Irmgard bartenieff biography template

Few people have even heard of her.

But of all the teachers, mentors and inspirational people I&#;ve been exposed to, Irmgard Bartenieff has had the biggest influence on the way I understand human movement and health.

She was born in Berlin in , studied with Rudolf Laban and other notables of German Expressionistic modern dance, fled the Nazi regime for New York, studied physical therapy, and was a pioneer in polio treatment, dance therapy, and dance ethnography. She was the founder of the Laban Institute of Movement Studies (later renamed the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies), one of the world&#;s foremost training programs for scholars, teachers, choreographers, practitioners, analysts, non-verbal communication specialists, ethnographers, and all those who work in the movement field.

Here&#;s her bio page on Wikipedia

Though she died in , she&#;s still decades ahead of her time in her views of movement.

For example, she grasped that movement is adaptive, that it forms the interface between the human being and the environment. Particularly the social environment.

Movement systems that emphasize &#;efficiency&#; or &#;ease&#; in motion are missing at least part of the point.  Movement isn&#;t designed to be &#;efficient.&#; It&#;s designed to be expressive, communicative, socially meaningful, adaptive, and (to some degree) efficient, all at the same time.

She also developed a keen understanding of the &#;three-dimensionality&#; of movement, particularly through her pioneering work during the polio epidemic of the &#;s.  These children suffered from muscle contractures; the treatment of the day consisted in trying to stretch their muscles to maintain their length.

Irmgard discovered that a more effective approach involved mobilizing her patients&#; limbs and trunk through all their possible ranges of motion while at the same time fostering &#;verticality.&#;

These and similar insights led to the developmen

It has been over 50 years since Alan Lomax introduced the Choreometrics project, 40 years since the release of Lomax’s film Dance and Human History, and 30 years since Lomax wrote Dancing: A World Ethnography of Dance Styles, which is still unpublished. When Lomax first announced the Choreometrics project, he was directed to Irmgard Bartenieff who, with her student Forrestine Paulay, worked to develop a method for coding movement. Using films containing images of the dances of different cultures across the world, several hundred coding sheets were completed. Choreometrics was refined throughout the next 25 years through an extensive dialogue with leading anthropologists and dance experts. In addition, Lomax and his colleagues made or gathered an extensive collection of filmed dance performances and related notes, analog codings,  and illustrations to illustrate showing the elements of Choreometrics. Bartenieff left the project after a few years, but she maintained an interest in it in support of her studies on Dance Ethnography. As such, she captured her thoughts on the Choreometrics project in notes to Paulay, general notes, and through her teaching. Several examples are shown here.

In , two Certified Movement Analysts (CMAs) discovered that the original archives for the Choreometrics project were located in the Library of Congress: Karen Bradley, then Director of LIMS and Associate Professor of Dance at the University of Maryland, and Miriam Phillips, Dance Ethnologist. Knowing that Irmgard Bartenieff and Forrestine Paulay were part of the original Choreometrics project and the resulting relationship between LIMS and the Association for Cultural Equity, Bradley reached out to Alan Lomax’s daughter, Anna Lomax Wood, ACE’s current President, and together they discussed the possibilities of revisiting the raw material and analytic process of Choreometrics with new eyes. This partnership launched a research project: Reimagining Choreometrics. To le

American physical therapist and dance therapist (–)

Irmgard Bartenieff (February 24, – August 27, ) was a German-born American dance theorist, dancer, choreographer, physical therapist, and a leading pioneer of dance therapy. A student of Rudolf Laban, she pursued cross-cultural dance analysis, and generated a new vision of possibilities for human movement and movement training. From her experiences applying Laban’s concepts of dynamism, three-dimensional movement and mobilization to the rehabilitation of people affected by polio in the s, she went on to develop her own set of movement methods and exercises, known as Bartenieff Fundamentals.

Bartenieff incorporated Laban's spatial concepts into the mechanical anatomical activity of physical therapy, in order to enhance maximal functioning. In physical therapy, that meant thinking in terms of movement in space, rather than by strengthening muscle groups alone. The introduction of spatial concepts required an awareness of intent on the part of the patient as well, that activated the patient's will and thus connected the patient's independent participation to his or her own recovery. "There is no such thing as pure “physical therapy” or pure “mental” therapy. They are continuously interrelated."

Bartenieff’s presentation of herself was quiet and, according to herself, she did not feel comfortable marketing her skills and knowledge. Not until June , a few months before she died, did her name appear in the institute’s title: Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS), a change initiated by the Board of Directors in her honor.

Biography

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