“Peaceful intercourse, well-being and economic prosperity,” wrote the Austro-Hungarian choreographer Rudolf Laban in 1947, “depend upon the right assessment of our own and our neighbors’ efforts.”[1] Laban pioneered modern and expressionist dance in the 1920s with his movement analysis and notation systems. In the 1930s, he held prominent positions in theater and dance institutions in Nazi Germany, including as director of the Deutsche Tanzbühne (1934-1936), the newly established German Dance Theater, an appointment made by the Propaganda Ministry. Prevailing narratives of Laban’s life and work significantly downplay his commitment to National Socialism by appealing to his eventual exile. Lilian Karina and Marion Kant provide a corrective in Hitler's Dancers. Their archival work demonstrates Laban's willingness to strategically align with state policy to continue his work and emerge as the dominant figure in modern German dance.[2] His choreographic vision, meanwhile, contained anti-Enlightenment elements compatible with Nazi aesthetic ideology but also a liberal kernel that would eventually bring him into conflict with the regime. [3] The expression of this liberal individualism in the proposed choreography for the 1936 Olympic ceremony—rather than any substantial political position on Laban’s part—led to Laban falling out of favor and, ultimately, to exile in England.
There, in the context of postwar reconstruction, he partnered with the industrialist Fredrick Lawrence to bring his dance-based knowledge of body movement to bear on “the economy of human effort” in British factory work. Their theoretical findings are collected in the short coauthored book Effort (1947). Animated by the effort graphs of Labanotation, accounts of overwork (temporarily color-blinded cherry pickers), and descriptions of reluctant workers “bathing, swimming or even submerging in a sea of time”,[4] Effort ultimately set out to contribute to postwar prosperity by maximizing the efficiency of movement on the factory floor. While the book’s emphasis on economy of effort attests to the thermodynamic basis of Taylorist work-science, it also speaks to a less-established connection between modern dance and thermodynamics. By extension, it gestures towards a broader relation between energy and kinaesthetics, or in other words, it raises the question of the extent to which dominant ways of moving and thinking about movement are fueled by hegemonic energy regimes.[5] Exploring that question can go some way to explaining how a kinaesthetic philosophy such as Laban’s, geared as it is towards bodily disalienation and societal regeneration, can nevertheless find itself instrumentalized towards productivity flows and workplace discipline. From a conjuncture increasingly defined by energic flows, chokepoints, and supposed “energy transitions”, reading Effort today also prompts the question of the continuity of its kinaesthetic, both in terms of how work makes us move today but also questions about the resources of dance to intervene in it.
The work of energy, the dance of work
Laban’s notation system in Effort figures movement as a series of time-space patterns, or “effort-rhythms”. They consist of sets of main actions (i.e., slashing, gliding, pressing, flicking, wringing, dabbing, punching, floating), each of which is executed according to a set of motion factors (motion, weight, space, time, and flow). In practice, “one movement melts indiscernibly into the next”,[6] so the first step of effort-analysis is to pull these effort-rhythms apart. By making legible the aspects of what otherwise appears as one flowing movement, workers’ efforts can be adjusted to avoid energy waste caused by issues such as strain and lopsidedness. The rechoreographed pattern can then return to muscle memory as an optimized flow, what Laban calls a “real automatism”.[7]
These time-space patterns are performed by a “human body engine”.[8] Efforts consequently produce “waste material” in muscle and nerve tissue that must be replaced by rest and “new fuel”.[9] The language is consistent with what the historian Anson Rabinbach identifies as a metaphor of the human motor emerging from the thermodynamic break of the 1850s, which reconceives work as a metabolization of energy; and energy, recursively, as the capacity for work. It’s a break that also leaves its mark on modern dance, argues Felicia McCarren in Dancing Machines, and not just as an overt parody of mechanistic movement but in the representation of a perpetuum mobile: a figure of inexhaustible energy.[10] Isadora Duncan serves as McCarren’s main reference, but the description of a graceful flow in its connection to natural (and cosmic) flows befits the movement philosophy that Laban would later bring into the factory.
As Effort progresses, its effort-analysis is scaled to include not just human motors but machines, assembly lines, and global supply chains. What emerges is a vision of a world in flow, precisely the kind of dynamic vision of the cosmos formalized by thermodynamic science.[11] But the rhythms of this world are out of sync, according to Laban, and harmonizing them begins at the level of individual effort. By unlocking the rhythmicity of work, he contends, work will become not just more enjoyable and less injurious but regenerative. By gifting workers the tools of transformative movement, they can improve their character and contribute to a postwar society in touch with the “rhythmic vitality” it had otherwise lost to modernity’s machines.[12] As such, and, again, like Duncan's, Laban’s intervention presents itself as a protest against the alienating effects of work that nevertheless grounds itself in the thoroughly modern coupling of work and energy fueling industrial modernity.
Viktor Szeri's Fatigue (2023). Photo by Jonas Zeidler
Despite talk of transformation and regeneration, Laban’s industrial choreography inevitably augments Taylorism and its micro-management of working bodies. It becomes particularly clear in a chapter on selecting and hiring workers that encourages covert effort-assessments:
Many of the movements seen in conversation, in leisure time, play and games, or even in relative relaxation and rest, reveal much as to the general effort make-up of a man […] Any small twitch of the face or hand might show some habitual efforts which if recognised and recorded, might help to complete the assessment of the aspirants’ effort make-up. [13]
Like Taylorist piecework, the “human motor” is dissected and scrutinized according to its parts. With no regard for what the assembly-line logic of factory work might actually be doing to the body, Effort focuses entirely on what workers bring to the job. Lopsided development is the result of imbalanced individual effort, the overworking of favored capacities, or the wrong people being selected for the task at hand.
At a surface level, and through its idiosyncrasies, there’s a clear desire in Effort to make work and life more embodied that is hard to argue with. In places, Laban even seems attuned to bodies in their range of differences. Elsewhere, however, the emphasis on diverse effort-capacities gives way to a hiring preference for “those who show a certain all-roundedness of effort-capacities from the very beginning”.[14] A closer look at Effort would, therefore, suggest that Laban’s effort-work contributes a kinaesthetic dimension to what Marx called the “general intellect”. It shifts the baseline of expected competencies by initiating fresh demands on workers for heightened proprioceptive awareness. As with the otherwise well-intentioned desire to make work less injurious by optimizing flow, the result of a dance-infused work-science is a productivity drive that asserts downward pressure on wages.
Burnout
At some point midway through Effort, Laban describes the movements of a stoker as he makes his repeated return from the furnace to the coal heap. What of this stoker today, I find myself asking. Is he still returning to his heap with “skimming glide” and “shoving punch”?[15] More to the point, what is the status of Laban’s kinaesthetic of productive flow in a world transfigured by a postindustrial petroculture? How does work make us move today?
Viktor Szeri's Fatigue (2023). Photo by Claudiu Popescu
Someone attuned to this contemporaneity is the dancer and choreographer Viktor Szeri. In Fatigue (2023), which was awarded the Rudolf Laban Prize for best contemporary dance performance of 2023, Szeri takes Laban’s movement philosophy and inverts it by figuring burnout as a stuckness in flow. The result is something like the postindustrial version of Charlie Chaplin’s factory scene from Modern Times (1936). In Szeri’s version, it’s still a case of moving like a machine, but screws and spanners give way to an algorithmic smoothness that dissolves any residual divisions between work and leisure, play and labor. Over the course of 40 minutes, Szeri uncoils his limbs to a soundtrack of reggaeton and dancehall playing at half-speed and pitched down to a haunting, just legible warble. The time-stretching is mirrored in the movement in a mimesis of slow-motion cinema, both for its speed and the scrutiny it affords. By slowing down, Szeri explores the inebriated state of being exhausted and yet hyperaware, observing oneself moving and experiencing movement. Against the trope of being disconnected from one’s body (as in Laban’s theory of alienation), he gives us burnout as a condition of being trapped in the body, at the mercy of rhythms and nervous states that are being modulated beyond the self.
Szeri walks on stage to a loop of the opening melody of Rihanna and Drake’s duet “Work”. His moves at first are slight: a gentle sway of the torso that subsequently activates the pelvis and shoulders, hips and knees, movements that unfurl and ripple outward from his core. Pelvic dips fall with an uncanny delay. There is no pulsation, no punch or pop, but also no ease. Each move melts into the next, and yet the sequence is haunted by a sense of struggle, of pushing through, as if moving through thick air. Szeri’s face is expressionless, but his eyes search nervously, alert to gazes coming his way (as threats, or potential hooks to escape this state). At a midway point in the work, Szeri doubles over, hands on his knees as if gasping for air, a sign of exhaustion kicking in. But the gesture is just as quickly recuperated. Szeri finds movement from within the pose, and the flow of the sequence continues.
The crescendo of the performance is marked by strobes as a version of Kevin Lyttle’s “Turn Me On” rings out, stretched and pitched low, more groaning pain than horny anthem. As the song plays, Szeri crouches down on one knee, palm on his thigh as his gaze meets the audience. It’s a muted gesture, but it punctures what is otherwise a spectacle of continuous motion. It teases an end, but again Szeri winds back up, shoulder by shoulder, slotting back into the sequence on beat. Here, the stage becomes an inferno as Szeri is bathed in orange light. The burnout is at its most literal as the backdrop becomes a video projection of flames that creep towards Szeri, ultimately engulfing him. From this point, the club music breaks down, with a loop of the opening melody of Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” creating a clearing. There is air again as Szeri’s movements wind down to a gentle and slowed sway. Sweat glistens from his forehead as a set of images projects behind him, flickering at a pace that makes them indiscernible, stretching time in the opposite direction of the choreography. Life flashing before one’s eyes? Possibly, but it also bears resemblance to the experience of having one’s senses haunted by the residue of a day: the image shrapnel of overstimulation, a day overmediated by digital screens and the hypersyncopation of work rhythms.
Fatigue might seem far removed from the world of Effort. It doesn’t aestheticize any particular type of work per se, and the club rather than the factory floor provides its mise-en-scène. The centrality of audiovisual media to its spectacle would likewise be foreign to Laban’s modernist priorities. But these shifts are precisely the point. It’s significant that Szeri privileges the club as a site where work and leisure fuse given the indebtedness of dance music culture to erstwhile (often auto) factories. It’s a story embedded within a larger one, where shoring up postindustrial growth precipitates a turn towards an energy-intensive service economy and digital culture, both of which do their best to keep oil and labor out of sight and mind.[16] In spite of it all, Szeri situates us in our late petroculture and suggests that Laban’s kinaesthetic of productive flow is still very much with us. Far from having disappeared or faded away, Fatigue points to its wholesale integration as a choreography of everyday life.
Crucially, the object provides the medium. While some critical contemporary dance may deploy stuttering, fragmentation, or stillness, Szeri performs his choreographic critique by following modern dance’s commitment to inexhaustible flowing movement.[17] This commitment, as found in Laban in another form, rests on a belief in the transformative capacity of movement. In Effort specifically, it manifests as the conviction that regeneration will follow from a (self-)knowledge of effort: a reconnection with one’s rhythmic vitality. Fatigue inverts this. Instead of freedom through movement, we get the claustrophobia of burnout, of being stuck in rhythms of self-optimization without knowing how to get out. This makes legible the limits of dance’s commitment to flow: a modernist strategy of disalienation that has been fully integrated as the kinaesthetic of productivism. The inversion is critical. By doing so, Szeri suspends flow as the privileged sign of healthy, graceful, productive movement, and it’s from such suspensions that we can start to move differently, setting in motion flows untethered from the circuitry of accumulation.
//
- Footnotes
[1] Rudolf Laban and F.C. Lawrence, Effort (Macdonald and Evans, 1947), xi.
[2] Lilian Karina and Marion Kant, Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich (Berghahn Books, 2004), 16-20.
[3] For an illuminating exploration of how Laban’s politics translate to his choreographic vision see Ana Isabel Keilson, “The Embodied Conservatism of Rudolf Laban, 1919–1926”, Dance Research Journal 51, no. 2 (2019). While containing clear anti-Enlightenment elements, Keilson understands Laban’s dance philosophy as essentially grounded in political liberalism, pitched as it is towards the attainment of individual freedom through movement.
[4] Laban and Lawrence, 55.
[5] Laban’s movement philosophy is emblematic of what Hillel Schwartz identifies as “torque”, a new kinaesthetic of healthy, graceful movement emerging in the 1850s and subsequently codified by various practices and institutions, modern dance and work-science key among them. Though he gestures towards industrialization, Schwartz maintains a reserved sense of causality throughout his essay, and thermodynamic science is conspicuously absent despite the overt association of torque with combustion. See Hillel Schwartz, “Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century” from Incorporations, Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds.) (Zone, 1992), 70-127.
[6] Laban and Lawrence, 45.
[7] Laban and Lawrence, 66.
[8] Laban and Lawrence, 3.
[9] Laban and Lawrence, 5.
[10] Felicia McCarren, Dancing Machines: choreographies of the age of mechanical reproduction (Stanford UP, 2003), 67.
[11] Cara Daggett, The Birth of Energy (Duke UP, 2019), 18-20. In Daggett’s account, the modern concept of energy produced by thermodynamics incorporates an earlier cosmology of energy that places motion at the center of the cosmos. Thermodynamic science is thus a materialism that also inscribes a moralism privileging “dynamism over stasis” (18).
[12] Industrial conflict will even be solved, says Laban, if only workers and managers can finally learn to read each other’s efforts properly.
[13] Laban and Lawrence, 41.
[14] ibid.
[15] Laban and Lawrence, 52.
[16] Jeff Diamanti, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum (Bloomsbury, 2021), 66; 78.
[17] I borrow these terms from André Lepecki in Exhausting Dance: Performance and the politics of movement (Routledge, 2006).
Cover Image:
Viktor Szeri's Fatigue (2023).Photo by Sinah Osner Másolata
