ABSTRACT
During his first working period the choreographer Rudolf Laban was fascinated by film. Early on at his school in Zurich in 1915 he had introduced cinematography as a mandatory subject in the curriculum and had developed film-pantomimes. 1 In the 1920s he resumed his efforts and acquired further practical film experience. Together with Wilhelm Prager, the director of the 1925 cult film Wege zu Kraft und Schdnheit (Ways to Strength and Beauty), Laban staged the pantomime for the film Drachentdterei (The Killing of Dragons), and participated in the direction of this successful danced fairytale. With film, Laban had found a gap in the market for himself that presented both a financial opportunity and an artistic challenge. Moreover, Laban saw the medium of film as a vehicle for mass art and therefore an extremely efficient opportunity for the dissemination of his choreosophic ideas. He wanted to write educational dance films as sound film treatments that would be an appropriate pedagogical means for modern education to systematically teach Laban’s choreographic methods. Laban’s educational dance film scripts, Das lebende Bild (The Living Image) 2 and Gruppenform-Lehrfilm (Group Form-Educational Film), created in 1929, had a strictly didactic character. With such dance pedagogical films Laban wanted to propagate the basics of his dance notation and his teaching of movement and spatial harmony. The Living Image was to be produced by Propagandafilm Company, and, as Laban wrote in 1929, ‘my method’ will be taught as a kind of ‘correspondence course’ (Unterrichtsbriefe). 3 The film, consisting of both image and text, represented 50 typical movements, ‘which could be the model for students’, 4 who could then teach themselves his choreography. In this way, the dance pupils learned the elements of dance notation and Laban’s teachings of movement and spatial harmony. During this period Laban was also occupied with writing screenplays and immersing himself in his film ambitions. Laban’s screenplays written at the end of the 1920s – Tanz ist Leben.(Dance is Life), Tanz der Menschheit, (Dance of Humanity), or Die Befreiung des Kôrpers (The Liberation of the Body) – were aimed, as dance documentary and/or dance cultural films, at presenting dance in an artistic and cultural dimension. Here his ideas were given expression in film.
