Photograph of the Jooss family with Rudolf von Laban (around 1938)
Photograph of the Jooss family with Rudolf von Laban (around 1938)
Diese neue „Sprache“ des Tanzens, der Sie sich in Ihren Balletten bedienen, ist – wenn ich so sagen darf – unser gemeinsames Werk. Und hier muss ich Ihnen danken für die lebhafte Elastizität, mit der Sie die unzähligen Bewegungsformen verwenden, die ich mein Leben lang von den Einflüssen einer leeren Tradition zu befreien mich bemühte.
[This new “language” of dance that you use in your ballets is (if I may say so) our joint effort. And for this I must thank you for the lively elasticity that you use the countless forms of movement that I have sought all my life to free from the influences of a hollow tradition. (ed. trans.)]
Rudolf von Laban in a letter to Kurt Jooss, Christmas 1938
After Kurt Jooss founded a dance school in Dartington in Britain, the Jooss-Leeder School of Dance soon attracted numerous emigrant German-speaking dance artists.Jooss gathered together old colleagues such as the composer Fritz Cohen and the stage designer Hein Heckroth as well as young ballet dancers such as Hans Züllig or Ulla Söderbaum. At the end of February 1938, he also had his one-time mentor, the nearly 60-year-old chereographer Rudolf von Laban, join him in England. Laban, who had had a prominent role in the German dance scene before the Nazis seized power, followed his friend's advice and did not return to Germany after visiting a congress in Paris in August 1937 and had since been eking out a minimal existence in the French capital.
On arrival in Dartington, Laban initially lived in the home of Kurt Jooss and his wife Aino Siimola. On the displayed picture, the new arrival can be seen together with his hosts in the garden in Dartington. Laban had become godfather to Jooss' daughter Anna in 1931. After the war, he founded his own dance school in Manchester and continued working there until his death in 1958. He believed that his aesthetic ideas were ideally realised in the works of Kurt Jooss.
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