Gerda Alexander

Gerda Alexander (born February 15, 1908 in Barmen ; † February 21, 1994 in Wuppertal ) is the founder of the body experience method eutonia .

Life

Gerda Alexander studied rhythmic education in Wuppertal with Otto Blensdorf , a student of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze . Gerda Alexander had a lifelong friendship with Blensdorf's daughter Charlotte Blensdorf . Influenced by reform pedagogy , she developed her method, which wanted to encourage people to move spontaneously and strengthen their self-confidence. In 1929 she passed her rhythmic exams at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. An internship with the reform pedagogue Peter Petersen from Jena shaped her educational concern: to promote people's ability to autonomy and responsibility.

Her connection to the New Education Fellowship led her to Scandinavia. A large field of work in educational and artistic fields opened up for her there. She has worked as a choreographer at operas in Sweden and Denmark. The then director of the Berlin State Theater, Leopold Jessner , got to know this work from Gerda Alexander and hired her on March 1, 1933 as a rhythmic movement teacher and assistant director. The rise of the National Socialists to power thwarted this dream. Leopold Jessner had to leave the theater because he was Jewish.

In 1933 Gerda Alexander emigrated to Denmark. In an interview for the American magazine “Somatics” she said: “There is no place for pedagogy that appeals to the responsibility of the individual in a country where a leader takes all responsibility alone.” She stayed in Copenhagen and founded there in 1940 a training school for relaxation and movement, which she directed until 1987.

Gerda Alexander spent the last years of her life in Wuppertal, where she died in 1994.

Motivated by her own illnesses, she developed the therapeutic aspect of her work. She explored the body with its functions, its reactions and laws in herself and in her work with children, artists, educators, therapists and people with disabilities. She recognized the unity of body and soul and the interaction of her own corporeality and the environment.

After the war, Gerda Alexander was granted Danish citizenship. From 1950 she accepted numerous invitations to congresses, lectures and courses in European countries, in Israel, the USA and Argentina and became known in professional circles. In 1956 she chose the term eutonia for her somatopsychic method. In 1959 she presented eutonia at the international congress for relaxation and exercise in Copenhagen . Here many methods and their founders met, u. a. Moshé Feldenkrais , Rosalia Chladek and Volkmar Glaser.

Your students developed eutonia further.

Works

• Eutonia: the path to physical self-awareness. Kösel, Munich 1976, 8th edition 1992, ISBN 3-466-42015-6 .
• Approaching Eutonia - Conversations with Gerda Alexander. Swiss and German Professional Association for Eutonia Gerda Alexander (Ed.), Self-published, ISBN 3-00-011347-9 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Gerda Alexander in the catalog of the German National Library