Physiological Psychology in Early Modern Dance: Rudolf Laban, Wilhelm Wundt, and the Structure of Body-Mind

Andrea Harris | Professor, Dance

6015 Vilas Hall
@ 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm

The emergence of “modern dance” around the turn of the twentieth century is an important event in the dance historical narrative. Yet its appearance was the outcome of multiple changes in philosophy, aesthetics, and science that took place well before its inception. Particularly significant for this paper are innovations in physiology and its sister discipline, physiological psychology, which transformed understandings of the human organism and the relationship between body and mind in the second half of the nineteenth century. Several early modern dancers seized upon this science to put forth new manifestos that advanced the moving body as an instrument for transforming the self and reversing the physical and social degeneration feared to be an inevitable byproduct of European industrial civilization.

Rudolf Laban and Wilhelm Wundt exemplify this interplay between modern dance and physiological psychology in the early twentieth century. Drawing on archival and primary sources, this paper investigates Wundt’s formative influence on Laban’s life-long effort to theorize the spatial structures of physical and psychical movement and their relationship. Laban’s adaptation of Wundt offers a compelling example of how artists not only took up scientific questions, they extended them, deliberately engaging with new scientific experimental methods to create new formal innovations and new theories about the efficacy of artistic practice in the modern world.

Andrea Harris, Ph.D.