In 1899, Laban moved to Munich and began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts (Akademie der bildenden Künste).

In 1904 Laban decided to leave Munich to visit the most famous art school in Europe, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris to study architecture.

Laban drew for the magazines Simplicissimus and Jugend and continued the studies he had begun in Paris on historical dance forms.

Overworked to the point of exhaustion, Laban collapsed in 1912 and went to the Lahmann-Sanatorium Weißer Hirsch [de] near Dresden for a cure, where patients were cared for according to the life-reform (Lebensreform) principles.

During the First World War, Laban created a school on the natural healing colony Monte Verità in the Swiss canton of Ticino, in the municipality of Ascona, which soon attracted many followers of the new dance art.

[11][12] Here Laban experienced his intellectual and artistic breakthrough, celebrating the "neuen Menschen", "Fiur-Menschen", "Anarchos", and "Orgiastos" in expressionist dance dramas.

It included interdisciplinary dance art, pantomime, improvisation and experiments with the body, voice, instruments, texts and even drawing.

The conclusion of a large vegetarian and pacifist congress at the end of summer 1917 on Monte Verità in Ascona was the three-part dance drama Sang an die Sonne [de] to a text by Otto Borngräber.

Early in the morning the rising, "victorious" sun was greeted as an expression of the hope of overcoming the war and a utopian higher development of mankind.

[13] On 24 October 1917, Reuss issued a charter to Laban and Hans Rudolf Hilfiker-Dunn (1882–1955) to operate a III° Ordo Templi Orientis Lodge in Zürich called Libertas et Fraternitas.

[16] Laban even wrote during this time that "we want to dedicate our means of expression and the articulation of our power to the service of the great tasks of our Volk (People).

In fact, the seizure of power by the National Socialists in 1933 had an immediate effect on Laban's work through the new law passed against racial overcrowding in German schools and universities of 25 April 1933 (Gesetz gegen die Überfüllung deutscher Schulen und Hochschulen [de]), Laban was thus bound by this new law of vetting students with the racial characteristic of a "non-Aryan" descent.

[25] Eventually, he was invited to England, where in February 1938 he joined up with two of his former students Kurt Jooss and Sigurd Leeder at the Jooss-Leeder Dance School they had founded at Dartington Hall in Devon (thanks to the philanthropy of Leonard Elmhirst and his wife Dorothy Whitney), where innovative dance was already being taught by other refugees from Nazi Germany.

[26] Laban was greatly assisted in his dance teaching during these years by his close associates and long-term partners Lisa Ullmann and Sylvia Bodmer.

[27] In 1947, together with management consultant Fredrick Lawrence, Laban published a book Effort, Fordistic study of the time taken to perform tasks in the industrial workplace and the energy used.

Among Laban's students, friends, and associates were Mary Wigman, Suzanne Perrottet, Katja Wulff, Kurt Jooss, Lisa Ullmann, Albrecht Knust, Dussia Bereska, Lilian Harmel, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hilde Holger, Ana Maletić, Milča Mayerová, Gertrud Kraus, Gisa Geert, Warren Lamb, Elizabeth Sneddon, Dilys Price, Yat Malmgren, Sylvia Bodmer, Betty Meredith-Jones, and Irmgard Bartenieff.

The Rudolf Laban Archive at the National Resource Centre for Dance, collected and organised by Lisa Ullmann and Ellinor Hinks, documents his educational work in the UK and contains many of his original drawings.

The John Hodgson Collection in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University holds original documents relating to Laban's career in Europe in the early twentieth century.