This chapter locates the practice-inspired approach to rhythm of choreographer and movement-thinker Rudolf Laban (1879–1958) in the wider context of critical theory focusing on rhythm and rhythmanalysis. In doing so, its aim is both to add a significant and overlooked voice to the ongoing debate on rhythm which has unfolded in Western thought, and to argue for the value of a practitioner’s insight into this prominently if not exclusively theoretical arena. Laban's attempts to define, analyse and understand rhythm are here discussed in relation to his artistic output and his philosophy through an exploration and analysis of unpublished manuscripts and drawings held at the National Resource Centre for Dance at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom.

Anticipating what Henri Lefebvre famously argued in Rhythmanalysis (2004), rhythm is for Laban at the same time a quantifiable phenomenon (Takt) unfolding in space and a qualitative variable (rhythm itself), suggestive of what Lefebvre would later describe as ‘what is least rational in human being: the lived, the carnal, the body’ (9). Laban studied rhythm's intensities in his ‘Effort theory’ in English factories in the post-war period. This work resonates with but at the same time differs from Taylor's project of time-motion studies, in that rhythm plays the central role of resisting the impact of machine work on individual workers. Rhythm's effects on space and its impact on the dynamics of the moving body are also explored by Laban in his Choreutic theory, of which several models in the form of sketches and drawings are discussed in this chapter. In order to understand and reconcile the inner (Effort) and outer (Choreutics) study of rhythm, Laban, later in life, relied on topological structures such as knots and Mobius strips to devise his theories, something that resonates with the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan and Michel Serres among others. These topological models sought to overcome the binary division of inside–outside and also to conceive of a continuous space of transformation without interruption, something that, it will be argued, comes to define Laban's understanding of rhythm.