Jooss, his family and his company had found another little jewel of a location in Dartington Hall, Britain, an old estate that had been purchased by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. The Elmhirsts were an intriguing couple: she was an American, a Whitney; he was an idealistic young Brit. They met at Cornell University and devised a dream between his vision and her money. Their home, Dartington Hall, purchased in 1925, became a center for Leonard’s experiments in progressive education, rural “reconstruction” (Leonard’s word), and, eventually, a refuge for artists.
At Dartington, a number of artists found a home, however briefly, with the Elmhirsts. The list included Mark Tobey, Bernard Leach, Michael Chekhov, Rabinath Tagore, Cecil Collins, Imogen Holst, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Michael Tippett, the Amadeus
String Quartet, Ravi Shankar, Viyhat and Imrat Khan, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Poulenc, Lutoslawski, John Cage—and many more.
Laban arrived at Dartington in 1937, sick and devastated. The students there at the time were told to leave him alone. According to Ann Hutchinson Guest, on occasion he could be spotted in the balcony that overlooked the dance studio, where the Jooss Ballet rehearsed, a figure in shadows.
He might have stayed in those shadows were it not for Lisa Ullmann, one of Jooss’ dancers, who became Laban’s domestic partner, leading him back into the world, and nurturing both his being and his vision.
It was in his little studio that Laban could be found, studying crystals and thinking about how matter forms itself into beautiful shapes, without consciousness but with a logic based in physics and metaphysics. The swinging scales he had developed some twenty years earlier made sense kinesthetically, allowing the body to fall, as it did, into natural rhythms and directions in space. He began to write and talk about spatial pulls and tensions that lived inside various crystalline forms, and to discover the multi-dimensional ways the human body can transcend gravity and achieve a spicier harmony with nature, one in which movers and environment partner actively and responsibly.
In Ascona, Laban had engaged with the Rosacrucians, the Freemasons and other cult- like groups that also professed openness to seeing the possibilities of human transcendence and a marriage of the spirit and imagination. Laban was not really interested in being part of a cult: he preferred to stand outside and move ideas rather than submit to them. In Southwest England, with time and space galore, he revisited his own thoughts about the myriad ways people are pulled into the farthest reaches of space, orienting themselves to the complexities beyond the vertical pull of gravity. He would sit and turn icosahedra and dodecahedra around and around, finding the center and the possibilities in each. And then he would take long walks around the estate, with its fields and sculptures, cows and medieval tilting yard. In the evenings, he and Leonard Elmhirst might sit and talk about farming and human movement, or Laban and Dorothy Elmhirst might discuss the creative work that was as much a product of the estate as the vegetables.
As at Ascona, the Eden-like existence on the Dartington estate was dissolved by war. Once again nationalism and boundaries between governments mattered. As World War II progressed, all German nationals were moved from the coastal regions and the members of the Jooss Ballet were no exception. The Elmhirsts found a farmhouse in rural Wales for Laban and Lisa, and it was here that a young Betty Meredith-Jones studied with them. Betty was a physical educator; she lived in a caravan (trailer, in the USA), while she and Lisa began to decode the theories Laban was garnering from his crystals. Eventually, Betty came to the United States where she pioneered Laban’s work in psychiatry and especially with Parkinson’s patients.
F. C. Lawrence was a management consultant when Leonard Elmhurst introduced him to Laban. During and after World War II, Lawrence and Laban blended traditional time–motion study approaches to worker efficiency with Laban’s analysis of effort and space. Observing young women throw around huge tires and pieces of equipment for the war effort gave them opportunities to note the role of personal style in efficiency. Body type and predilections for particular permutations of expression and pathways played a role in the productivity and job satisfaction of the women hired to take over from the men
deployed to the war. Laban and Lawrence called their approach “lilt in labour” and it revolutionized industry.
Few of us realize that our contentment in work and happiness in life, as well as any personal or collective success, is conditioned by the perfect development and use of our individual efforts. We speak about “industrial effort” or “cultural effort”, without realizing that each collective action is built up from the mental and manual efforts of individual people.
(Laban and Lawrence, 1974, p. 1) These same notions of individual style became the basis for Marion North’s Personality Assessment through Movement, a comparative study of the relationship between individual movement style and classroom behaviors in young children. They also underlay the character development work of Geraldine Stephenson, Yat Malmgren and other teachers of Laban-based movement for actors. Individual style analysis became the seeds for the Action Profiling and Movement Pattern Analysis developed by Warren Lamb, who analyzed the decision-making styles of top team planners in industry.