Abstract
This study aims to elucidate psychopathological aspects of Rudolf von Laban’s dance works and
his writings, referring as well to the influence from Zurich Dada. In the first chapter, I discuss Laban’s
suffering from recurrent depressive episodes. Considering his course of illness, I argue that his condition
meets the criteria for depression with hyperthymia. This psychopathology invokes ‘radical empathy,’
which one can observe in his diary and his publication The World of the Dancer (1920). In chapter 2,
I discuss that his dance drama The Fiddler (1916) reflected his mourning of his deceased spouse and
its fairytale narrative might have exerted a therapeutic force to his lamentation. Subsequently, in the
following two chapters, I pursue the collaboration between Laban’s students and dadaists in their
experiment of dance performances. Through the analysis of theoretical and practical backgrounds, the
notion of ‘abstraction’ was summoned to depict the characteristic of their performances, notably those
of Sophie Taeuber. Finally, in chapter 5, I introduce the term ‘transformative abstraction’ in order to
refigure the impact from Dada performances as well as Laban’s psychopathology on his dance and
then propose that his performance in Fool’s Mirror (1926) represented the functional ambivalence of
transformative abstraction which was associated with enhanced resilience.
