26 Facts About Rudolf Laban

Rudolf von Laban, known as Rudolf Laban, was an Austro-Hungarian, German and British dance artist, choreographer and dance theorist.

Rudolf Laban is considered a "founding father of expressionist dance", and a pioneer of modern dance.

Rudolf Laban initiated one of the main approaches to dance therapy.

Rudolf Laban attempted to apply his ideas to several other fields, including architecture, education, industry, and management.

In 1897, Rudolf Laban senior was ennobled by the Hungarian monarchy in recognition of his military merit and received the nobiliary predicate "de" to his family name, whereupon Rudolf Laban junior was rightly entitled to use "von" in his family name in the German-speaking world.

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Rudolf Laban grew up in the courtly circles of Vienna and Sarajevo.

At age 15 Rudolf Laban entered the Theresian Military Academy, but later turned his back on military service.

In 1899, Rudolf Laban moved to Munich and began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1904 Rudolf Laban decided to leave Munich to visit the most famous art school in Europe, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris to study architecture.

Financially bankrupt, Rudolf Laban completed an apprenticeship as an accountant in Nice, from which he successfully graduated.

Rudolf Laban drew for the magazines Simplicissimus and Jugend and continued the studies he had begun in Paris on historical dance forms.

At a cultural event, Rudolf Laban met the singer Maja Lederer from Munich and married her on 8 May 1910 in Pressburg.

In 1911, Rudolf Laban rented a room in a rear building in Munich's Theresienstraße, which he set up as a makeshift movement studio.

Rudolf Laban couldn't make a living with his school; he had to continue working as a commercial artist and caricaturist.

Overworked to the point of exhaustion, Rudolf Laban collapsed in 1912 and went to the Lahmann-Sanatorium Weißer Hirsch near Dresden for a cure, where patients were cared for according to the life-reform principles.

Rudolf Laban had been a member of a Freemason association since 1913, and had founded his own masonic lodge "Johannis lodge of ancient Freemasons of the Scottish-and-Memphis-and-Misraim-Rites in the valley of Zurich" which had six brothers and ten sisters.

Whilst on Monte Verita, Rudolf Laban met the occultist Theodor Reuss, who had been on Monte Verita for some time and had established a local Freemason lodge.

In 1923, the first Rudolf Laban school was founded, which had its own movement choir.

Rudolf Laban directed major festivals of dance under the funding of Joseph Goebbels' propaganda ministry from 1934 to 1936.

In 1936 Rudolf Laban become the chairman of the association "German workshops for dance" and received a salary of 1250 RM per month, but a duodenal ulcer in August of that year bed bound him for two months, eventually leading him to ask to reduce his responsibilities to consultancy.

However, some Rudolf Laban scholars have pointed out that such actions were necessary for survival in Nazi Germany at that time, and that his position was precarious as he was neither a German citizen nor a Nazi party member.

Rudolf Laban was greatly assisted in his dance teaching during these years by his close associates and long-term partners Lisa Ullmann and Sylvia Bodmer.

In 1947, together with management consultant Fredrick Lawrence, Rudolf Laban published a book Effort, Fordistic study of the time taken to perform tasks in the industrial workplace and the energy used.

Rudolf Laban tried to provide methods intended to help eliminate "shadow movements" and to focus instead on constructive movements necessary to the job at hand.

Rudolf Laban published Modern Educational Dance in 1948 when his ideas on dance for all including children were taught in many British schools.

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Rudolf Laban's students went on to found their own schools of modern dance, influencing their own pupils through the 20th century:.