Rudolf Laban

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Rudolf (Jean-Baptiste Attila) Laban, also known as Rudolf von Laban (December 15, 1879, Pressburg, Austria-Hungary (today Bratislava, Slovakia) - July 1, 1958, Weybridge, England) was a notable central European dancer and dance theorist. Laban's parents were Hungarian, but his father's family came from France, and his mother's family was from England. His father was a field marshal who served as governor of the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Laban initially studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and became interested in the relationship between the moving human form and the space which surrounds it. He moved to Munich at age 30 and under the influence of seminal dancer/choreographer Heidi Dzinkowska began to concentrate on Bewegungskunst, or the movement arts.

Laban established the Choreographic Institute in Zürich in 1915 and later founded branches in Italy, France, and central Europe. His greatest contribution to dance was his 1928 publication of Kinetographie Laban, a dance notation system that came to be called Labanotation and is still used as one of the primary movement notation systems in dance. His theories of choreography and movement served as one of the central foundations of modern central European dance.

In addition to the work on the analysis of dance, he was also a proponent of dance for the masses. Toward this end Laban developed the art of movement choir, wherein large numbers of people move together in some choreographed manner.

This aspect of his work was closely related to his personal spiritual beliefs, based on a combination of Victorian Theosophy, Sufism and popular fin de siecle Hermeticism. By 1914 he had joined the Ordo Templi Orientis and attended their 'non-national' conference in Monte Verita, Ascona in 1917, where he also set up workshops popularising his ideas.

From 1930 to 1934 he was director of the Allied State Theatres in Berlin, in 1937 he fled from by this time National Socialist Germany to Manchester.

In the UK, he re-directed his work to industry, studying the time taken to perform tasks in the workplace and the energy used. He tried to provide methods intended to help workers to eliminate "shadow movements" (which he believed wasted energy and time) and to focus instead on constructive movements necessary to the job in hand. After the war, he published a book related to his research entitled Effort (1947). He continued to teach and do research in the UK until his death.

Among Laban's pupils were Mary Wigman and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.