Psychologist Teaches Steps to Dance of Life

Eva Von Rheinwald leaned eagerly across the sun-warmed tiles of a window table at a restaurant in Cardiff. Her hands swooped and dipped, emphasizing her words. She looked luminous. She looked youthful. It was hard to believe that she was, as she insists, born in 1932.

Suddenly, she changed.

Her head drooped. Her shoulders hunched. Her hands, no longer swooping, clutched at each other with a white-knuckled intensity across the lap of her linen skirt.

“Many people unconsciously sabotage themselves with the language of the body,” she explained, unfolding herself again. A classical ballet dancer until she was 35, she unfolds very gracefully.

“If they droop they give the impression of misery. And then they wonder why no one ever talks to them at parties. Or why they don’t get promotion.”

A clinical psychologist, Von Rheinwald has a private practice in San Diego. She remembers vividly her first experience with just how much straight posture and a positive facial expression can drop years from someone’s image.

“I was still a student then. At U.S International University. And Alvarado Convalescent Hospital asked me if I’d conduct a dance therapy class,” she said.

When she walked into the therapy room she found her class waiting for her--all in wheelchairs.

“And they were so old . The oldest was 104. They just sat there and stared at me. Nobody moved.”

Two months later, after five mornings a week of lively dance classes, the women of Alvarado were dancing the cancan in their wheelchairs.

“And they were laughing! Cracking jokes. They were animated. They were changing in front of my eyes.

“Their wrinkles . . .” Von Rheinwald shrugged, fanning her hands. “Well, sure they had wrinkles. You know, at 100 you get a couple of wrinkles. But their eyes sparkled. Their expressions were like high school kids. I realized then that people with a vital, interested facial expression can seem youthful even when they are not.”

Von Rheinwald was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia. She was 7 when she began her classical ballet training and 16 when, in 1948, the Russians took over her country.

How does someone travel the road from ballet dancer behind communist borders to psychologist in San Diego?

“Destiny?” Von Rheinwald asked. She smiled. The events that have happened in her life she now sees, she explained, as fitting together--like jigsaw pieces--to enable her to do the work she does now.

Her early life, she says, was an easy one. As a dancer with Czechoslovakia’s National Theatre, she led a privileged life.

At 24, she married Czech composer Jaromir Karel. With Karel she wrote two successful musicals, and, in 1957, took a brief “time out” from dancing to give birth to a daughter, Michaela.

“And I knew that my dancing career must also come to an end soon,” she said. She turned to writing as a second career--radio and television scripts, short stories and lyrics. “But in a communist country everything is censored. Even songs.”

The censors, she explained, would not pass anything that presented life under a communist regime as less than perfect.

“Everything must be beautiful,” she said. “Happy people. Everybody working hard. No problems.”

One day Von Rheinwald was working on a short story when she realized she was writing entirely with the censors in mind. Every shred of reality was leached from her work.

“It was like . . . mental prostitution!”

A waitress wearing a bright Hawaiian print dress paused to listen to her words. The couple at the next table were straining forward, obviously listening too.

“I knew I had to get out,” Von Rheinwald said. “But how?”

Her ticket across the border turned up in the unlikely form of West Germany’s largest circus, the Circus Krone. They had decided that a dozen classical ballet dancers would add a certain panache to their show, a blending of theatrical art and circus art.

Von Rheinwald signed a one-year contract. “They traveled for part of the year,” she said. “But their base was Munich, in free West Germany.”

Michaela was 10 then.

“I didn’t tell her what my plans were,” Von Rheinwald said. “It is so easy for information to be coaxed from a child. I left her at school. I knew that because I had a long contract, she would be allowed to join me in her holidays. Then I planned to tell her that we were never going back.”

That part of her plan worked.

“But when I asked in West Germany for asylum it wasn’t granted. They didn’t say ‘yes,’ and they didn’t say ‘no’. They just said ‘wait.’ ”

She did wait, growing more and more nervous. Two months. Four months. Six months.

When nine months had passed she was afraid to wait any longer. Under the sponsorship of the American Fund for Czechoslovakian Refugees, she and Michaela emigrated to New York.

“Unfortunately, their sponsorship lasted only as far as the airport,” she said. “We were left standing there. We had no friends. No place to stay. I had $100 with me.”

It was at that stage of her life, Von Rheinwald believes, that she began to develop the empathy needed in the work she does now.

“When I landed in New York I was a snob,” she said. “Life without a maid? Unthinkable! My knowledge of how life is for most people was very limited.”

She took the first job she could find, modeling clothes in New York’s garment district. It was 1968, and the pay was $80 a week.

“And it was awful. The boss yelled most of the time, and sent me out for sandwiches. People treated me as if I were simple-minded because I mispronounced some of my words. I grew humbler and humbler.”

The last vestiges of snobbery melted away, she remembers, in 1971, soon after she and Michaela moved to Los Angeles.

“Karl Martinek, an old friend who had been a choreographer in Czechoslovakia--he choreographed me many times when I danced on television--was working in Los Angeles as a maitre d’,” she said. “It was Karl who got me a job as a restaurant hostess.”

Being a hostess, Von Rheinwald felt, had more status than being a waitress.

“But then I discovered that nearly all the waitresses I was working with had their master’s degree. And they were making three times the money I was. So--I became a waitress.”

She also became a volunteer dance therapist in the psychiatric ward of St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica.

“It was wonderful to see the way music and movement reached the patients in ways words never could,” she said. “One day I watched a 15-year-old girl who was catatonic--you know, just frozen, staring into space--come alive when she heard the music of ‘Hava Nagila.’ She danced it. She even sang it.”

If she became a psychologist, Von Rheinwald thought that day in the psychiatric ward as the last echoes of “Hava Nagila” faded, she could have her own movement therapy classes as part of her practice.

She was still, she cheerfully admits, naive about many of the facts of American life, particularly American education.

“I thought I would go to school for, maybe, two years,” she said, laughing.

In fact, it was eight.

It was during the last year of school, when she was in San Diego at USIU, that she found herself back on a stage again.

She had been working, part time, for David Chamberlain at his Anxiety Treatment Center in Hillcrest.

“One day Dr. Chamberlain told me that he’d arranged for me to give a talk on coping with stress, at a church hall,” Von Rheinwald said.

The thought terrified her.

What if they didn’t understand her pronunciation? What if she forgot her words? Got lost in syntax?

“But, Eva, you were on stage for 28 years,” Chamberlain pointed out.

“But ballet dancers just dance. They don’t speak!” she said. “Still, it was a church. ‘At least,’ I thought, ‘it will be a very small group.’ ”

One hundred fifty people were packed tightly into the church hall. Once she began to speak, Von Rheinwald remembers, all nervousness vanished.

“To share what you know with people, to wake them up, to make them laugh--it is a beautiful thing,” she said, adding that she ended her talk with a dramatic balletic movement with both arms flung above her head.

“They gave me a standing ovation.”

She kept on speaking in public--gaining in confidence as her groups grew larger--during her internship at the Mental Health Center of Las Vegas. She also wrote a column for the Las Vegas Sun, appeared on the talk show “Las Vegas Tonight” and had her own call-in radio show.

“I think my enthusiasm made up for any deficiencies in pronunciation.”

Las Vegas, she said, also provided a large piece of her “destiny jigsaw.” It was there that she acquired a great deal of experience working with people with sexual dysfunctions.

“The open-24-hours time of the place is very, very hard on relationships,” she explained.

She moved back to San Diego in 1981, combining speaking to groups and organizations--”how to be successful is always the favorite topic”--with private practice. She uses hypnosis a great deal with her private patients. And, of course, movement therapy.

“Just the way a person walks tells so much,” she said. “It says to me that they are confident. Depressed. Immature. Manic.”

She paused, glancing around the restaurant. It was 3 p.m. The restaurant was almost empty. Nobody, manic or otherwise, was walking across the floor. Outside on the beach, a lone runner loped by, scattering a few browsing gulls.

“The language of the body,” Von Rheinwald said softly. “You may not say a word, but your body image will always speak for you.”

Many people unconsciously sabotage themselves with the language of the body. If they droop they give the impression of misery.

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