Table Of ContentMaking Connections
Making Connections
Total Body Integration Through
Bartenieff Fundamentals
Peggy Hackney
Illustrated by Mary Konrad Weeks
LONDON AND NEW YORK
Published in 2002 by
Routledge
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New York NY 10016
Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
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Originally published by Gordon and Breach Publishers, an imprint of OPA (Overseas Publishers
Association).
Copyright © 1998 by OPA (Overseas Publishers Association)
First Routledge edition 2002
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
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please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Body-Mind Centering™ denotes a patented system of movement therapy created by Bonnie
Bainbridge Cohen. For purposes of the clarity and design of this book, the trademark symbol has
been omitted from the term “Body-Mind Centering” when it appears in the text. However, this term
is a registered trademark owned by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and is fully protected under U.S. law.
Cover illustration by Mary Konrad Weeks
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any
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Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 0-203-21429-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-27093-2 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 90-5699-592-8 PBK
ISBN 90-5699-591-X HBK
CONTENTS
Preface v
Acknowledgments ix
1 Personal Memories of Irmgard Bartenieff 1
2 What Is Fundamental? 12
3 Why Return to Fundamental Patterns? 21
4 What Is Bartenieff Fundamentals? What Is Its Goal/Core? 33
5 What Are Principles of Bartenieff Fundamentals? 41
6 Breath 54
7 Core-Distal Connectivity 71
8 Head-Tail Connectivity 90
9 Upper-Lower Connectivity 121
10 Body-Half Connectivity 181
11 Cross-Lateral Connectivity 193
12 Integration 219
Appendix A A Brief Overview of the Framework of Laban Movement 237
Analysis
Appendix B Concepts Used in Fundamentals 250
References 267
Index 268
PREFACE
Well, you see, there are many possibilities! …
As human beings we want to be fully present, embodied, as we live our lives. We want to
communicate who we are and what we stand for in action, so that our message reaches
out to others. As we move, whether in dance, theater, sports or simply in being with
others, we want to connect. In order to do this we need to find means to connect inwardly,
both to what we want to say and to how all parts of the body relate to each other to support
our statement and purpose. To do this, we need to know something about the
fundamental nature of making connections. This ability to make connections, to create
relationships, is a skill which begins “at home,” within our own bodies. This book
provides a chance to explore how we go about creating the connections within us that
allow us to become fully embodied human beings in the world.
As I write this book about making connections through movement, the words of my
mentor Irmgard Bartenieff come back to me with a diversity of implications: “Well, you
see, there are many possibilities,” she often said. Yes, there are many possibilities for
talking about our human process of becoming embodied. There are also many possibilities
for illuminating the fundamental work of Irmgard Bartenieff and my own continued
development of that work, because the work is constantly changing.
When I was working with Irmgard in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s as she
was forming her Bartenieff Fundamentals, I was never disturbed to see that she would
seem to totally change what she was teaching from year to year. I could see that she was
exploring. For instance, one year she might be concerned almost exclusively with
mobility at the proximal joints, while another year she might focus on internal space with
breath support. She didn’t set out to propose a new theory of body connectedness. She
worked with living bodies and responded to their needs. Bartenieff Fundamentals
developed in application, which means that what was stressed in any particular year was
part and parcel of where Irmgard was in her own life at that time and where she perceived
her students/clients to be. This alive relationship, this sense of adventure in the classroom
or in private work, is something I have enjoyed also as a way of working. I have come to
believe that effective teaching comes from that alive relationship. It also means that the
“adventure” is never the same two days in a row. This brings into real question what can/
should be written about Fundamentals.
vi
And so it is with great trepidation that I write; for black and white words written in the
linear language of English seem too concrete and much too inanimate. Their sequence is
too set. Words need to have the capacity to jump, turn inside out, constantly alter their
emphasis, texture and relationship. It seems I am longing for movement. But I have been
moving these ideas for thirty years. In the unceasing alternation of mobility and stability,
now is the time for some ideas to become stable, in print, so that they can take on new life
and mobility in the work of others.
When I ask myself: “Why am I writing this book?,” I realize that I am searching for
closure on this period of my life and my current work with Fundamentals. It is a time of
taking stock, of seeing where I am with this body of work—like seeking to complete a
thought. Paul LaViolette, who studies how people form new thoughts, says that thoughts
are “momentarily stabilized patterns of flow” (i.e., they have substance). I want to give
work that has been totally fluid a bit more substance momentarily. When I was talking
with my colleague Robert Ellis Dunn several years ago, he said in his mischievously
insightful way: “Oh, I can’t wait for your book to be published so that it can be out of
date!” “Yes,” I said, “and then we can go on.” We have been in a period of “form creating”
in the Fundamentals work for about thirty years. Now it seems that this is for me a period
of “form stabilizing.” It also should be stated that this form I am momentarily stabilizing
should not be confused with the form Irmgard would have chosen to stabilize. I am not
writing the “Bartenieff Fundamentals,” because I could not. It would not interest me to be
mainly historical, even though some history is included here. Only Irmgard could have
written that book.
By writing this book I am recording where my own work in movement is now—
feeling-tones and associations around Fundamentals that have coalesced around certain
larger themes. From the ongoing continuous flow of complex and richly patterned
movement associations, mostly subconscious, certain more simple discontinuous thematic
words or thoughts emerge—words such as “initiation,” “connections,” “sequencing” and
“dynamic balance.” It is true that these themes, words, have been almost universally
agreed upon among persons working in Fundamentals and were spoken about consistently
by Irmgard. In other words, these themes are not new. And it is also true that over time
each of these major concepts falls back into the sea of subconscious feeling-tones to have
more and more associated relationships. So in another way these concepts are always new
and unique to each individual. Each concept contains in some sense an historical record of
the evolution of processes that contributed to producing that concept. At each moment
when thoughts emerge in relation to each other, the individual person is in a “form-
creating” mode, actually creating knowledge. And this is my working definition of learning
—“Learning is the creation of knowledge.”1 It is a creative process. As we create
knowledge we come into an embodied relationship with what we know.
And so, as I work with organizing this material, at every point I hear Irmgard’s words:
“…[T]here are many possibilities.” And I say: “Yes, here are but a few.” Each reader will
find more.
vii
Organization of This Book
As a sequence for writing this book I am metaphorically organizing my material in a
developmental progression. This organizational progression, based on the work of Bonnie
Bainbridge Cohen, will be encountered again and again. The sequence is:
1.Breath
2.Core-Distal Connectivity (Navel Radiation)
3.Head-Tail Connectivity (Spinal)
4.Upper-Lower Connectivity (Homologus)
5.Body-Half Connectivity (Homolateral)
6.Cross-Lateral Connectivity (Contralateral).
We will begin with some very personal memories of Irmgard Bartenieff and the
development of her approach to Fundamentals. Events in history are part of a flow line,
part of a phrase. Irmgard Bartenieff’s important work breathed life into Fundamentals. It
was germinal. One might say it was the initiation moment of the Fundamentals “phrase.”
But Irmgard’s power and joy lay in working with people in movement, mobilizing people
in the moment—not in explaining what she was doing or formally addressing the issues
her work generated, nor the full extent to which it could develop. Fundamentals was not
a theory codified and thoroughly illuminated by its originator. Irmgard’s own major
writing on Fundamentals was deleted from the final published version of her book, which
she co-wrote with Dori Lewis, Body Movement: Coping with the Environment. She asked me
to read her manuscript and make comments, which I did in 1977. I have utilized
quotations from her manuscript in this book.2 But my hope is that the entire
Fundamentals portion of her original manuscript will eventually be published. Irmgard’s
students were waiting for her to publish before they began writing about Fundamentals.
We were disappointed that the Fundamentals aspect of her work did not receive full
publication when her book came out in 1980. In the time since 1980, we have each
continued to do our own work—clarifying the material in both action and theory. My
colleagues and I are realizing a larger, more comprehensive framework for what Irmgard
was doing, which hopefully will nourish the work. I will leave detailed historical research
to the historians. My concern is more with the living progression—and so, I give my own
personal memories of Irmgard in chapter 1 and then move directly into how I work,
including my thoughts on theory underlying the work.
In chapters 2 and 3, I discuss some of the theory behind the work with an immersion
into the whole sense of patterning as a basic life-giving process, much like the breath. In
chapter 4,1 present what I perceive to be the core or navel center of working in
Fundamentals and its goal. I cover the vertebral spine of the system (chapter 5) i.e.,
principles and concepts on which the system is based.
In the next portion of the book (chapters 6–11), actual body level issues are dealt with
in detail. I explore stage-specific movement experiences in the developmental progression
and discuss possible movement experiences within each pattern—Breath, Core-Distal,
viii
Head-Tail, Upper-Lower, Body-Half, and Cross-Lateral. I must also be clear that my
thirty years of experience is in Fundamentals, not in Body-Mind Centering; so although
Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s work has been inspirational and has provided a framework, I
will not be writing about Body-Mind Centering per se.
By the last chapter in this book, the stages of bodily differentiation are complete. It
becomes clear that no one pattern is more important than any other. It is the sequences or
pathways through all the patterns that weave the message. All the patterns are available,
and it is the effective functioning of changing relationships according to context that takes
us to the integral stage. Within the book, this brings us to the question of reintegrating all
our specific knowledge into our own life context, acknowledging its timeliness. What is
the purpose in all of this after all? Is studying Fundamentals meaningful? What would
“meaningful” be in our world today? Certainly there are no answers, but I do want to
engage the question.
Whether one is a dancer, actor, athlete or business person, a fully functioning
expressive body increases life’s possibilities. Irmgard Bartenieff stated: “Body movement
is not a symbol for expression, it is the expression.” The functional and the expressive are
in intimate relationship. The work we are exploring in this book activates connections to
facilitate integration and enrich life. As you read this book you are engaging in an active
relationship with me and the questions that becoming embodied pose to all of us. Here we
go….
Notes
1. My friend Dean Elias, former dean of Antioch University-Seattle, currently dean of the
California Institute of Integral Studies, and I were discussing the field of education, learning
and other large topics. He made the statement quoted in the text and I have always enjoyed
using it as a frame for knowing whether learning is happening. “Am I/are these students
creating knowledge in this moment?” Knowledge is not the same as information, because true
knowledge, in my understanding, requires claiming the information in a personal way.
Claiming it personally requires coming into an embodied relationship with it.
2. The manuscript was entitled Body/Space/Effort: The Art of Body Movement as a Key to Perception.
I particularly like this subtitle, because it acknowledges the key role of movement in our
process of coming to know whatever it is that we actually know.
