories from primary sources into historical narratives, which have been received as authentic by the readership by virtue of the genealogical line of transmission of their knowledge. The mode and timing of Laban s departure from Germany had an important impact in this situation. As he was unable to carry all his personal papers, which were then at the Berlin Opera, they were stored in a private archive until the 1970s and then at the Dance Archive in Leipzig, where they were almost inaccessible for foreign scholars until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Another portion of the documents was held in Great Britain by John Hodgson, a former student of Laban, and became part of his private archive that only in recent years has been made accessible to the public at Leeds University Library. Other documents belonging to Laban and written in several languages were spread in oxfordhb ch1-10.indd 155 7/3/2017 9:11:38 AM

14 156 Historical Fiction and Historical Fact many private archives, whose heirs in recent times donated to public institutions. In Great Britain the documents that Laban brought with him and those he collected until he died were passed on to Ullmann, who donated them to the National Resource Centre for Dance at the University of Surrey, where the Laban Archive was opened in the mid- 1980s, and other material has been acquired by the Laban Centre (Franco 2007). Together, these archival situations explain why the oral transmission of Laban s theories and practices became dominant in respect to the historical approach to his thought and career. Moreover, despite the work of historians who have questioned these narratives and structural models by bringing to the surface the constructed and fragmented nature of individual and collective memory, Laban s historiography can still count on studies based on what is considered firsthand knowledge of this dance tradition. The resistance demonstrated by these authors to different versions of what they assume Laban s history to be should be taken as an integral part of his tradition. Historical research on Laban s choreographic legacy, carried out by Preston- Dunlop, was stimulated by a desire to retrace the historical background of what she knew mainly as a personal (bodily) memory of her education, and by the first extensive archival studies conducted by Vera Maletic, in her book dedicated to the development of Laban s thought and theories (Maletic 1987). A more recent example of this scholarly attitude is the The Laban Sourcebook (2011) edited by Dick McCaw, 12 who conceived it as a tool for Laban practitioners and dance scholars. This Sourcebook, which presents a series of English translations of texts written by Laban and previously available only as archival documents or published in the original German, was also an important reference for Preston- Dunlop as her last recreations of Laban s repertoire. The editor, who is not a scholar, legitimizes himself in this publication by claiming to have become a bodily archive through his practical learning (McCaw 2013, 407). In his general introduction, the son of Sylvia Bodmer, Walter, affirms that he can authoritatively speak about this tradition precisely because of his direct affiliation with it, and all the authors, with the exception of Dörr and Stefanie Sachsenmaier, who have selected and introduced the texts are defined as Laban scholars by virtue of their personal relationship with Laban, as students or dancers (McCaw 2011, 2). 13 For a dance scholar, The Laban Sourcebook and Rudolf Laban: Man of Theatre represent a dangerous model of the circularity of memory, rather than precious resources. Here cultural memory informs historical writings that then become the reference point for recreations structured mainly around embodied knowledge. Preston- Dunlop s personal embodied memory is part of a collective memory, which, following Jan Assmann, is the combination of communicative and cultural memory 12 McCaw comes from a background as a theater festival organizer, has arranged Geraldine Stephenson s private archive (one of the first students in 1946 at the Art of Movement Studio in Manchester), and took some practical lessons with her, and later worked on the Laban archive in Leeds. He is currently a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at the Royal Holloway University of London. 13 Vera Maletic, Roderyk Lange, Valerie Preston- Dunlop, Warren Lamb, Anna Carlisle, Marion North, Janet Kaylo, and Carol Lynne Moore. oxfordhb ch1-10.indd 156 7/3/2017 9:11:38 AM

15 The Motion of Memory 157 (J. Assmann 2008, 117). Whereas communicative memory lives in everyday interaction and communication, and is not supported by any institutions or cultivated by specialists, cultural memory carries events of the past and can be mediated by specific dances and performances as much as by texts. Cultural memory is passed on by teachers, artists, and scholars, among others, and it reaches back only so far as the past can be reclaimed as ours (and not as it is investigated by archaeologists and historians). For these reasons, the participation of a group in communicative memory is diffuse, whereas the participation of a group in cultural memory is always highly differentiated. Moreover, Aleida Assmann calls active cultural memory the interplay of religion, art, and history, resulting from processes of selection and collection managed by institutions charged to preserve the past as present (A. Assmann 2008, 100). These processes, which we call canonization, secure for certain artifacts a lasting place in the cultural working memory of a society or functional memory, a form of future- oriented memory (A. Assmann 2012, 127). Conversely, the institutions of passive cultural memory, such as archives, preserve the past as past, and therefore can be considered as the reference memory of a society or as storage memory. In other words, the archive preserves what has been neglected and creates a meta- memory, a formally organized repertoire of missed opportunities, alternative options, and unused and unincorporated material. Laban s heritage is a combination of active cultural memory (the past as present ), still transmitted after his death by different generations of teachers in the institution(s) carrying his name, and of passive cultural memory (the past as past ), stored in various archives. By preserving the past as present, Preston- Dunlop s recreations produce a selection of Laban s choreographies that makes possible their reception as canonical. More specifically, in Preston- Dunlop s recreations an embodied memory, perceived as a- temporal, and a choreological approach driven by an anti- historical impulse generate what Guilbert defines as a selective memory functioning at the expense of the awareness of the work that history does to the bodies and that produces the oblivion (2000, 428; my translation). In other words, these recreations certainly work not only as systems of storing knowledge of both the past and the present, but also as forms of an active remembering that produces an active forgetting of many aspects and events of this very past. Jacques Derrida reminds us of the extent to which oblivion leaves traces and recommends that institutions should preserve the memory of what they tend to exclude, to avoid the possibility that they can be marked precisely by what they expel because it has been experienced as a threat (1990, 17). But how would it be possible to imagine a dimension where memory and the memory of what has been excluded can interact with history, and embodied knowledge with archival research? Following the idea that history is a dynamic continuity rather than a series of completed events, Preston- Dunlop engaged anew in the creation of a series of works, rather than bringing to the stage dance pieces that have been preserved in their original form. She affirms as well that her recreations can reveal the work s potential for future performances (Preston- Dunlop 2013, 39 41), precisely by securing a lasting place in a future- oriented memory, the working memory of a society. This practical and theoretical oxfordhb ch1-10.indd 157 7/3/2017 9:11:38 AM