My teacher in dance movement psychotherapy, Dr Janet Rosalyn Adler, who has died at the age of 82, was one of the founders of Authentic Movement, a specialism in human movement and its empathetic observation and iteration.
Brought up in a Jewish-American family, Janet possessed an innate understanding of the transformative power of relationships. Trained initially as a speech and language therapist and a passionate young dancer, she created her initial lasting impact on the therapeutic community through her award-winning film Looking for Me (1968), which movingly documents her work with autistic children.
Adler received a Doctorate in Mysticism from the Union Institute in 1992, and her personal initiation into contemporary mysticism was subsequently described in her book Arching Backward (1995). In this book Adler traces her own mental health and spiritual journey and survivance in an excruciatingly honest, poetic form.
Having endured, transformed, and recovered, Adler developed Authentic Movement into her own movement meditation practice, which she named a “discipline,” a practice of relationship between a mover and a witness, who are equals. This work developed over a period of 20 or so years, resulting in her primer of a succinct method in Moving from a Conscious Body: The Discipline of Authentic Movement (2002).
With this ground-breaking publication and her ongoing teaching practice, Adler reached a global community of dancers, somatic practitioners, and psychotherapists. She was the founder and director of the Mary Starks Whitehouse Institute in Northampton, Massachusetts (1981–1983), the first school devoted to the study and practice of Authentic Movement. She worked internationally with many leading organisations in the field, such as the American Association for Dance Therapy, building a European community of professional practitioners (1990s), as well as later founding a so-called “Circle of Four” programme, where she trained others to provide succession in what she increasingly called “a mystical practice.” In 2019 she returned to Northampton to be honored at the Somatics Festival for her 50 years of devoted work within the field.
Adler’s axiom was “seeing and being seen.” As her own family stated in a personal obituary distributed on social media in August 2023: “Beyond all outer ways of naming, it feels appropriate to say that Janet’s life was one devoted to presence. Even meeting her once could feel like a transmission, inviting each person in their own way to be seen, and then in turn, to see.”
I met Adler in 1991 in the Tuscan hills between Pisa and Florence, where for the subsequent six years an international group of dance movement therapists studied with her. Our deep and intuitive dedication to Adler and her charismatic work assisted her in developing her innovative and methodological practices: the discipline. Two more years of teaching and exploratory retreats followed in Greece and, in 2002, Adler published Moving from a Conscious Body: The Discipline of Authentic Movement, the definitive guide to her life's work. Unsurpassed by her later essays, which expanded on mysticism, it is a unique primer on her method and pedagogy.
In 2023 Adler, who had by now moved to the Canadian island of Galiano, visited her family in the USA and sought more medical treatment for an ongoing blood condition which had been making her increasingly tired. Just over a couple of months later Janet peacefully passed away. I received a last email from her on 9 June telling me that she had read my new book Reflections on Authentic Movement. Adler died at home on Galiano Island, BC, Canada, with the windows open and the sound of the sea outside, surrounded by her family. She is survived by her husband Philip Buller, her children Paul and Joshua (Vanessa), and her granddaughter Paloma.