Stories for Aileen by Emma Cooke

Hi! My grandmother Tommie gave me your email so I could send you something for Aileen's birthday!

I've known Aileen almost my whole life and she's left quite an impression on me! She's the kind of person that makes you feel really good about yourself because she teaches you to embrace your every side: good, bad or ugly. I've spent some really wonderful times making sub-personality dolls with her, always leaving her studio feeling lighter and stronger. I'm lucky to have been able to spend time as her student. She's an incredible person.

thanks!

Emma Cooke

Aileen Crow by Nancy Zendora

I have known Aileen it seems for decades through the Authentic Movement Community and the Laban Community.
For several years we have tried to get together once a year to share movement and catch up with a nice dinner and conversation.

Aileen encouraged me to write about my experiences with voice for the Authentic Movement Journal . I am a choreographer and the artistic Director of the Zendora Dance Company http//www.zendoradancecompany.com.

In one of my pieces I create a bird/character that cries out and she was interested in how I found that sound.  Having written about it was very therapeutic for me and also somewhat exciting and I thank her for her interest in helping me and the journal for publishing it.

Aileen is for me a very loving, insightful person who I hold with great reverence. As aging for women has been for a long time a "silent passage" it has been especially significant to see Aileen's power and intensity in her chronological challenges.

She is someone to love and honor and I am happy to add to the list of her admirers.

Nancy Zendora

I love her. By Liz Lurie

My first memory of Aileen is that her hands were so hot when she touched me during an Alexander session. They felt like furnaces as she deftly followed my body needs with her creative intuition.



Her devotion to the creative in herself and others is inspirational whether it be in her teaching, her calligraphy, her movement, drawing, journalling, sculpture …. Everything!



I think I am most blown away by her constant quest to discover and follow her life path in beautifully spiraling fluid ways; her youthful and joyous admiration of beauty wherever she sees it; whether in the way paint is peeling on a wall or birds flocking, flowers , some beads thrown out on someone’s lawn, it could be anything at all that inspires a deeply felt response that might appear, transformed, in her next artistic venture.



Trying to put my thoughts about Aileen into words, I realize how much I have gained by knowing her. How she has informed my life. Not only by her teaching (which is amazing)…… but in the way she lives her life.



I love her.

About Aileen by Thomasin Cooke

In the 40 years that I have known her—attending her workshops and she attending mine

and the two of us attending other people’s workshops, she has never once been a teacher, always the student.

What an accomplishment. Is there any higher praise one can give a dear friend that has such wisdom to know

that we all have the answers inside us?

Love you Aileen.

Thanks for the many play days we had together.

Tommie

More on Aileen! from Roberta Whitney

Dear Elizabeth:

What a grand occasion!

Here's my input:

Aileen, happy 88th! I honor you with a memory of our first meeting at Stony
Point some years ago. You were presenting a piece on Authentic Movement and
Focusing. I remember how you artfully guided people through a creative and
rich process. Even more, I recall our conversation afterward, seated at the
end of a long table. In our brief time together, you opened me to a world
of creative inner dialogue that you had recorded in a journal. You also
inspired me through the work you described doing one-on-one with clients in
your studio. Life poured through every image and word. In me there was a
sense of a deepening wisdom and wholeness as I imagined you embracing
yourself and others in a single moment...and then another. Thank you for
the growth you have and continue to inspire in me. May you continue to move
in the rich flow of life throughout your new year.
Ever,
Roberta Whitney