I stumbled across this fun article from the Austin Chronicle about dancer Rhoda Winter Russell. Rhoda trained with Mary Wigman, as well as various other teachers and attended the University of Wisconsin dance program home of Mable Elsworth Todd author of one of one favorite body/movement books; “The thinking Body” .

Russell commented on her early days in the article stating; “There’s Picasso in art, and there’s Stravinsky in music, and there is Wigman in dance”. Russell recalled that when Wigman instructed her class, “It was a lot of emotional feeling, not that you should bend this way and turn that way. And let the group feel each other, and create out of that. Basically you had to get out of yourself, and you had to sense not only your body but the others.”

Like others in the beginnings of the Dance Movement Therapy field Russell volunteered at a psychiatric hospital where as she began leading movement therapy sessions; “I worked with very severely disturbed patients, because in the Fifties, they were just beginning to use the psychotropic drugs”.

This was a great article to read and I only provided a few highlights here to see more click the link below.

Read the entire article here.