(b Pozsony [now Bratislava], 15 Dec 1879; d Weybridge, 1 July 1958). Hungarian dancer, choreographer and inventor of a system of dance notation. The son of a general, he was intended for a military career but in 1900 went to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. He became a dancer at the Moulin Rouge, toured North Africa in a revue, and later danced in Leipzig, Dresden, Münster and, in 1907–10, Vienna. In 1910 he opened a school of modern dance in Munich. He worked in Zürich during World War I and in 1919 went to Stuttgart; there he started the Laban Dance Theatre at which Kurt Jooss joined him as a pupil, accompanying him to Mannheim in 1921–3. Laban was ballet director in Hamburg from 1923 to 1925 and founded a Choreographic Institute in Wurzburg in 1926. From 1930 to 1934 he was ballet director of the Berlin Staatsoper. In 1928 he published the first volume of Schifttanz, presenting his system of movement notation, Kinetography Laban, which crystallized many years of thought on the anatomy of movement. For the 1936 Berlin Olympics Laban prepared an open-air performance of 1000 dancers and singers, similar to one that he had produced in Vienna in 1929, but Goebbels banned the performance. In 1937 Laban went to England, joining Jooss and his company at Dartington; during World War II and until 1951 he worked in Manchester, applying his analysis of movement to the uses of industry, and presenting his findings in Effort (1947, with F.C. Lawrence). In 1953 Laban moved to Addlestone, Surrey, where his former associate Lisa Ullmann had founded an Art of Movement School, and he worked there until his death. He published his Principles of Dance and Movement Notation in 1954, by which time his system of dance notation was widely accepted; in 1953 it was renamed Labanotation by the Dance Notation Bureau in New York. The music staves run vertically up the left of the page, and a three-staff column with printed symbols for the choregraphy runs alongside it; it is read from the bottom upwards (see illustration). Laban choreographed many ballets danced in the free, plastic style of modern dance, but none survives.
Die Welt des Tänzers (Stuttgart, 1920)
Choreographie (Jena, 1926)
Des Kindes Gymnastik und Tanz (Oldenburg, 1926)
Schrifttanz (Vienna, 1928–30)
Ein Leben für den Tanz (Dresden, 1935; Eng. trans., 1975)
with F.C. Lawrence: Effort (London, 1947, 2/1974)
Principles of Dance and Movement Notation (London, 1954, rev. 2/1975 by R. Lange as Laban’s Principles of Dance and Movement Notation)
A. Hutchinson: Labanotation: the System for Recording Movement (London and New York, 1954)
New Era in Home and School, xl/5 (1959) [entire issue]
R. von Laban: A Life of Dance: Reminiscences (New York, 1975)
J. Foster: The Influences of Rudolph Laban (London, 1977)
D. Steinbeck: ‘Die Geburt des Freien Tanzes aus der Spekulation: einige Bemerkungen zur Rudolf-von-Laban-Rezeption’, Festschrift Arno Forchert zum 60 Geburtstag (Kassel, 1986), 303–10
V. Maletic: Body – Space – Expression: the Development of Rudolf Laban’s Movement and Dance Concepts (Berlin, 1987)
J.M. Jordan: ‘Laban Movement Theory and How it can be Used with Music Learning Theory’, Readings in Music Learning Theory (Chicago, 1989), 316–32
J. Hodgson and V. Preston Dunlop: Rudolf Laban: an Introduction to his Work & Influence (Plymouth, 1990)
G.B.L. WILSON