Stephanie Artz
My Trager Journey
I would like to talk about community. This is how I have been most educated and touched in the important areas of my life. When I was twenty-two, I had a job in publishing in New York City., the assistant to a literary agent at Curtis Brown Literary Agency Ltd. on 10 Astor Place in Greenwich Village. That was the only job I ever had.
I left the job, technically I was made “redundant”, and upon leaving remember the frank discussion with my boss who was prepared to help me get a job at a publishing house as an editorial assistant when I said I was thinking about going back to dancing. He surprised me with the advice to do that. Publishing would always be there.
Then, it wasn’t. The upheaval of digital media changed the industry after my departure in 1991, but he was right about one thing, if you want to do something do it. Now. While you can. I never went back to publishing because I entered a universe of dance, contact improvisation and in 1994 the career of a Certified Trager Practitioner.
In those days, Tribeca was an edgy neighborhood and the East Village got weird fast east of 1st Avenue where I lived, but the overlap of the downtown dance world and Trager was strong. Through Martha Partridge I started my beginning Trager training, met Roger Tolle and spent hours and days in those years with Steve Buchbinder. Many wonderful Trager students and practitioners flowed in and out of the combined dance and Trager community. I grew up in those years in New York, I was raised by the artistic communities of dance, improvisation, authentic movement, my trades with practitioners of movement modalities like Feldenkrais, Alexander, Body Mind Centering, Continuum and practices like Jin Shin Jyutsu, mainly of course Trager. Through these trades I grew, and was often in a mentor/student relationship. I also took unlimited classes at the cool downtown club house, Jivamukti Yoga Center, where I hauled out the little cash box at the top of their stairs on 2nd Avenue and registered people as my karma yoga until 1997. In those days I averaged two 1 and ¾ hour yoga classes per day, six days a week. It was crazy. I benefited from the combination of dancing, improvising, meditating, moving and Tragering my way into my mid-thirties.
Now we are growing as a Trager community, bringing current neurological information to light in what was always there in our Trager work. We know people learn, quietly or sometimes dramatically when as practitioners we are steady, constant and my favorite word, unflappable. All this means that in addition to social media and the concept of “friend” we actually learn in real time, in real life , with real people, doing real cool things. Here is my plug for the September 2019 Conference when we can be in contact and playing with each other.
I want to meet you. All of you have a standing, open invitation, any time, to come visit me in Arkansas. I have a one-bathroom house, but it’s on a 20-mile oxbow lake, a former channel of the Mississippi River, my husband is the Director of a Native American Archeological site across the river in Mississippi. I spend every couple months in New York, a place I cannot leave, where I have clients, friends and yes, Trager trades.
I don’t know your mix and how you do it but put yourself in the hands of your Trager colleagues, move them around, and share your experience. Trager work has many entry points and much to teach the world, one body at a time.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stephanie-artz-1286a64b
Facebook: facebook.com/stephanie.artz.1
Email: tragersteph@gmail.com