389 pages

 

 

Bone, Breath, and Gesture: Practices of Embodiment

Edited by Don Johnson

This book is a collection of writings on principles and techniques by the pioneers of bodywork and body awareness disciplines. Together, they represent a historical record of the field of somatics. Ranging from hands-on workers like Ida Rolf to phenomenologist Elizabeth Behnke, their lives span this century. In these lectures, writings, and interviews, editor Don Hanlon Johnson has sought to revel the unbroken lineage, theoretical differences, and major similarities of these originators.

People included in this volume:

  • Elsa Gindler
  • Charlotte Selver
  • Carola Speads
  • Marion Rosen
  • Ilse Middendorf
  • F. Matthias Alexander
  • Moshe Feldenkrais
  • Ida Rolf
  • Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
  • Judith Aston
  • Irmgard Bartenieff
  • Mary Whitehouse
  • Gerda Alexander
  • Emilie Conrad Da'oud
  • Elizabeth A. Behnke
  • Thomas Hanna
  • Deane Juhan.

In addition, there is a bibliography, a list of pilot research projects in various methods, and addresses for contacting the various training institutes.

 
 

$35

  Sample the book:

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=iVtdDKqG1uoC&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0

 
  From introduction:

"These pioneers in embodiment are typically a feisty lot, unwilling to take at face value a poor medical prognosis, a dull exercise class, ordinary states of consciousness. Rejecting the bleakness of conventional wisdom, they have chosen to survive outside the mainstream, like artists often struggling to make a living by doing something other than their heart's work. Marion Rosen and Carola Speads worked for years as physical therapists; Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen as an occupational therapist;Emilie Conrad Da'Oud as a fashion model and night club entertainer;Moshe Feldenkrais as a professor of engineering.Many of their students now live as quiet outlaws, neither psychologists, nor physical therapists, nor physicians, though bearing resemblances to all of those officially sanctioned professionals. Those few who, like Marion Rosen and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, have gone through the process of gaining an academic degree or a professional license typically do it not primarily for interest in the material itself -- psychology, osteopathy, medicine -- but for the sake of protecting their practices and giving their clients access to third party payments."

 
   

 

 

About the Author:

Don Hanlon Johnson received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University. He is a professor of Somatics at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

For more information: http://donhanlonjohnson.com/

 
   

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