Alexandra Baybutt
(Presented 12 April 2023, as a talk in the frame of the WAEF three-day summit on the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System. I was part of a day focussed on ‘the ‘silent’ bodies of knowledge and overlooked contributors: the women and men who developed and ensured the legacy of ‘Laban’ studies’)
Abstract
This presentation discusses some of the long-term legacies of Lisa Ullmann and Geraldine Stephenson through the Travelling Scholarship Fund on the UK dance scene. Theorised through a politics of space inspired by transversality, or the movement of and in-between multiple pulls, this talk/text explores the sustainability of practices nurtured by the Fund and draws on what feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti refers to as an affirmative ethics.
This talk/text is for those with an interest in the long-term impact of material resources and generosity of Ullmann and Stephenson, and the ethical implications of collective cultural stewardship. It also shares an approach to thinking about social phenomena using aspects of Space Harmony as a practical philosophy (praxis).
Introduction
I will start by showing a short film that was made to celebrate 30 years of The Lisa Ullmann Travelling Scholarship Fund, released in 2019. The Fund has a unique policy to award travel scholarships to individual dance and movement practitioners based in the UK and who wish to pursue professional development through many different kinds of projects at destinations across the world.
I’ve chosen to present about the fund because I was on the committee for 11 years after receiving a travel grant to study Laban Movement Analysis, Bartenieff Fundamentals and Somatic Studies in Canada with Janet Kaylo, and I stepped down this year. What follows is in 3 parts and uses what philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers calls an ‘ecology of practices’, and what posthumanist feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti refers to as affirmative ethics to think about the Lisa Ullmann Travelling Scholarship Fund, hereafter called the Fund. I always refer to it with its full title but it’s a bit of a mouthful. If I have worked with someone personally I refer to them with their first name, if not I refer to them with their surname. After part 1 about some concepts, I’ll present a little about Geraldine Stephenson and Lisa Ullmann. That’s part 2, some people. Then I shall present the Fund as one of the infrastructures for dance in the UK and the implications of this, and I will share some of the infrastructure and practices of the Fund itself. That’s part 3. In this text, I refer to ‘dance’ in an expanded sense stylistically and methodologically, attempting to keep open the questions of who does it and how, and where it might happen. Comments on transversality are woven throughout. A transverse pathway is one of multiple changing spatial pulls. It helps to visualise and embody the processes of change dance worlds and the individuals in them undergo as a field of forces.
Part 1
Concepts
Ecologies of practice
An ecology of practices isn’t a neutral tool (Stengers, 2005: 185). I am choosing to refer to dance worlds as ecologies of practices in which dance and movement are not characterised by an imposed success scale or hierarchy of ‘the most well-known’. Whilst the film you just saw showcases some of the most prestigious names in dance, choreography and education in the UK, as a researcher interested in the cultures of dance and how practices of dance move, pun intended, I’m curious about how these coexist and interrelate, and in the less visible people, infrastructures, institutions and policies that affect dance’s conditions of emergence and development.
Interconnections and relations in dance show transverse movements of people, bodies, ideas and practices, where each is significant, contrasting or complimentary to already existing ones. An ecology of practices is helpful when attempting to understand over 500 different projects, as there is no ambition to describe practices ‘as they are’ or to flatten any differences between them. Instead, it aims at the construction of new possibilities for practices to be present or to connect.
And so, it invites approaching practices for what they may become. Using ecology of practices as a tool for thinking about practices of dance in an expanded sense demands that no practice or artist be defined as ‘like any other’ (Stengers, 2005: 184), just as no living species is like any other, but rather each co-exists and is mutually implicated in co-becoming. The Fund, a charity with the capacity to act amidst an ecology of practices, appears motivated to both sustain and expand upon what dance might be, and how it is produced, circulated, taught, and so forth.
In the UK there is a crisis in sustainability for dance at every level of education and creation, and attacks on the arts and humanities are not limited to the UK alone. At the time of founding the charity in the late 1980s, dance artists in the UK were also facing a crisis of sustainability. Thinking about the Fund as an affirmative ethics offers insights into what ongoing incremental support looks like, especially for those places in the dance ecology that are more at risk, less seen, perhaps more interested in exploring the edges of what is already known.
Affirmative ethics
Rosi Braidotti asks: ‘What is an adequate ethical question?’ She claims it is, and I quote, ‘one that is capable of sustaining the subject in their quest for more interrelations with others, that is, more Life, motion, change, transformation, and potential. The adequate ethical question provides the subject with a frame for interaction and change, growth and movement. It affirms life as difference-at-work’ (Braidotti, 2006: 249).
If I view the Fund as a kind of body or subject, as a mediator of multiple relationships between artists and contexts internationally and circling back to the UK, it exemplifies an ethical question through recognising the limits to its own freedom to support others. More on this later.
Braidotti’s notion of affirmative ethics refers to transforming the negative into positive, or said another way, increasing one’s power to act. The Fund as an open ethical question and affirmative practice contributes to the possibility of moving beyond struggle, that is, the material reality of not having the money to be able to travel to develop as an artist or practitioner, at any age in one’s working life. This unique Fund helps to keep contexts, practices of dance and ultimately people, open to becoming (Braidotti, 2006: 247–48).
Part 2
Geraldine Stephenson, Lisa Ullmann, LUTSF
Next follows a very brief sketch of some connections between Lisa Ullmann, Geraldine Stephenson and Rudolf Laban.
Geraldine Stephenson
Dr. Geraldine Stephenson was a prolific and pioneering dancer, choreographer, movement director and teacher, working on more than 150 film and television programmes and more than 200 stage productions. A text from the Bedford School of Physical Education celebrating Stephenson as a former student traces the significance of Laban’s teaching and encouragement on her work. This school is an important space in the UK where a convergence of movement educators connected to and including Laban and other central European artists like Mary Wigman took place, with major consequences for the transmission and embodiment of practices of what became called ‘modern educational dance’ in the UK.
In 1987, Geraldine Stephenson co-founded the Fund in Lisa Ullmann’s name, with Elinor Margaret Hinks and Athalie Knowles. Ullmann had died two years before in 1985.
Lisa Ullmann
Born in 1907, Ullmann graduated from the Laban Berlin School in 1929, where teachers included Lotte Wedekind, and it was run by Hertha Feist (who herself had studied with Emile Jacques-Delacroze, Olga Desmond and Laban). Ullmann was a talented dancer and inspired teacher, and went on to teach at the Folkwang School in Essen, working with both Laban and the international choreographer Kurt Jooss.
In 1934, together with the entire Jooss Dance Company, she arrived at Dartington Hall in Devon, taking refuge from the Nazi regime, welcomed by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst. In addition to her role as a Company teacher and rehearsal director – and ahead of the Community Dance movement by 40 years – Ullmann set up and taught ‘Dance for All’ classes in the area, and established the first Movement Choir in the country. We see in Ullmann an enduring commitment to dance practice and education, and her close working collaboration with Laban, as well as becoming his partner in life. Ullmann’s efforts ensured the transcription, translation and transmission of his research during his life, and after his death in 1958.
In the books by Laban likely in your collections, Ullmann’s name is there in a smaller font, ‘written by Rudolf Laban, with Lisa Ullmann’ – she was the prolific writer and stronger English speaker helping archive the work.
Works and Publications, Rudolf Laban
(Undated). Harmonie Lehre Der Bewegung (German). (Handwritten copy by Sylvia Bodmer of a book by Rudolf Laban) London: Laban Collection S. B. 48.
(1920). Die Welt des Taenzers (German). Stuttgart: Walter Seifert. (3rd edition, 1926)
(1926). Choreographie: Erstes Heft (German). Jena: Eugen Diederichs.
(1926). Gymnastik und Tanz (German). Oldenburg: Stalling.
(1926). Des Kindes Gymnastik und Tanz (German). Oldenburg: Stalling.
(1928). Schriftanz: Methodik, Orthographie, Erlaeuterungen (German). Vienna: Universal Edition.
(1929). “Das Choreographische Institut Laban” in Monographien der Ausbildungen fuer Tanz und Taenzerische Koeperbildung (German). Edited by Liesel Freund. Berlin-Charlottenburg: L. Alterthum.
(1947). with F. C. Lawrence. Effort: Economy of Human Movement London: MacDonald and Evans. (4th reprint 1967)
(1948). Modern Educational Dance. London: MacDonald and Evans. (2nd Edition 1963, revised by Lisa Ullmann)
(1948). “President’s address at the annual general meeting of the Laban art of movement guild”. Laban Art of Movement Guild News Sheet. 1 (April): 5-8.
(1950). The Mastery of Movement on the Stage. London: MacDonald and Evans.
(1951). “What has led you to study movement? Answered by R. Laban”. Laban Art of Movement Guild News Sheet. 7 (Sept.): 8-11.
(1952). “The art of movement in the school”. Laban Art of Movement Guild News Sheet. 8 (March): 10-16.
(1956). Laban’s Principles of Dance and Movement Notation. London: MacDonald and Evans. (2nd edition 1975, annotated and edited by Roderyk Lange)
(1960). The Mastery of Movement. (2nd Edition of The Mastery of Movement on the Stage), revised and enlarged by Lisa Ullmann. London: MacDonald and Evans. (3rd Edition, 1971. London: MacDonald and Evans) (1st American Edition, 1971. Boston: Plays) (4th Edition, 1980. Plymouth, UK: Northcote House)
(1966). Choreutics. Annotated and edited by Lisa Ullmann. London: MacDonald and Evans.
(1974). The Language of Movement; A Guide Book to Choreutics. Annotated and edited by Lisa Ullmann. Boston: Plays. (American publication of Choreutics)
(1975). A Life For Dance; Reminiscencs. Translated and annotated by Lisa Ullmann. London: MacDonald & Evans. (Original German published 1935.)
(1984). A Vision of Dynamic Space. Compiled by Lisa Ullmann. London: The Falmer Press.
Source: https://ickl.org/publications/list-publications/
Ullmann was Director of the Art of Movement Studio from 1946 when it was based in Manchester, and then in Surrey from 1953, until the third relocation and transformation of the school in the move to London under Marion North in 1972.
During their lives, Ullmann and Laban profoundly enriched a UK ecology of dance practice and education. Stephenson’s impetus to start the Fund is testament and gratitude to their impact. The Fund appeared when there was already the Laban Art of Movement Guild founded in 1945, International Council of Kinetography Laban, and the School, each instigated by Ullmann. The Fund reflected a need, perceived by its co-founders, for other kinds of infrastructure, especially as artists and educators mature. What is significant about the Fund amongst the legacies of Laban is not through its insistence on projects relating to ‘Laban theory’. Rather, as the film gestures towards, projects illuminate art as a public good, dance as life, creative professional development irrespective of age, and the significance of mobility in artists’ working lives for inspiration and connection with peers.
Lisa Ullmann was an exceptionally demanding teacher whose experience, dynamism and love of dance ensured a place and a tradition for dance in schools in the UK, which is at risk today. Some of the projects the Fund has supported attest to alternative spaces of education and learning that are always needed for an ecology to remain diverse and open.
Part 3
Infrastructures
To understand this ‘ecology’ that sustains practices and that practices are sustained by, visualise the interrelations between Ullmann, Stephenson, the Fund’s committee and the individuals who receive a grant for their travel, and all people who they encounter during their project, and after, over different durations and intensities. The affirmative ethics at play in the Fund, like other kinds of awards and structures, consistently nurtures dance worlds. It does so by staying with its highly-defined purpose, and so it maintains itself by not changing much.
Investing in unknowable dance futures
In spite of this very rigidity, the Fund projects hope into an unknowable future for dance. The intention was to support projects relating to dance and movement, but remain flexible and open as to what they might be and become. Like making art or the transformational spaces of education, the Fund is committed to immanence, or said another way, that which arises out of the doing and cannot be known in advance.
Redistribution of opportunity
The award affirms the redistribution of opportunity to develop as an artist or practitioner. This is even more important when other public subsidies are diminishing, and self-financing is not possible. In the UK where the majority of dance artists work as freelancers, and professional development support from a university institution is only available for those employed full-time, the Fund is crucial for expanding who gets to cultivate their practice.
Mobility
Following its namesake’s own experiences of moving for work and life, the Fund inscribes the importance of mobility in dance. The Fund demonstrates a cosmopolitan outlook through recognising that it is the movement of ideas and practices that refreshes local scenes and communities. What connects Stephenson, Ullmann, Laban and a large ecology of dance artists in the UK and elsewhere, is a hunger to open up to new experiences, peers and challenges.
Alternative monuments
A prize in the name of Lisa Ullmann reflects a different kind of statue-building and the making of a monument, one that is not about her individual ego. The Fund is amongst a few other prizes in the UK as part of a similar legacy of women connected to Laban like Sylvia Bodmer and Bonnie Bird, and connected to the Fund itself through Rebecca Skelton.
Embodied memory
Prize-giving is a form of enculturation for commitment to an ecology, bestowing recognition and belonging, hoping for a ‘return’ of some kind, though what that might look like is not determined in the award itself. The Fund itself has few ceremonies, just polite emails, formerly letters, from the Chair to the recipients. Awardees are asked to provide a report of their project for the website as an ongoing archive that explains what was done and why it was important. The site also has a section that revisits some past awardees to find out what were the longer impacts and consequences of their award. In this vein, more research is needed to better understand the Fund’s effects. For the time being, celebration of dance, and any ceremony for its namesake Lisa Ullmann, appears through embodied memory, through people and their practices.
Administrative practice
The annual award paused for two years because of the pandemic and has resumed this year. Its application process is managed by a volunteer committee of practitioners in dance and performance to assess suitability. Whilst eventually consensus must happen, the selection process involves much discussion over individuals, projects and dance praxis, and requires awareness of and appreciation for a broader ecology of dance with its multiplicities, pressures and new currents, internationally not only in the UK.
Administrative enthusiasm
As an open call competition for people having lived in the UK for a minimum of five years, it is not just experience and evidence of practice that are considered, but a sense of the person coming through in-between the lines. In one of my earlier terms on the committee, I recall reading applications with Maggie Killingbeck, at the time Chair of the Laban Guild. Maggie reflected upon an application that ‘ticked all the boxes’ but was, in her words, ‘lacking passion’. Enthusiasm affirms commitment and willingness to explore, and is part of a mutual recognition between applicants and the committee, and the committee and the Fund’s values that resonate back to Ullmann, Stephenson, Laban and others.
Access
Though the Fund has regularly awarded grants for travel to artists with disabilities, and there is funding for assistants’ travel, the methods of application to the Fund are in a process of becoming more inclusive. What this looked like in practice this year was the decision of the Fund to allocate some money for applicants requiring assistance with submitting their proposal.
Committee, committed
An affirmative ethics here recognises the potential in the individual, and reflects how the committee itself draws on practices elsewhere. This new policy was propelled by then committee member Louise Costelloe, and methods used at the membership organisation Dance Ireland, in the Republic of Ireland. Initiated by former committee member Yael Owen-McKenna, a new award for ‘dancers in training’ will be launched this year.
Balance
To update its practices and policies, the committee attempts to balance its need to support others alongside the terms of its own financial sustainability. It is entirely reliant upon donations, and often the generosity of those who were connected to Laban. I’ve watched over the years how individuals, always women, leave lump sums of money in their wills that appear without warning, and significantly bolster the infrastructure of the Fund. Such windfalls maintain staying in a position to share and having the power to act. These are part of a legacy of embodied memory enabling future generations, without kinship ties but rather a trust in dance as life. This is seen through former committee members BJ Lewis and Judith Chapman who generously sponsored the film shared at the beginning of my talk.
Becoming
The advantages of working independently, within the charity’s constitution, means proceeding slowly without pressures from governmental agencies or commercial interests. Upholding the impetus of Stephenson’s vision for the Fund requires time, skill, patience, enthusiasm, embodied knowledge, working collaboratively, and above all, belief in nurturing the infrastructures and connections of the dance ecology. Such work to steward artists of the future is the unseen work that is part of the legacies of people like Ullmann.
Anna Carlisle
The Fund’s outgoing Chair, Anna Carlisle MBE, had hoped to present with me today but could not.
In 1965, at the age of 18, Anna Carlisle went to Addlestone in Surrey and trained with Ullmann. What follows are her words from a text published in 1999 about the Art of Movement Studio at that time:
In retrospect, my own leap from classical ballet into German expressionist ‘ausdrukstanz’ was an act of extremism. I was unaware of the extent to which specific stylistic forms become assimilated – not only into the body – but into the processes of thinking. I suffered during the first year – from an inability to improvise, to find my centre of gravity to roll around the floor (ugly and childish), to understand notation, to execute a ‘natural’ movement, to comprehend the theory and philosophy. In short, to conceive of movement as the raw material of dance. I was told that I was good at exercises but I did not dare to dance and I had forgotten how to play. I was determined to break the mould. I graduated two years later, fired with enthusiasm and a conviction that the praxis of Laban’s work, rooted in the principles of movement, provided a systematic, logical and conceptual framework for the understanding of dance in its diverse forms.
These words reflect the transformational potential in embodied practices and spaces of learning. Vera Maletić writes that Lisa Ullmann ‘considered Laban capable of helping students to listen inward, to become aware of their own particular heartbeats and breathing patterns’ (20-21). These somatic processes remain vital in order to proceed with something extraordinary.
Transverse
By way of concluding remarks, the Fund helps thinking about how dance scenes, fields, sectors, industries, ecologies, however you see dance and movement and yourself within it, require maintenance and innovation in order to firstly: remain responsive to shifts and transformations of artistic methods and concerns. And secondly, be relevant to societies more broadly in which dance is fundamentally a social practice, interrelated and co-dependent for its becoming.
Transverse becoming
To develop a legacy of conditions for practice, without being explicit about what those projects might be, is a profound investment and gesture of trust. As an affirmative ethics, the work of the Fund strives for unknowable futures through creating conditions for artists and their communities to develop in self-directed ways. Its responsibility is part of a collective transverse one, spanning sideways and back for decades, and hopefully forward, onward for more. The Fund itself shows its own becoming: with a new Chair on the horizon, changes of committee members, ongoing challenges for international travel related to urgent environmental change, and the insights given by the recent pandemic for ways of working and being together.
Transverse adventure
An ecology of practices as a tool for thinking upsets any idea of a stable centre and periphery. Instead it acknowledges changing perspectives through multiple positions. Awareness of an ecology requires ongoing sensitivity, with individuals understood as not in competition but co-dependent in transverse, historical, and affective ways. A Fund for travel advocates for a sense of expansion, reflection and curiosity, and the need for adventure for inspiration.
As tracing these interconnections show, navigating spatial tensions involves opportunity, affordance, and loss. A transverse pathway is one of multiple changing spatial pulls that can activate affirmative ethics, as people, practices, organisations and legacies fall with trust through processes of becoming. Put simply, Ullmann and the Fund nourish a rich Space Harmony in which dance as an ecology of practices and people may thrive.
References
Bedford Physical Education (no date, before 2017) ‘Geraldine Stephenson’ https://www.bpeosa.co.uk/significant-lives/geraldine-stephenson/
Braidotti, Rosi. “Affirmation vs Vulnerability: On Contemporary Ethical Debates.” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 1, 2006, 235–54.
Carlisle, Anna (1999) ‘Staying Alive’, Animated [available online] https://www.communitydance.org.uk/DB/animated-library/staying-alive?ed=14052
Lisa Ullmann Travelling Scholarship Fund (2020) About https://lutsf.org.uk/about-lutsf/
Maletić, Vera (1987) Body-space-expression: the development of Rudolf Laban’s movement and dance concepts. Berlin, NY, Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter.
McCaw, D (2017) ‘Geraldine Stephenson Obituary’, The Guardian, [available online] https://www.theguardian.com/stage/tvandradioblog/2018/feb/08/geraldine-stephenson-obituary
Stengers, Isabelle (2005) ‘Introductory notes on an ecology of practice’ culturalstudiesreview, 11(1), 183-196
Donate to the Fund here: https://lutsf.org.uk/fundraising/
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