Donors can also access the Members Pages to get more details
and audio excerpts from interviews.

February 8, 2010

Inspired by an email I recently received I would like to share with you a piece which I wrote for Charlotte Selver's memorial service in 2003. I had almost forgotten about it and enjoyed rediscovering the article. You might enjoy reading it (again) too. Follow the links below but first read the email from Pieter Jongbloed who had never heard of Charlotte Selver before:

Dear Mr Laeng-Gilliatt,

While I was searching for a recording of Frank Martin's Der Cornet, on a text of Rilke's poem, google led me to the eulogy you have written on Charlotte Selver a few years ago. Although I have not known her, I would like to tell you hat I have read the eulogy with so much pleasure. It is a wonderful and very respectful description of a no doubt very special person. Especially the section on her visits to my country during the war was interesting and delightful.

Thank you very much for having kept this text on the web.

Sincerely yours,

Pieter Jongbloed

Here is the link for the Eulogy for Charlotte Selver.

You might be interested in revisiting the other articles on the Pathways web site too. All of them touch on aspects of Sensory Awareness and its history:Pathways of Sensory Awareness: Article Page.

 

 

Charlotte Selver in Warnemünde in 1926, writing one of the over 700 letters she wrote to Heinrich Selver.

"Senta*, der Schelm, hat mich eines Tages geknipst, als ich Dir schrieb.
So überrascht sie mich Unwissende heute mit diesem Bild.
Willst Du es wohl annehmen?"

"Senta*, that rascal, took pictures of me one day when I was writing to you.
Today she surprised me with this photograph.
Will you accept it?"

*Senta Liecke, who some years later married the movement teacher Hinrich Medau.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

November 10, 2009

Reflections on Charlotte Selver and Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

An Interview with Yvonne Rand

This is an edited excerpt of a much longer interview which was conducted as part of the Charlotte Selver Oral History and Book Project.

Yvonne Rand: The first time Charlotte and Suzuki Roshi* taught together in North Beach in San Francisco in 1967. It was the first time Suzuki Roshi had met Charlotte. He was right there doing everything with her. He led part of the day, and she led part of the day, and he was completely a participant.

His students noticed that. Oh, so this is a teacher we should pay attention to. There were also some of Charlotte’s students who felt a resonating with Suzuki Roshi and what he was teaching.

I remember one of Charlotte’s first workshops at Green Gulch where she had some big stones. She had us lie down on the floor and put the stones on different parts of the body as a way of bringing attention to the body. Suzuki Roshi was thrilled with all of that. Because for us as Americans, even to this day, we concentrate our attention very much from the neck up. So I think he was very glad to feel that kind of company and mutuality between what he was doing and what she was doing.

For Suzuki Roshi, who loved stones – he was mad for stones – to meet somebody like Charlotte who used stones in her teaching, and who would use stones as a way of introducing her students to a kind of awakening of sensing, and beginning to allow oneself to pay attention to what one experiences in a body-based, sense-based, way – it was clear to him that she could provide what was missing. Read on...

Yvonne Rand is a meditation teacher and lay householder priest in the Soto Zen Buddhist tradition. She began her practice and study of Zen with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in 1966. Her other principal teachers and mentors have been Dainin Katagiri Roshi, Maureen Stuart Roshi, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the Venerable Tara Tulku, and Shodo Harada Roshi. Her primary practice path is Zen, augmented by practices and teachings from the traditions of Theravada and Vajrayana. Ms. Rand incorporates insights from the psychotherapy traditions in her teaching. She also investigates the relevance of the arts and gardening for training the mind. Ms. Rand is married and is a mother and a gardener. (For more information go to www.goatintheroad.org.)

Sebtember 22, 2009

Glimpses Into a Rich Summer of Research in Europe
 
(Members can access a page with more photographs from my trip.)

Over the summer I spent five weeks in Europe to offer Sensory Awareness workshops and for research on the book project. I had many fascinating encounters with students and colleagues, with people who met Charlotte decades ago, with places in which Charlotte lived before fleeing Germany in 1938.

While the conversations usually began with memories about Charlotte and what it meant for people to have known her, we always came at one time or another to discuss "the work".

I am grateful for the many questions raised to which there are no easy answers: What is Sensory Awareness and what is not? How did Charlotte’s approach develop and change over the years? How did it compare to that of her peers, Elfriede Hengstenberg, Frieda Goralewsky, Sophie Ludwig, to name just a few of the many Gindler students who carried on the work? How was Charlotte’s way of working different from that of her teachers Elsa Gindler and Heinrich Jacoby?

Stools, steel balls and sandbags at the Heinrich Jacoby/Elsa Gindler-Stiftung in Berlin.
Most of these materials have been used since the time of Elsa Gindler and Sophie Ludwig.

Another fascinating question to which I am hoping to find answers: How did Gindler’s own approach change over the years? This question was an important part of the conversation I had with Jutta and Eberhard Wangemann who studied with Gindler from 1951 and until her death in 1961. That was, in their experience, the time when Gindler really came into her prime and refined her work. According to the Wangemanns, the work that Charlotte experienced during the years of her most intense studies with Gindler in the 1920s and 30s must have been quite different. To shed light on such questions is something I hope to accomplish in my book about Charlotte’s life and work.

Other people who shared their knowledge with me were:
– Karoline von Steinaecker, author of Luftsprünge, a beautiful book about the beginnings of modern somatic therapies.
– Ulrich Bode, grandson of Charlotte’s Expressive Gymnastics teacher Rudolf Bode.
– Karlheinz Passon, current director of the Bode School.
– Birgit Rohloff of the Heinrich-Jacoby/Elsa-Gindler-Stiftung,
who very generously opened its archives for me.
– Sensory Awareness Leader colleagues:
Thomas Niering (my very generous host in Berlin), Leonore Quest (Bewegungsraum am Lietzensee),
Ute Strub (Emmi-Pikler-Haus), Norbert Boehmer, Ioana Cisec, Peggy Zeitler (Wege der Entfaltung), Marianne Ehrat, Claudia Caviezel, Hannes Zahner (Ruth Matter Stiftung).

I am planning to make some of these conversations available online over the next months. The interviews were conducted in German and have yet to be transcribed. Do you read and write in German? Can you help?

From early on in Charlotte’s life the professional and the personal were very much intertwined. Charlotte lived for her work, and she was very passionate about it, be it in the 20s when she was a Bode Gymnastik teacher, be it as a student of Elsa Gindler and Heinrich Jacoby or later on, as many of us have experienced, when she lived in the United States. As I continue to explore Charlotte’s early life it is becoming increasingly evident that her vocation must have had a big impact on the relationship with her first husband, Heinrich Selver. An image emerges of their relationship that shows two young people who are fiercely independent in their everyday lives but emotionally entangled, two people who adored each other but who could never settle for an ‘ordinary’ marriage. It seems that they loved each other most passionately when they dreamed to build a life together but struggled when they actually shared an apartment. That is not to say that they did not enjoy living together. I know from Charlotte how much she loved coming home after a days work to join Heinrich in their apartment when he was still a student at the university of Leipzig: “I remember the evenings when I came home late from the work. I entered the living room, cigarette smoke was hanging in the air and there sat Heinrich, working very quietly and I came from the very lively lessons into this stillness.”

One of the big surprises in Berlin was when I discovered a gap of about 3 to 4 years in Charlotte's otherwise very well documented life in Germany. I had always assumed that Charlotte lost her work in Leipzig in 1933 when the Nazis took power and that she then joined her husband in Berlin. He had lived there since the early 30s and by that time was the principal in a private school. When I was in Berlin it became evident that Charlotte probably didn't move to Berlin until sometime in 1935 or early 1936 when she joined Heinrich Selver in the schoolhouse of Lotte Kaliski’s private Jewish school in Berlin-Dahlem. What did Charlotte do in Leipzig after the Nazis took power? Was she still able to teach? And why did she and Heinrich not live together?

I have yet to find out when exactly Charlotte was banned from working at the University of Leipzig but it was likely in 1933. Apparently, she continued to give classes on her own for some time (years?) and she seemed to have received continued support from Hermann Altrock, the director of the institute for physical education: “He would take me in an open car and drive with me through Leipzig and I would say: 'But, Herr Professor, you cannot do that? With whom are you driving?' And he said: 'Die sollen mal kommen!' [Just let them come!]"

Memorial on the site of the great community synagogue in Leipzig,
desecrated and destroyed during the November Pogrom in 1938,
only days after Charlotte fled Germany.

I was always aware that Charlotte’s life became increasingly difficult in the 1930s but while in Berlin, Leipzig and Munich this knowing grew into a felt sense of turmoil. Those of us who have not experienced similar circumstances will never be able to fully grasp how the daily humiliation of antisemitism, once it became the law of the land, affected Charlotte. Moreover, as the humiliation changed to outright terror, Charlotte’s relationship with Heinrich also changed in ways that must have been very painful for both of them. Here, too, the personal and the political were tragically intertwined. This is not the place to go into detail about that and much is not clear to me yet but I am working on finding information on that time period in Charlotte’s life through state archives in Germany and – if I am very lucky – if I find people still alive who might have known Charlotte then.

All of this work is possible only because of the support of many of you and I thank you for that. Fundraising has been very successful again this year. I do not take this for granted. About $2,700 are missing to reach this year’s fund raising goal. It is a sign of great generosity and trust that it is not more. Still, as funding is tightly calculated, it would be a great help if this money could be raised. If you are moved to do support my work for the remainder of this year I would be grateful for any donations.

 

March 18, 2009

Over the past months I have dedicated much of my time to studying and typing Charlotte Selver's letters to her first husband, Heinrich Selver (to be precise: at the time of the letter mentioned below Charlotte and Heinrich were not married yet, though they had been a couple for about 5 years). Charlotte was a prolific correspondent and the letters are fascinating. Through them I will be able to let the young Charlotte be the guiding voice in the book throughout the 20s and 30s. Here is part of a letter from July 10, 1925, in which Charlotte writes from the sea resort of Warnemünde, where she and her colleagues from the "Bode School for Physical Education / Berlin" offered a series of workshops: Letter 1925-7-10.

To further explore that time in Charlotte's life I am planing a month-long trip to Germany this summer, where I will conduct research in Munich, Berlin, Leipzig and hopefully the city in which she spent her childhood, Duisburg.

Postcard from January 6, 1925:
"You should, my friend, know the places where your girlfriend
spent her youth. The x shows the roofs of the houses
on the Rheinallee where our house is."

Interestingly, though Charlotte and Heinrich had been dating since 1920, he had never been to Ruhrort nor had he met her parents. This should finally happen only weeks after this postcard was sent. It was part of preparing Heinrich for the visit. Why it took so long for this meeting to take place is not entirely clear to me yet but it may well have been a class issue. Charlotte, on the other hand, had long met Heinrich's family in Chemnitz.

Besides digging in the early history of Charlotte's life, I am also continuing with the oral history interviews. Listen to an excerpt of my interview with Stanley Keleman. Donors to the project can access the full interview through the members pages (including his account of a demonstration by Ida Rolf in which she insured Charlotte. This just for fun, nothing against Ida Rolf or Rolfing!). The full interview can be accessed by donors to the project on the members page.

 

November 20, 2008
In October I had the chance to interview more people in the Bay Area. Among them were Don Hanlon Johnson and Stanley Keleman. Read an excerpt of my interview with Don Johnson, titled Charlotte Selver is the ABS of Being Human. Members can also listen to some of the interview. I hope to add excerpts from my fascinating interview with Stanley Keleman before long.
Reaching back a bit into the growing 'vault' of interviews, here is an expcerpt of my conversation with Sophia Rosoff. At age 87, Sophia is still active and sought after as a piano teacher. She took the first workshop with Charlotte in 1948, which makes her the earliest student I have been able to interview to date. Here she talks about how she met Charlotte and what working with her meant for her piano playing. (In this excerpt, you will hear Sophia say she met Charlotte in 1968. This error was corrected later in the interview.)

October 31, 2008
I am now working through 1923 of Charlotte's letters to Heinrich Selver. It is the year of the great inflation and much turmoil in Germany. Sadly, it is also the year in which Charlotte writes about the first shocking signs of things to come, as she encounters grave anti-Semitism. Charlotte continues her training with Bode and she studies art history with Heinrich Wölfflin at the university of Munich. She mentions Heinrich Jacoby and Elsa Gindler for the first time. In the letters, Charlotte goes not into much detail about them, though it is clear that they immediately become important to her. Because the letters are a record of the times when Charlotte and Heinrich were not together, there is much about which we do not hear. Naturally, they do not reveal much about the times they spent together, though one gets a good sense of the many ups and downs in their long-distant relationship before they got married. Often, what we learn in the letters are only fragments of experiences and encounters. To give an example: in a letter dated June 6, 1923, Charlotte writes about a trip to Hellerau, today a part of Dresden, at that time a center for cultural visionaries in Germany. In Hellerau, Charlotte just visited the reform pedagogue Tami Oelfken and her school. This fascinating letter offers glimpses into a life rich with new and exciting experiences at the edge of cultural developments in Germany. But only 'en passant' does Charlotte hint at the fact that she studied with Heinrich Jacoby there and that both she and Heinrich Selver had met him before: "Jacoby: You wouldn't recognize the man as the one we met before, when having a lesson with him. To write about that would be useless, you have to experience it yourself." We do not learn anything about the nature of these lessons. This is one of the many entry points for research into the fascinating times in which Charlotte lived and about which I have the great opportunity to paint a portrait.

 

September 26, 2008
I have started to work through Charlotte Selver's letters to her first husband, Heinrich Selver (later I will tackle his letters to her, which are very hard to read). These letters, most of them written between 1921 and 1932, contain a wealth of information about Charlotte's formative years. Going through these letters I realize how fortunate I am to have Charlotte's voice - in writing and in interviews - covering much of her life and guiding me in my work. Many of the letters give detailed information about her studies, her whereabouts and her professional life. I am now working through 1922. This is a crucial year in Charlotte's life. She studies photography in Munich and also begins her training with Rudolph Bode in Bode Gymnastik; she meets artists and intellectuals going to "tea" at Dr. Ludwig's; she falls in love with the Bavarian alps and becomes a passionate hiker and - she sees Mary Wigman dance (see a clip on YouTube). This is quite possibly a crucial moment in her life and it is the first time she writes about the field of work which will soon become her passion and profession.

In a letter dated November 17, 1921, Charlotte writes: "Last Sunday I saw Mary Wigman, the dancer! It is impossible to describe how people are affected by her. She is supernatural and her simplicity and strength - foreign to us - her ultimate sincerity, show more about the connection of body and mind than ever before. How this woman, her gesture, moves away from the body with her body, is a miracle. All the arts seem to unite in her when she dances without music, harmonies emanate from her, her gestures show the ultimate truth of the poets; her lines, the structure of her body, its language and spirit are more beautiful and ravishing than sculpture. Her dance is completely detached from gravity. Though nothing is difficult for her and all technique transcended, she dances in uncompromising form."

German original: "Letzten Sonntag war ich bei der Mary Wigman, der Tänzerin. Es ist unmöglich zu beschreiben, wie sie auf die Menschen wirkt. Sie ist übernatürlich, und die uns fremde Einfachheit und Stärke, dieser letzte Ernst, den sie gibt, zeigt mehr den Zusammenhang von Leib und Geist als je. Wie diese Frau in der Gebärde, mit ihrem Leib ganz wegführt vom Leib, das ist das Wunder. Tanzt sie ohne Musik, so schient sie jede Art von Kunst in sich zu vereinen, Harmonien schlagen aus ihr, die letzte Wahrheit der Dichter gibt ihre Gebärde, die spricht; ihre Linien und der Aufbau ihres Körpers , seine Sprache und sein Geist sind schöner und hinreissender als Plastik, und ihr Tanz ist gänzlich losgelöst von der Erdenschwere. Obgleich es für sie keine Schwierigkeit gibt, ihr jede Technik Überwundenes ist, so tanzt sie in der strengsten Form."

I also I continue to transcribe my interviews with Charlotte from 1999. Members can hear her talk about visiting Charles Brooks in his apartment in Greenwich Village for the first time.

September 9, 2008
A rich summer is coming to its end. It is becoming cooler fast here in Santa Fe as I process this summer's "harvest". I traveled for seven weeks and was able to meet with many friends and students of Charlotte.
One of the very inspiring meetings took place on the Lower East Side in Manhatten on June 12, when I met with Johanna Kulbach. Johanna, now 96 years of age, studied with Elsa Gindler in the 30s and 40s. She came to the US in late 1949 and met Charlotte Selver soon after. Listen to a short excerpt of my interview with Johanna Kulbach (supporters will be able to listen to a longer excerpt on the Members Page). Spending time with her was very inspiring in many ways. Having recently lost both legs because of diabetes, Johanna is full of life, happy to live and simply a joy to be with.

May 28, 2008
What has been most rewarding in the past months - besides enjoying the generosity of those supporting my project fiancially - Thank you! - is to experience the warmth with which the interviewees have received me. Clearly, for most people it is as gratifying as it is for me to remember and share their “life with Charlotte”. And I am always thrilled when the conversations go beyond the biographical to include an exploration of the significance of the practice of Sensory Awareness in our personal and professional lives.

One of my trips brought me to Santa Barbara, where Charlotte, together with her husband and colleague, Charles Brooks, started to offer workshops at La Casa de Maria in the late 1960s. For a catholic retreat center to host Sensory Awareness was at that time controversial. Don George was director of La Casa for much of the time Charlotte worked there: “When Charlotte was coming with her work, no one was doing that.  It was so different from any other kind of learning we were being exposed to. When you see there are possibilities of doing things differently, that’s really significant. And there are not that many things that come along that can hit you on the side of your head and say, wait a minute, here is a whole another world of being. Charlotte was a gem, and I admired her so much, but it was also that the work was altering the way we were being in our learning and, yes, in our spirituality even.  I know she said it is not spiritual work, but it is. Today, we understand so much more of Gaia and the whole connection, but Charlotte had it back then and just didn't call it what we might call it today.”

In Santa Barbara I also met with June Christensen. Her eyes sparkled with life when she opened the door to greet me. What a warm, immediate welcome! June, now in her eighties, was a dancer when she met Charlotte. Charlotte’s relationship with dance, with performance in general, was complex and she often gave dancers a hard time in her classes when she sensed that they were performing and not exploring. I look forward to finding out more about this in the course of my research and writing. June: “Charlotte was very hard on dancers. Don’t do any performing for her! She was the Germanic master when it came to that. But I learned how to put the spirit in the dance. Later, I gave up teaching dance and became very interested in learning, in education itself.  I ran an alternative school looking at how kids learn, rather than what they’re learning. [I was offering] a lot of movement along with that, honoring that many people actually learn kinesthetically. I did that and then I became a consultant for a couple of years, and then I started working with adults.  And all that time I was doing sensory awareness classes off and on too, which Charlotte gave me permission to do. I clearly remember that experience: We were exchanging rocks, we each had a rock and we were walking around and exchanging. And in the reporting afterward I just said that it had come to me that giving and receiving were one thing”. And June recalls Charlotte’s response:  "Now! Teach that!  But don't tell your students, make them discover it for themselves."

Some interviews I conduct from my home in Santa Fe by phone: A few weeks ago I spoke with Sensory Awareness leader and psychologist Robert Kest in Montpelier, Vermont. Among many other things I asked him about the relevance of Sensory Awareness for his professional life. Robert: “The issue of character was always an integral part of sensing for me. The first time I noticed this was in an experiment [moving other students’ arms]: To just feel how totally different every person was, and to feel their whole life! Charlotte would ask the question: ‘Are you working with an arm or with a whole person?’ And moving their arm I could almost feel what their relationships are like with the world. Krishnamurti once said that we only have one relationship and that’s our relationship with life, and we do it everywhere. The way someone walks, speaks, is with their breath, is in lying – their whole life is right there and in a given moment it can all show. Sensing really helped that sense of the whole person. So many people were talking about trying to integrate mind and body and spirit, but Charlotte was saying that’s a misunderstanding. You’re not integrating it, it’s the same thing.” (Members can hear more of this interview on the members page).

Because Charlotte lived such a long life, many – in fact most – of the people who knew her, are long gone. Thus, in researching her life before the 60s, I will largely depend on archival materials. But then there is serendipity too: A few weeks ago, a violinist from Germany contacted me because she needed information about a somatic practice for a paper she’s writing. My brother, who is also a musician, had given her my address. So we had a conversation in which I told her about Sensory Awareness. A few days later she contacted me again to let me that know she had told a fellow musician about Sensory Awareness and Charlotte Selver. It turned out that this musician is the granddaughter of Erika Donner, who was a student of Charlotte in the 20s and later became colleague and friend with whom Charlotte kept in touch until the end of her life. I had known about her but assumed, rightly, that she was dead. I knew she had a son but wasn’t sure if he was still alive and how I could find out. Well, this woman is his daughter and Dieter Donner is still alive and eager to have me visit when I go to Germany this summer. He already sent me an account by his mother, in which she wrote about her life and Charlotte. Learning more from Mr. Donner will be very helpful in shedding light on Charlotte’s early years.

May 21, 2008
I have interviewed these people since the last entry: Katja Gruettner-Donner (granddaughter of Erika Donner, a friend of Charlotte's from her early years in Germany), June Christensen, Don George (La Casa de Maria, Santa Barbara), Bernard Gunther (Bernie's web site), Bruce Bryant, John Schick, Judyth Weaver (Judyth's web site), John Schick, Richard Lowe, Connie Smith Siegel, Lily Nova, Robert Kest, Terry Ray (Terry's web site).

March 27, 2008:
These are the people I have had the pleasure to interview so far: Natalie Ednie, Jill Harris, Babette Wills, Joan Barbour, Seymour Carter (Seymour's web site), Mary Conelly, Ray Fowler, Sever Woll, Marsha Woll.

A short note from my 1999 interviews with Charlotte (slightly edited for clarity): "This morning Charlotte told me about Alan Watts some more at the breakfast table. She said that she did not teach all the courses together with him. Sometimes he would just be at her place and had his own seminars. And then sometimes they would teach together but certainly not all of them. And she said that once Erich Fromm came for a seminar with Alan Watts. Erich Fromm was so straight in his suit and tie and then Alan Watts came in in his flower power 60s costume and would sit down on the couch and put his feet on the table and how Erich Fromm just hated him, she said: 'They hated each other.' And Erich Fromm wanted to get rid of him. Maybe it was not for a seminar, I don’t know. But she said: 'He started to tell Jewish jokes and wouldn’t stop until Alan Watts left.' Also, she said, that Erich Fromm was very much against Esalen. . . ."