ABSTRACT
In the early to mid-1920s, the Tanztheater galvanized the European performance world. One of Laban's main concerns was that dance had not yet defined its own language. In developing the notation system, Laban freed dance and captured it again, but he captured it as an ever-changing, context-influenced phenomenon. Laban's analysis of movement into Body, Effort and Space allows for replicability without the loss of choice and human creativity. For him the dance and the often abstract stories the bodies told through movement were as important as the means whereby those stories were being told. Laban wrote, in 1924, that the art form of dance ought not to be abused anymore, a lament he was to repeat to some extent for decades. Even though none of his works survive in any wholly replicable form, his approach to choreography is precisely how many twenty-first century contemporary artists work with their dancers.
