Moving With The Times

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