Modern dance originated from Duncan, and Laban further developed it and made great contributions to the theoretical construction of modern dance. He has many theoretical works, which comprehensively discuss the laws of people's physical and mental activities in dance movements, including the relaxation and tightening of muscles and the coordination of movements. There are famous theories such as dance space in stage performance. These theories and practices laid the foundation for modern dance. M. Wiegmann, a student of Laban, turned Laban's theory and rules into dance works through practice, which made modern dance theory more concrete and played an extremely great role in promoting the development of dance all over the world.

This modern dance school centered on Laban is called "Expressionist Modern Dance". Expressionist modern dance, like other expressionist artistic thoughts, advocates feeling first and takes intuition as the only way to know the world. Wiegman is a representative figure of expressionist dance. Another outstanding feature of her dance is to try to cut off the relationship between dance and music and let dance exist independently as an art. She said: "First of all, modern dance must be liberated from the shackles of tradition and at the same time resist the dictatorship of music, so it becomes a free and independent dance." Therefore, the so-called new approach of expressionism to explore dance is to cancel the role of music in dance and establish dance without music.