University of British Columbia Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies PHYSICAL CULTURE, POWER, AND THE BODY

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SCHOOLING THE DANCE: THE IDEOLOGICAL MOORINGS OF EMBODIED PRACTICES

Patricia Vertinsky

Abstract: THE IDEOLOGICAL MOORINGS OF EMBODIED PRACTICES: LABAN, MODERN DANCE AND EDUCATIONAL GYMNASTICS By all accounts Rudolf von Laban, Germany’s most famous theorist of dance, was an extraordinary man- a visionary, a mystic, artist, dancer, choreographer, womanizer, charismatic teacher and theorist. And he led an extraordinary life, one intimately bound up with the political, social and cultural upheavals that formed the turbulent backdrop of modern Europe. But in the decades following his death in 1958 surprisingly few of his pupils or scholars have attempted to analyze his work which has tended to evoke either unconditional support or immediate criticism. Laban worked willingly with the Nazis as Germany’s dance master before incurring Goebbels’ displeasure on the eve of the Berlin Olympics. He became one of a number of Hitler émigrés who were given refuge at Dartington Hall, a unique arts and educational community in the Devonshire countryside of southwestern England. The Dartington ethos, and his later emphasis upon dance as an educational force - especially the cooptation of his work by female physical educators- had a widespread and relatively unexamined impact upon British primary schools in the years after WW2. There does not seem to a safe guide through the complex and confusing mindscape of Laban, and it is important to question the ideological moorings of embodied practices – especially in the ways such practices have reflected the cultural landscape of modernity in schools, colleges and other arenas of disciplinary power. Do dancers, teachers, scholars, students need to know the murky origins of what they do?