Gerda Alexander

Gerda Alexander (* February 15, 1908 in Barmen, † February 21, 1994 ibid ) is the founder of body experience Eutonie method.

Your connection to the New Education Fellowship led to Scandinavia. There is a large field of work opened up for them in educational and artistic areas. As a choreographer, she worked at opera in Sweden and Denmark. The then director of the Berlin State Theatre, Leopold Jessner, learned this work by Gerda Alexander know and engaged her for March 1 1933 as rhythmic movement teacher and assistant director. The coming to power of the Nazis defeated that dream. Leopold Jessner had to leave the theater because he was a Jew.

1933 Gerda Alexander emigrated to Denmark. In an interview for the American magazine " Somatics " she said, "A pedagogy that appeals to the responsibility of the individual, has no place in a country where a leader assumes all responsibility alone. " She remained in Copenhagen and founded in 1940 a training school for relaxation and exercise, which she headed until 1987.

Motivated by their own disease, she developed the therapeutic aspect of their work. She researched on themselves and in their work with children, artists, educators, therapists and people with a disability to the body and its functions, its reactions and laws. She recognized the unity between body and soul, and the interaction of his own physicality and the environment.

After the war, Gerda Alexander was granted Danish citizenship. From 1950 she followed numerous invitations to congresses, lectures and courses in European countries, Israel, the USA and Argentina and was known in the art. In 1956 she chose for her the name Eutonie somatopsychic method. In 1959 she presented the Eutonie ago at the international congress for relaxation and exercise in Copenhagen. Here met many methods and its founders, including Moshé Feldenkrais, Rosalia Chladek and Volkmar Glaser.

Your students have developed the Eutonie.

Works

• Eutonie: the way of physical self-awareness. Munich: Kösel 1976 ( 8th ed 1992) ISBN 3-466-42015-6
• Approach to the Eutonie - Conversations with Gerda Alexander. Swiss and German professional association for Eutonie Gerda Alexander ( Eds.), Self Publishing ISBN 3-00-011347-9