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Uncompromising innovator, researcher,
dancer and scholar, mentor and matriarch
She is a bishop’s daughter with a silver-spoon
childhood and youthful traumas through
the death of her father, wartime separation
and teenage poverty. Valerie’s meeting, aged
sixteen, with the extraordinary Hungarian
Rudolf Laban, guru of expressionist dance,
set her on a life-long career devoted to
questioning, championing and developing
his initial insights into dance as a deeply
significant art form for human wellbeing.
Her writing exposes her battles to integrate
dance practice with dance scholarship in a
world set up to keep them apart.
She shares the difficulties of balancing the
demands of family with professional life
exacerbated by the catastrophic illness of her
husband John and her own experience of
mental breakdown.
She describes her travels taking dance all
over the globe and collecting evidence across
Europe of Laban’s leadership of German dance
in the 1920s and 1930s, work that the Nazi
regime almost succeeded in annihilating.
The book traces her support of what is
now Trinity Laban Conservatoire for Music
and Dance, from being in its first cohort of
students in a grubby studio in Manchester to
being honoured as a Fellow in its Herzog and
de Meuron award-winning building in South
London.
Valerie shares her wholehearted commitment
to whatever was on offer at difference stages of
her life from performing and choreographing,
renovating a Victorian garden and running
clubs for disadvantaged people, writing books
and directing documentaries, educating
dancers and dance makers, engaging with
all manner of people along the way from the
left-wing theatre director Joan Littlewood to
the establishment Archbishop of Canterbury
or the astounding choreographer William
Forsythe, while nurturing her family and embracing Quakerism.
