Patricia Norris, The Norris Technique of Body Alignment

This is part four of what I'd begun writing in the posts about Milton Feher, Pauline Tish, and Harold Pessorilo...all proponents of the way man walks (or dances) on the earth...Patricia Norris is both dancer and expert in body alignment.

Patricia Norris was formerly Patsy Shibley, one of the two teachers at a very fine school of ballet in Long Island in the 1940s.

The founder of the school was Patsy's mother, Jeanne Shibley, an elegant blonde woman who taught ballet in the classical mode, even for the smallest children. She was able to demonstrate for us an incredible arched foot, the sight of which still resonates with me.  The Shibley School was in a small sunny studio in Freeport, N.Y., a town right next to ours on the south shore of Long Island. When she taught she wore, of course, the traditional leather Capezios, and a lovely long cotton quilted skirt (this I just remember suddenly) which was black and many colors pieced together. We'd started classes there when World War II was coming to a close, and the reason we were there was that a pediatrician had told my mother that my older sister had a problem with her feet, and that it could be remedied with ballet classes . My mother taught 5th grade in a school in Queens, New York, for many years, and always loved ballet and was pleasantly surprised to find a school had opened right near us in Freeport, NY, but to find one of such exceptional quality was, I guess, unexpected, and it went on to become a great part of our lives.

For one thing, my sister Cynthia, was found to have a great talent for ballet and applied herself very seriously to practicing at home every day. I was the more casual one about it until later. But each of us took part every year in June at the recital held in a local high school. The nature of the choreography, the costumes (the traditional tutus of ballet companies, handsewn by a marvelous costuming seamstress that Jeanne knew), and the lighting, all were in marvelous taste, and all came to the fore for me years later when I was at Pratt and in Pauline Tish's dance workshops.

Patsy, Jeanne's daughter, was a wonderful choreographer. She and Jeanne together evolved the production of the "white ballet" which culminated the recital every year, in which all the students participated. But Patsy also designed dances for all the smaller bits, where a solo was done, or a dance of three students, or six...and whatever the smaller dances were, they were framed around those particular students, coming out of their very natures, suited to their capabilities...so that nothing was standard and all was much more individually wrought.

Patsy was very petite, with a shining cap of black hair and beautiful eyes, and a wonderful dancer herself. When my sister and I both were in Mepham high school and there was a yearly event, (the "Pop Concert" it was called), we were always part of the many acts that performed. Every year my mother would ask Patsy to design us each a dance to whatever music Mr. Pritchard, the music director at the school suggested. He taught instruments and got those kids together every year into a great band that would play all the music at the Pop Concert. (When I watch School of Rock with Jack Black, I often think of how good Mepham's band was!) So we would bring the record of the piece over to Patsy and she would work with us, listening to the music together, starting a few steps, and then go on to knit, as it were, a dance. And when the performance would be done, it would be that same piece on the record but played live by the band. Of course there would be rehearsals, and dress rehearsals to iron out any rough spots, but I found it to be absolutely invigorating to dance to live music on a stage with a willing audience out there. This so different from my childhood years, when being on a stage for any reason was uncomfortable and embarrassing!  Patsy's choreography was great: one year, my dance was to Leonard Bernstein's New York, New York, "New York, New York, a helluva town. The Bronx is up but the Battery's down."

A picture from that performance appears below...

Recently, I was thinking about Patsy and Jeanne and decided to look on the computer and see if I could find something about Patsy's life now...I knew that she had moved to England years ago, but here follows some of the interesting information I discovered about her work there, and her books, one of which I have ordered and received with great pleasure via Amazon...

More to come shortly...

To Balance on One Foot...Harold Pessirilo

This is part three of what I'd begun writing when doing the post about Milton Feher, and then the one about Pauline Tish. It all seems to be about man's relationship to gravity, to moving on the earth...how one does it, and how it can be done better.

So I will begin with telling something about Harold Pessirilo, who was a friend during the years when I lived with my two daughters on Roosevelt Island (a tiny slice of land hanging in between Queens and Manhattan, just as I seemed to be hanging in between my life as a married woman and the rest of my life as a single one.)

Harold was a unique figure in my life: he taught high school art in Queens, the part of Queens just over a little blue bridge from Roosevelt Island. He too was divorced and he too had two children living with him, older than my daughters, a girl and a boy. He was a wonderful cook, had special ways of cooking quite delicious chicken and myriad vegetables and rice and such like that. He also had a certain way of seeing the role of the parent as helping the child approach life boldly and encouraging them to join in to activities without temerity. There was a very nice article written about him in the paper called the Roosevelt Island Wire, an interview with him where he was asked ideas about single parenthood and how to navigate through it.

Harold also taught a yoga class on Roosevelt Island, and that was how I had met him. And now, over the years when we have spoken, he would often mention that he had hurt himself, pulling a muscle, or falling and bashing a knee, and his method of healing it was, instead of putting the leg up on a chair, or resting his back, he instead tries to work into the injury, bringing the blood circulating to the injured tissues, a way of working from the injury to bring healing to it, so to speak, and that way, restoring equilibrium.

Here follow a couple of poetry-like excerpts that I wrote in response to Harold's classes...he was very similar to Milton Feher in the things he would say in the course of a class, the way he used words to pull the mind of the student into alignment with the body.


You say that to balance
on one foot may make the foot
struggle...that all the little
muscles are brought into move-
ment to keep the great body
poised above, the great weight
funneled into the small base,
the large dependent upon its
linkage to the earth, to its
reality, gravity, a place
in space.


I saw you during the class
spring to what you are
without any system evident,
your atoms going to their
appointed places, your body
making a curve in space
elegant as some ancient ivory weapon
(one that monks would use,
 nothing ordinary about it.)


Here also is a quote from the I Ching, the book I absolutely love, not only for its help in times of stress with a word or two of wise counsel via synchronicity, but also for its overall balanced words of wisdom that stay fine and imprinted on one's mind for many another moment:


"In the Zen Monastery: The abbot placed a stick on his finger, balancing it. He pointed to the left, and said, this is the past, it will not come back. He pointed to the right, and said, the future is yet to come. Then he pointed to where the stick balanced, and said, here, there is nothing, emptiness, zero, yet if abundance can be piled up anywhere, it must be here. It is now."

The Willoughby Wallace Library in Stony Creek, Connecticut

There is a library in Connecticut that has some very special qualities, which I will describe below...but also want to announce that there will be an exhibit, in its Keyes Gallery, of my watercolor paintings, and watercolors and collages by fellow Connecticut artist, Anne Coffey. 

First, some information about this unusual library, then more about the upcoming exhibit which will be on view from October 2nd through October 28 of 2015...

A plaque at the entrance to the library

                                                           A close-up of the pink granite

There is a wonderful book, Flesh and Stone, Stony Creek and the Age of Granite, edited by Deborah Deford, which tells the story of the quarry whence came the beautiful pink granite of which Brooklyn Bridge is made, as well as the base of the Statue of Liberty, and many other artifacts around the world. From the book's jacket:

"This is the story of a changing world. From the formation of pink granite deep in the heart of a volcano to the urbanization and industrialization of a nation, this story traces the forces that changed not only the face of the Earth but also the heart of a nation and the soul of a village."

Published by Stony Creek Granite Quarry Workers Celebration in association with Leete's Island Books, ISBN # 0-918172-29-2

The library itself is made of the pink granite, not only its handsome architecture, but the pavement outside and some sculptural forms out on the grounds...and across from the library lies Long Island Sound itself, with the first of multitudes of Thimble Islands right offshore, a house and a couple of trees residing thereon.

From an article in the New York Times, June 24, 2007, by Eve Glasberg, How Many Thimble Islands? Depends on the Tide:

"The Thimbles are an archipelago of 100 to 365 islands, depending on whether you count small rocks, reefs, ledges and sandbars that surface at low tide, off Branford, east of New Haven. The largest, Horse Island, owned by the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, is 17 acres. They look like chunks of coastal Maine - with pink granite bases and lush covers of hardwoods, pines and thickets - that have somehow ended up in Long Island Sound."

The article by Eve Glasberg tells much about what living on one of the islands is like...this is a nice paragraph from the article:

"The Thimbles begin just 200 yards offshore with Wheelers Island, less than an acre and dominated by a replica of its original house, a four-story Victorian with wraparound porches and a cupola. Similarly small islands farther from shore...each with a single century-old house, sit on the horizon and appear very fragile. If the world were flat, you'd think a wind would push them over the edge."

There is information in the article about tour boats that take people out on the Sound to view the islands and learn something about their history, as well as a kayak expedition and water taxis.

You can read the whole article on the New York Times archives:

June 24, 2007 - By EVE GLASBERG - Travel - Print Headline: "How Many Thimble Islands? Depneds on the Tide"

From Wikipedia:

"Known to the Mattabeseck Indians as Kuttomquosh, 'the beautiful sea rocks', they consist of a jumble of granite rocks, ledges and outcroppings resulting from glaciation...the islands themselves - long prized by sailors on the Sound as a sheltered deep-water anchorage - comprise 23 that are inhabited (most of them wooded), numerous barren rocks and hundreds of reefs visible only at low tide."

The exhibit will be in the Keyes Gallery at the Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library, October 4 - October 28, 2015, with an artists' reception on Sunday, October 11, from 4 to 6 PM.

                                                     Postcard announcing the show

My work includes watercolors, ink drawings and watercolor with pastel...here are a couple of the paintings:

New York City Blue Pastel

                                                                  Curve of the Land

                                                                 Spring Light
 

An ink drawing:

                                                                 Thimble Island, #1

 

 

  

I had taken these photos of leaves gracing the walkway in front of the Library the last day of the show, one of wild wind and heavy rain. But shortly I will post photos of the Reception on October 11th...a lovely day of nice people, delicious food, and hospitable weather!

Musings on the past, waxing nostalgic for the 30s and 40s...

An intriguing article in the January 5, 2014 issue of The New Yorker is The Birth of Pulp by Louis Menand. It talks about a revolution in the publishing industry when Robert de Graff launched Pocket Books, the first American mass-market-paperback line. A quote from the article: "Whether it also transformed the country is the tantalizing question that Paula Rabinowitz asks in her lively book "American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street" (Princeton."

Looking back at one of this blog's earlier posts about Adventure Magazine, where my aunt worked in the 1930s ("My aunt Connie and Adventure Magazine", posted on Mary 25, 2013), the New Yorker article refers to that very same era with very similar cover art, such as the illustrations done by artist Earl Mayan (see website  http://www.earlmayan99.com/ with Mayan's illustrations for Adventure and Saturday Evening Post.

The 1930s and 1940s seem very appealing to me now, though at the time I was very young and interested in the more daily doings of childhood!

I'd like to recommend a catalog I receive periodically called Radio Spirits which documents what was, before television, a wide variety of drama and humor and news...the catalog lists them all, including newsreels from World War II.

Here is the Radio Spirits catalog information:

1(800) 833-4248
Radio Spirits
P.O. Box 3107
Wallingford, CT 06494-3107

CDs are available of what they call "classic radio": detective programs including Nero Wolfe, Johnny Dollar, Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Keen - Tracer of Lost Persons, Mr. & Mrs. North, The Falcon, The Saint, The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, The Adventures of Sam Spade, Nick Carter, Bulldog Drummond, Boston Blackie, Dragnet (on radio before it was on TV), The Whistler, The Shadow, Mysterious Traveler and Suspense.

And humor: the Fred Allen Show, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Burns & Allen, Abbot & Costello, Duffy's Tavern, and my parents' favorite: Henry Morgan.

I was and am very partial to Jean Shepherd, who via his all-night wonderful radio monologues on WOR, helped me survive my first year at Pratt Institute. CDs of many of his shows are available from Amazon for modest sums, under the heading of "Classic Radio Humor". The titles alone entertaining: "Don't be a Leaf", "A Fistful of Fig Newtons", and "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories." Shepherd, as he did in the Christmas Story movie, told again and again of his childhood in the midwest in details I had heard over and over again on his radio shows in the late 50s when I was commuting to Pratt, and struggling with art homework on all-night stints in the cellar of my parents' house, in a room that had been converted into an office/art studio from its earlier incarnation as the room where coal had been delivered through one of the cellar windows.

And lastly, in continuing homage to the 30s and 40s...I enjoyed many a wonderful jazz performance at the 92nd Street Y in New York City: the Jazz in July series directed for years by Dick Hyman. I used to buy CDs at those performances, and recently ordered a magnificent one directly from Dick Hyman's website:
http://www.dickhyman.com/
The CD is "Lost Songs of 1936"...Dick Hyman, piano, Bucky Pizzarelli, guitar, and Jay Leonhart, bass.

These are some quotes from the wonderful liner notes for the album by Michael Feinstein: 
"That Bucky, Dick & Jay collaborate so effortlessly is as much due to the bonds of friendship among three longtime colleagues as it is to their peerless professionalism."  And: "The musical accomplishments of Dick Hyman are of Herculean status, his being a career of extraordinary scope, innovation and inspiration." And: "The best example of Hyman's maverick versatility is paradoxically demonstrated through one instrument: the piano. He has made many recordings on that instrument and the dazzling variety of sounds and styles he has extracted from 88 piano keys remains the single most unique document of what is possible from the mind of a true genius of musical expression."

Here is contact information from Dick Hyman's website (and see the beautiful Al Hirschfeld caricature):

Dick Hyman Music, Inc.
617 Menendez Street
Venice, FL 34285

Phone: 941-485-9506
FAX: 941-488-1824

Email: dickhymanmusic@verizon.net

Pauline Tish, dancer and teacher

Pauline Tish was the wonderful dance teacher at Pratt Institute during my years there from 1957 to 1961, a time when dance was not then part of the curriculum there, but which very much embodied the very essence of one's experience at an art school during my four years at Pratt.

When I first arrived at Pratt in 1957, coming by subway from the Atlantic Avenue Station of the Long Island Railroad on  Flatbush Avenue, I was a bit stupefied by the sheer number and ambitiousness of the courses presented to the incoming freshmen. On hearing about a dance workshop available as an excurricular activity, I leapt at the opportunity to do something freeing from the rather alarming challenge of the art classes. I felt it was going to be something pleasurable, and was not disappointed.

The classes were held on the stage of Pratt's theatre, Memorial Hall and began with us all lying on the floor, moving to the soft beats of a drum Pauline carried around the stage. A small and emphatic figure in black leotard and long skirt, she took us through floor exercise and stretches, followed by vigorous movement on our feet. But what to me was so intriguing was her explaining that ultimately each of us could arrive at creating our own choreography using whatever germ of interest that inspired us, which seemed to me something quite akin to the course of study in the visual arts, but bringing all aspects of experience into one focus: the visual, the three-dimensional, the elements of movement and music, and a chance to communicate with a present audience on a lit stage, in the mysteriousness of a darkened theatre. She, of course, oversaw the choreographical explorations, guiding, in a respectful way, one's own inclinations, and honing the result to something one could be proud of. Yet there was no forcing of her point of view on us, the initiates, more a mood of suggestion to make a professional result. To me, it seemed to surpass the visual arts efforts one was undergoing as a student, allowing a wider, freer kind of expression to happen. Hence, I enjoyed it hugely!

I regret that I cannot right now find some wonderful photos taken by a photographer who came to those Dance Workshop performances during the years I was at Pratt...I know I have them here somewhere, carefully tucked away, and shall keep searching for them, but they do attest to Pauline's both democratic and mentoring leadership of our efforts. Once I find them, I will post them here. And anyone else who was involved in these experiences will enjoy seeing the evidence of her excellent and subtle guidance, and the resulting good effects.


This below was written about Pauline in the Jewish Women's Archive:

Pauline Tish was professor emeritus and former chair of the Dance Department of Pratt Institute. Trained as a dancer with Martha Graham and Louis Horst, Tish performed with Helen Tamiris during the WPA Dance Project and was instrumental in the reconstruction of Tamiris’s How Long Brethren? performed at George Mason University in 1991 and the American Dance Festival in 1993 and 1995. Tish received a B.A. from Hunter College and an M.A. in dance from New York University, where she also pursued graduate studies in anthropology.

Pauline Tish passed away on April 1, 2002.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Here is an excerpt from Pauline's article about choreographer Helen Tamiris, which also appeared in the Jewish Women's Archive:

"Helen Tamiris was a pioneer of American modern dance. She brought a social consciousness to the concert hall and went on to become the director of the Dance Project for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and later an acclaimed Broadway choreographer. Her works were uniquely American, dramatically depicting important social issues of the time such as racism, poverty, and war. In 1928, she wrote the following manifesto in her concert program: “Art is international but the artist is a product of a nationality. … There are no general rules. Each original work of art creates its own code.”

She was born Helen Becker on April 23, 1902, into a poor but cultured Orthodox family on New York City’s Lower East Side. Her parents, tailor Isor and Rose (Simonov) Becker, had come with their son Maurice to New York in 1892 from Nizhni Novgorod, Russia, where they had fled from pogroms and czarist military oppression. Maurice Becker became a cartoonist and painter. Two other brothers were born in New York: sculptor Samuel Becker and art collector Peter Becker.

She attended New York public schools and later studied economics and labor statistics at the Rand School (1918–1920). At age eight, she began to study Isadora Duncan–style dance at the Henry Street Settlement, and at age fifteen her professional dance career began when she auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera Company Ballet. She danced for three seasons at the Met, toured with the Bracale Opera Company as a ballerina, and performed in the Music Box Review in 1924. Early in her career she took the name of Tamiris, a ruthless amazonian queen of Persia who overcame all obstacles.

In 1927, she presented her first solos in a concert called Dance Moods at the Little Theater in New York. The following year, a new concert at the same theater attracted excellent notices, and she was described as being in the forefront of the younger dancers of the “new dance.” This concert included Prize Fight Studies and the seminal and dramatic Negro Spirituals. Later in 1928, Tamiris became the first American dancer since Isadora Duncan to tour Europe, where the critics hailed her as the outstanding interpreter of American life. In 1929, she founded the School of American Dance and her company, Tamiris and Her Group, which she directed until 1945. From 1930 to 1932, Tamiris banded together with Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman to found and direct the Dance Repertory Theater, a cooperative in which the four companies shared productions and expenses.

During the WPA, Tamiris became a spokesperson for American modern dance. In 1935, she went to Washington, D.C., as the head of the American Dance Association to lobby for the inclusion of a separate Dance Project in the organization of the Federal Theater Project under the WPA. The Federal Theater Project operated from 1935 to 1939, and Tamiris became the director and main choreographer of its Dance Project. She also acted as the organization’s representative in Washington. Her major productions during this period were Salut au Monde (1936), How Long Brethren?(1937), Trojan Incident (1938), and Adelante (1939). She continued to perform Negro Spirituals, which contained strong elements of protest against prejudice, violence, and human suffering, and could be considered a metaphor for Jewish oppression. From 1935 to 1945, Tamiris created many modern dance works.

As she began to perform less, Tamiris moved into musical theater. She had taught movement for actors and directors and was skilled at moving large groups effectively in her own dance works. She began to create and perform musical theater material with her partner Daniel Nagrin, whom she married on September 3, 1946. She went on to choreograph over eighteen Broadway musicals with Nagrin as her assistant. These included Up in Central Park (1945), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), Touch and Go(1950), Plain and Fancy (1955), and Fanny (1955). Outstanding dancers who performed for Tamiris in these shows were Daniel Nagrin, Talley Beatty, Valerie Bettis, Dorothy Bird,  Pearl Lang and Pearl Primus."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When it came to the music for one's imagined dance-creation, Pauline would send us over to Manhattan to the famed Liberty Music shop, a place where, long before there were computers or cassette players or any online way of hearing music, you were able to select albums to listen to in one of the their listening booths, where you could hear all the bands on a particular album, and once something felt right for your "dance", you could buy the album, and bring it back in to Pauline, and she and you together would determine the exact right music for the dance-to-be. I remember one creation in particular: another student and I, Dorothy Connor, wanted to do something together that was based on "Degas" and "Toulouse Lautrec", and so we proposed our idea to Pauline and proceeded to first secure the music. Pauline sent us to Liberty Music for listening...I had already found a Chopin piece that I had on an album at home, played by wonderful pianist William Kappell, and that would be the Degas portion of the dance. But for the Lautrec, we went to Liberty and at Pauline's excellent suggestion, listened to a Francis Poulenc album and found the perfect musical equivalent of a Lautrec painting, a contrast to the quiet peacefulness of the Chopin. The missing photos are black & white, not color, the color being reds and blacks and Siamese pinks of a Lautrec painting, but the photos taken by Pratt's excellent photographer very much captured the spirit of the piece, the choreography, and the costumes.

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This picture is one I found online, it is Pauline taken at a family wedding...the picture is a little blurry, but very much the way I remember her!

Milton Feher & other innovative people

This is a story about people whose innovations have to do with walking on the earth with optimum comfort and ease. The first such person I would like to tell about is Milton Feher, but there are others as well: Sophia Delza, Pauline Tish, Patricia Norris and Harold Pessirilo. I want to write about these folks in future posts, and also to quote something interesting and pertinent from C. G. Jung's introduction to the I Ching, a book which I love.

Meanwhile, here is Milton Feher:

Milton Feher School of Dance and Relaxation

I first came to know Milton in 1962 when my left knee developed arthritis in an almost-overnight fashion. I had been taking a course at what in those years was a well-known business school in New York City: Speedwriting Institute on West 42nd Street, next to a popular store in those years, Stern's, right across from Bryant Park. Though I had graduated from an excellent art school, Pratt Institute, I was still in a dreamy state about what my vocation should be apropos of art: I wanted to paint, I wanted to write, and I wanted some employment, but the first two options didn't meet logically with the third. As I was not too practical in those years (something still to be worked on), I acquiesced quickly when my father suggested that I learn to type (and in my case, learn Speedwriting, a form of shorthand which uses the alphabet as opposed to symbols. My aunt Connie used to marvel at the ads on the subways in those years: "if u kn red ths".) My parents lived through the Depression, both holding jobs which were stable but many of their friends and siblings struggled to find and hold onto jobs. So I learned to type fast (the touch system) and to take dictation, which was how much of the business world progressed in the pre-computer world.  And as it happens, I still use my Speedwriting and recently found it marvelously helpful in doing a series of transcriptions for two PBS science series: "Brains on Trial" and "The Human Spark."

I started the Speedwriting course in the fall of 1961 following my graduation from Pratt, in what was to be an exceedingly cold winter in New York. The day the arthritis began was really bitter, and as I exited down the very long staircase at the school to head to Penn Station, I felt as though something had wrapped around my knee and was tightening on it nastily. When I got down to street level, I found there was nothing there around my knee causing the pain, and I made my way home with difficulty, thinking the pain was due to the intense cold outside. The next day, I visited my doctor, he did an X-ray, diagnosed arthritis, and gave me a cortisone shot in the knee. And after a short leave of absence from the school, I  decided to read up on rehabilitating a sore joint, finding in the phone book a unique listing under the categories of schools of dance: the Milton Feher School of Dance and Relaxation. It sounded wonderful, and then it actually was!

Milton was a very unusual teacher, not simply from the dancing standpoint, but he had evolved a unique way of overcoming his own arthritis which made his classes so special. Following are excerpts from his own writing and articles about him. I continued (with benefit to my knees) until I married and moved to Westchester, and returned to the classes when I moved back to New York with my two daughters, finding great benefit again, not only physical improvement but much that made sense to me in other realms. Eventually I began to write things in response to expressions Milton used to get people to free their bodies from stress and its resultant strain on the posture, the kind of posture he felt was everyone's birthright. He was pleased with the first poem-of-sorts I gave him, asked me to read it to the class, and I wrote more, reflecting back to him the words and freeing phrases he would say as we moved about the room.


Here is the first of the poetry-inclined writings...

Milton wrote an article for Prevention Magazine in 1958 which he later issued in a booklet:  "The Art of Walking: Walk Correctly for health, voice, sports, and figure". In it, he explains he'd been a dancer who'd developed arthritis in his knees, leading him to find his own unique solution to the problem. He was told by an orthopedist that the cartilage in the knees had been destroyed by excessive jumping, and that he would never be able to dance again.

 

From the booklet:  "I was a sorrowful ex-dancer as I hobbled miserably in Times Square one day, thinking of that wonderful dancing method which I would never be able to use. Almost unconsciously I made the corrections in my posture necessary to get the spine straight. Suddenly my body grew light and all the pain went out of my knees. Eureka! It was too good to be true! Straightening without strain, my body relaxed and the tight muscles causing the pain ceased to be tight. The pain returned soon and it was several years before it went away permanently. During this time I had tens of thousands of experiences indicating that effortless straight posture relieved my pain while my usual posture or a stiff erect posture caused pain."

"The outstanding fault in walking is tipping the head and trunk from side to side. We all know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. If you tip from side to side while you are advancing from one point to another, you are walking two miles for every one you progress. The sideways motion helps drag the legs forward, but robs the legs of a part of their proper function. Legs which do not work completely gradually stiffen up so that they can help you even less. This forces you to use the trunk more and more as time goes by. In most cases, the older you are and/or the weaker you are, the more you heave from side to side." 

(The booklet is illustrated with drawings showing the body "resting on your feet which are directly beneath you."   And there are several photos of Milton that exemplify his resting posture.)

The New York Times, June 20, 1988:

POSTURE AND FITNESS LINKED IN FEHER METHOD

By William Stockton

Published: June 20, 1988

WITH age comes stiffness. It is one of the givens of life.

So when we encounter a 75-year-old man who is as limber as the proverbial wet noodle, that's reason enough to pay attention. When he glides about his studio with the ease of a gazelle and stands interminably on one leg in a storklike pose, we listen to his words with rapt concentration. Never mind that his theories at times seem to cross the line from physiological fact into a charming, convincing ether, the metaphysics of a half-century of experience.

With age comes wisdom, and we youngsters would do well to listen and learn.

Milton Feher, dance instructor, stretching expert, balance coach, posture guru, relaxation proponent, has a current and longtime student who is 96. She also glides effortlessly about the studio, belying her age.

Our subject, then, is posture, which our mothers nagged us about. Feher considers posture, or balance, the foundation of all that he teaches and believes. Great athletes begin with posture. Posture can improve a runner's gait and speed. Feher lunged across the studio floor to demonstrate a point.

''When your body is balanced, your mind is balanced,'' he said...

(To read the rest of this article, you can go to the New York Times archives, and enter the title: "Posture and Fitness Linked in Feher Method". One quote from it particularly sums up Milton's point of view, expressed in every class and everything he wrote or said:  "The more you press against the earth and it supports you, the more relaxed you become," he said. "Relaxation is everything. When you relax, you function better.")

The Walking Magazine, 1986:

An article titled "Feher and Cool" had Milton saying: "The body, if released from tension, will straighten--that's a part of good alignment."

New York Magazine, May 28, 1990:

Author Patricia Burstein said: "Feher leads his pupils through a three-part routine that begins with a mantra: 'Let your arms rest. Let your head and trunk sink down. Let your legs relax.' Melodic notes, instead of rock music pounding the brain, issue from a piano played by Russian emigre Fima Farberg as the group sways into rhythmic dance exercises."

There is a recording of Milton speaking and taking the listener through his methods of relaxation: "Relaxing Body and Mind", which was produced by Smithsonian Folkways in 1962. 

It can still be ordered from them online (Smithsonian Folkways, Catalog No. FW-06191.) It was originally an LP, but is now available on CD for $16.98. The several sections from the CD can also be found via digital download under their headings: Walking without Effort, Effortless Good Posture, Going to Sleep, Breathing without Effort, Relaxing Body and Mind, The Habit of Relaxing, and How to Sit Correctly.

http://www.folkways.si.edu/milton-feher/relaxation-record/psychology-health/album/Smithsonian

A drawing I'd done at one of the classes...Milton was a fatherly figure to all his students...this must have been around 1990, and the two he is pictured with were Annette on the left, and Ursula on the right

And several more things I'd written for Milton...

1990:

The mind and what it is

was the question asked.

We sat on the floor like

crickets, with our bent

legs, and antennae poised.

I made myself not think

and an image of whiteness,

like stretched walls of a

tent, came to mind. I

felt the boards of the floor

were white too and stretched

far away and that what

was called the mind, the

alertness, was a bouncing

back and forth from the

farthest horizon and the

upright body that was me

with my small brain coiled

at the top like a fern-head. 

1998:

We stand on the point where the foot meets the earth

the body has been held clenched by necessity

and is surprised by freedom as the muscles let go

and let the earth walk the limbs

a river of restfulness flows upward from foot’s

contact with ground, the body poised and lightly straight

as a feather

I have more information to impart about Milton and his wife Marga, who worked with him for years. In one of the last classes I attended, a visitor came to the class, an old friend of Milton's who with him,  appeared at the 1939 Worlds' Fair in Queens as part of a ballet contingent in a production called "Railroads on Parade", music by Kurt Weill, written by Edward Hungerford, and sponsored by all the country's many railroads.  I  have some information to post about this unique event. Milton told us of "dancing" on bicycles as part of the World's Fair performances. And it so happens that my mother and father, Dorothy and Leighton, were at that very Fair the day before I was born, walking and enjoying all, maybe even having seen Milton on the stage that day. In later years, my mother and sister Cynthia began coming in to New York for his classes...Mom would have been in her 80s at the time, like so many of his students.

Here is one of Milton's repeated and inspiring utterances: (among many other similar wordy inventions):     " Let your head rest upon your toes, let your neck rest upon your heels"...

this said as we walked around and around the room in a circle, the way every class ended...

you can try saying it to yourself when you take a walk...the words keeping time with your feet.

The Little World of the Balcony...

I've been at a disadvantage for some months, trying to grapple with an aging computer which itself was grappling with the surge of change in computerdom. So now am in possession of a new computer, and looking forward to the pleasures of the blog again.

During this previous extremely snowy winter, I had a large ochre-colored flowerpot, of curving and commodious size and shape, which I foolishly, unknowingly, left out on my balcony to winter over. In spring I found a sad change had overcome it:  the entire glaze on the bottom of the pot must have been shocked from the repeated layers of ice on the balcony, and when I picked up the poor pot, I found it had discarded its entire glaze from the bottom half, which now lay like discarded snowflakes in the plastic pot underneath it.

Here follow pictures that illustrate the damage and yet the enduringness...

First, a similar flower pot (but in avocado green) which will show you the grace and nice size of the pot.

Next, the pot as it is now: the top half still ochre, the bottom, raw terra cotta, but still quite nice, reminding me of a zen pot. The next photo is a small moss garden that manifested when winter was waning: it possessed a mat of moss, a tiny bird feather, and a curled up leaf.

The third picture is the plastic pot I had nested the ochre pot in out on the balcony, where you will be able to see at the bottom the myriad little squarish pieces of the glaze making yet another kind of aesthetic pattern.

I like the word "enduringness", as, before this transformation,  the ochre pot, like its avocado brother, was always inside and comfortable, cozy as if before a hearth. Its maintaining itself, the roundness and sturdiness, sans the "slip", the glaze of golden color, shows a kind of innate courage in that which wishes to endure.

Here are the photos: first, the pots, then some other denizens of the balcony...