Moving With The Times

Uncompromising innovator, researcher,dancer and scholar, mentor and matriarchShe is a bishop’s daughter with a silver-spoonchildhood and youthful traumas throughthe death of her father, wartime separationand teenage poverty. Valerie’s meeting, agedsixteen, with the extraordinary HungarianRudolf Laban, guru of expressionist dance,set her on a life-long career devoted toquestioning, championing and developinghis initial insights into dance as a deeplysignificant art form for human wellbeing.Her writing exposes her battles to integratedance practice with dance scholarship in aworld set up to keep them apart.She shares the difficulties of balancing thedemands of family with professional lifeexacerbated by the catastrophic illness of herhusband John and her own experience ofmental breakdown.She describes her travels taking dance allover the globe and collecting evidence acrossEurope of Laban’s leadership of German dancein the 1920s and 1930s, work that the Naziregime almost succeeded in annihilating.The book traces her support of what isnow Trinity Laban Conservatoire for Musicand Dance, from being in its first cohort ofstudents in a grubby studio in Manchester tobeing honoured as a Fellow in its Herzog andde Meuron award-winning building in SouthLondon.Valerie shares her wholehearted commitmentto whatever was on offer at difference stages ofher life from performing and choreographing,renovating a Victorian garden and runningclubs for disadvantaged people, writing booksand directing documentaries, educatingdancers and dance makers, engaging withall manner of people along the way from theleft-wing theatre director Joan Littlewood tothe establishment Archbishop of Canterburyor the astounding choreographer WilliamForsythe, while nurturing her family and embracing Quakerism.