Recent encounters with physical therapy have given me a new appreciation of Irmgard Bartenieff, my first Laban teacher. Bartenieff was a dancer when she studied with Laban in Germany. After immigrating to the U.S. she became a physical therapist, initially working with polio victims. If facing the challenge of helping clients recover from paralysis, she drew on everything she had learned from Laban. The result crystallized in a somatic practice known as Bartenieff Fundamentals, which I studied with Bartenieff in the 1970s.
The physical therapy exercises I was given to do recently were similar to exercises in Bartenieff Fundamentals. Initially I felt comfortable with the prescribed regimen. Over time, however, certain things began to bother me – the emphasis on isolated movement, the mechanical repetition, the limited spatial form. And so I started to rethink my physical therapy, drawing on Laban and Bartenieff.
Bartenieff believed that, “change in any part changes the whole”. So I began to work with my whole body, rather than merely focusing on the part that was injured.
Because Bartenieff didn’t see much value in mechanical repetition, I minimized the number of times I repeated prescribed exercises. Instead, I distributed my practice, doing fewer repetitions at one time, but taking time to exercise a couple of times a day. This helped me find a more healthy rhythm of exertion and recuperation.
I also started to introduce more three-dimensional movement into my therapeutic practice. I used diagonal sequences from Fundamentals and cautiously worked with some of Laban’s transverse and peripheral space harmony scales.
I could enumerate many other changes. However, this is my point – knowledge of Laban and Bartenieff principles allowed me to take charge of my own process of healing. And once I did so, genuine recovery began.
Studying movement is a life-long undertaking. As I have recently learned, re-visiting Laban and Bartenieff’s ideas under changed conditions can yield new insights.
The forthcoming Tetra seminar provides an opportunity for a fresh encounter with these ideas. Click here to take advantage of the early registration discount.