I have practised Structural Integration for over thirty years and taught it for fifteen. I began my foundational training in 1993 with Peter Melchior and Emmett Hutchins — the first two instructors Ida Rolf herself trained. Almost everything I know about this work traces back, through these two people, to her.
And yet, for most of these thirty years, very little material told her actual story or explained how she arrived at her ideas. At the same time, fascia became a serious scientific subject, while the woman who had recognised its significance half a century earlier remained largely unmentioned.
This film aims to help set that straight.
A biography without footage
Telling the biography of someone with no surviving footage from before their seventieth year poses a particular problem. What did survive: interviews — hours of them. We spent two years in archives and then made the decision that shaped the whole film: rather than let others describe her, we gave her the floor herself. Every line attributed here to Ida Rolf comes from her own mouth, drawn from original interview and course transcripts.
She came across as witty, uncompromising, and often difficult, and she worked on a question that mattered long before anyone stood ready to listen.
What hopefully comes across involves not only her intelligence but the idea she kept returning to and called ‘the Line’ — that a body organised around a vertical axis and aligned with gravity helps a person become more fully the person they have it in them to become.
This film pays homage to a pioneer and attempts to secure her a place in the history of fascia research.
— Aleš Urbanczik
Director’s biography
Aleš Urbanczik began his foundational training in Structural Integration in 1993 with Peter Melchior and Emmett Hutchins, Ida Rolf’s earliest instructors. He has taught Hatha Yoga for thirty years and developed a teaching approach based on Rolf’s principles, which he calls RolfYoga. He comes from a Zen Buddhist background and received Bodhisattva ordination at the French temple La Gendronnière. Finding the Line – An Exploration of Structural Integration and Ida Rolf – Mother of Fascia count as his first films.
Disclosure
Aleš Urbanczik co-founded the European Guild for Structural Integration and teaches its foundational trainings in Switzerland. An independent production created the film, in collaboration with the EGSI.
Watch the film
A 98-minute documentary told entirely in Ida Rolf’s own words, drawn from her recorded interviews and class transcripts. Subtitles in nine languages on Vimeo.