Rhoda Winter Russell
September 27, 1930 - July 26, 2019

Rhoda Winter Russell
September 27, 1930 - July 26, 2019
Age 87

Rhoda was both in Philadelphia to Rose Garfield Winter and Robert Samuel Winter. Her parents and ancestors all came from Russia, her mother Rose being born in Russia and coming over to the USA as an infant.

Rose was a career public school teacher. Bob was a pharmacist and then a drug company sales rep before starting his own medical pharmaceutical business.

"Tooey" (as her nickname was) loved Dance from an early age. There are many photos of her as a Ballerina and at dance lessons when she was 13, 14, and 15.

One of the hallmarks of her growing up years was a very liberal, middle class, background and exposure to people of color and other cultures from her mother as a schoolteacher. She was a true trendsetter, having friends of color in Philadelphia in the 1930's and early 1940's. And yes, she even had a "black" boyfriend in College and a guy from India as well that she dated. May seem like nothing today but back then it was truly "doing it my way" in terms of living!

In 1948, Rhoda went to college at the University of Madison, Wisconsin. She earned a BA and then an MA in physical education with her major being dance. Her thesis was about using Dance to help rehabilitate accident and mentally handicapped people. This would prove to be her path in life in later years.

In 1953 and 1954 she traveled by herself to Berlin, Germany and studied dance with Mary Wigman, a pioneer of modern dance. (see Austin Chronicle article from 2012 below). What a courageous young woman to travel I post war Germany to study. THAT was Rhoda.

She came back to the USA and lived in New York City where she met the up and coming sexual psychologist Dr. Albert Ellis. While working as a newly coined term "Dance Therapist" at Manhattan State Hospital, she married Albert in 1955.

Rhoda's picture dancing with mental health patients at Manhattan State made it into Life Magazine and in the famed "The Mind" Life book published in 1961.

Rhoda divorced Dr. Ellis in 1956. However, they remained friends until Dr. Ellis death in 2004 at the age of 97. Albert would always send her autographed copies of his many books over the years with fond memories of their marriage.

In 1958, Rhoda traveled to LA, CA to visit friends. She met Dr. Murray Irwin Russell as a blind date during the trip. Dr. Russell was an already successful and semi-famous Urologist in Southern California. He pioneered new techniques in the emerging area of male infertility. Back then it was truly leading-edge technology that Murray was creating, and Rhoda was his great supporter.

Rhoda focused her personal energies at the time for local dinner theatre and was active in producing and acting in many plays and musicals at the time. She also was greatly involved in local charities using theatre to raise money for various causes. In addition, Rhoda discovered Afghan Hounds at a local dog show. The rest was History.

Rhoda became enamored with the graceful elegant Afghan hound and quickly purchase her first pure Breed Afghan around 1961 or so.

Meantime Rhoda suffered a traumatic still birth of her first son, Abraham, in early 1960. Dogs and Local Dinner Theatre were her means to grieve over the loss.

On November 6, 1961 Rhoda's second son, Harlow Garfield Russell was born. Murray, Rhoda, Harlow, and now two Afghan hounds were very happy in Garden Grove, CA. Murrays practice grew too.

Sadly, on September 13, 1963 Murray passed away at home from am massive heart attack. It was unexpected.

Rhoda's world truly shattered. With young infant son and Murrays estate in litigation with his business partners, this time period no doubt affected Rhoda very much to become the fighting, no-nonsense, no "BS" person, all of us know her as through her final years.

Over the next few years, Rhoda moved Harlow and 2 dogs across the USA back to Philadelphia (driving across the USA was a very big deal for a single mother to do by herself with baby and dogs in 1965!)

She established herself outside of Philadelphia in Haverford, PA and then Langhorne, PA 1968-1988. First as a dance instructor a Harcum Junior College, then becoming a Creative Arts Therapist at Philadelphia State Hospital (ByBerry). She became part of the management team at the Hospital before moving on to Trenton Psychiatric Hospital (TPH) in Trenton, NJ in 1988. She also moved to a new house in neighboring Richboro, PA. She was a Senior Clinical director at TPH until she retired in 1994, age 64.

For her retirement she decided to get away from the cold Northeast to sunny Austin, Texas. In 1994 she moved herself and 7(seven) of her now elderly Irish wolfhounds and Salukis from Richboro to Austin. What a trip that must have been!

Becoming a "South Austinite" in 1994 through her passing in 2019, Rhoda loved Austin. She was a maven of thrift stores in Austin even before they were so trendy and omni-present. She shopped at Whole Foods, Sprouts and other "rather weird" supermarkets before they became so trendy as well.

Rhoda loved Garage Sales! And during her adult life went to hundreds (maybe thousands of Yard and Garage sales) in PA, Austin and anywhere she traveled. She always had an eye for spotting the ubiquitous "garage sale" sign driving anywhere and making time to stop and she what reassure she could find.

First and foremost, though, throughout her life, Rhoda loved Dogs and Animals. Her entire adult life was built around showing and judging Pure breed dogs as an accredited AKC judge for many breeds. She was known as a perfectionist in her judging looking always for the gracefulness and "smooth lines" of show dogs as they stood and moved, and performed across the show ring, much like judging a graceful dancer's performance on stage. And later in life she became owner of multiple rescue dogs and was a donor to countless "pro-Animal" groups around the world. Some are listed below as ones she wanted people to donate to in her name.

It is impossible to briefly summarize her dog showing and dog judging career of 50+ years. She showed Afghan Hounds, Salukis and Irish wolfhounds for years (with the occasional Mini Dachshund for good measure). She became an AKC judge in 1975 and over a multi-decade period judged all major do groups in the USA and Australia and New Zealand. We have hundreds (close to thousands) of photos of her from dog shows during her life. Rhoda was Dogs. Dogs were Rhoda.

Rhoda moved to Sodalis Senior Living in Buda, Texas on November 1, 2018. She moved with her last Dog, beloved Ringo, a 90 lb. mixed Chow rescue dog. The story of how we managed to get Sodalis to accept Rhoda AND Ringo is a funny one to share in person. Rhoda and Ringo were truly the hit of Sodalis popular with residents' staff, and visitors alike. Rhoda's spicy "language", sarcastic humor, and funky electric fashion style were positive elements at her new home for the final chapter of her life.

Ringo Russell passed on February 4^th, 2019 age 12. He did his duty for Rhoda and passed quietly at the foot of her bed.

Rhoda Winter Russell passed quietly in her own bed on July 26, 2019 at 4:52PM. She will be missed by son Harlow, Grand Daughters Bryanna-Karina, Adeena Nicole and all the friends and animals that knew her. Rest in Peace, Mom Russell.

The following pages are two additional article related to Rhoda and her wishes.

Austin Chronicle articles 2019 and 2012

In Memoriam: Rhoda Winter Russell
Movement therapy pioneer who knew the greats of dance has died
By Robert Fairies,  AUG. 1, 2019
https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/arts/2019-08-01/in-memoriam-rhoda-winter-russell/

On July 26, Austin lost a resident with an extraordinary history in dance. As an aspiring dancer in the Forties and Fifties, Rhoda Winter Russell crossed paths with a number of influential choreographers and dance teachers - most notably Mary Wigman. Then, Russell went on to become a pioneering figure in the field of movement therapy.

The thing is, almost no one here knew it. Since 1994, when Russell arrived in Austin, she was best known as a judge of show dogs. She did donate several boxes to the Harry Ransom Center containing correspondence with Wigman, as well as fliers, brochures, clippings, theatre programs, and photographs pertaining to dancers, choreographers, and dance companies that were active in the 1940s and 1950s. But it was really in 2012 when Russell granted Chronicle writer Jonelle Seitz an extensive interview that Russell's remarkable story reached the rest of the city. In Russell's memory, we reprint it here.

August 10, 2012
Rhoda Winter Russell reflects on a historic life in dance and the Mary Wigman connection
by Jonelle Seitz
https://www.austinchronicle.com/arts/2012-08-10/dance-of-the-century/


"Rrho-DA" is how Rhoda Winter Russell remembers Mary Wigman addressing her, rolling the "r" and lowering the pitch to emphasize the final syllable. "Rrho-DA."

It was 60 years ago when Russell, now 82, flew to Europe to take a summer course with Wigman, the German expressionist dancer and choreographer who was one of the mothers of 20th century modern dance. Russell, having just earned her bachelor's degree from the Department of Women's Physical Education and Dance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was impressionable but confident, and Wigman (1886-1973) had a profound influence on her. "Mary liked me," says Russell, and they kept in touch. She's just relinquished her collection of Wigman letters, photographs, and programs to the Harry Ransom Center, less a few pieces with personal significance. One such is a sepia-toned photo of Wigman, its curled edges framing her severe, almost cubist cheekbones and planetary eyes.

A decade after the Wigman course, Russell left the dance world to launch a distinguished career in movement therapy, but her memory is a jewel box, a dance historian's dream. In her 20's, she was precocious and gregarious, and her stories, studded with the famous (and infamous) dancers, teachers, choreographers, musicians, composers, and designers she crossed paths with, could make quite a page-turner. "There I was!" she marvels on more than one occasion, in awe of her own history.

But Wigman's ideas were her golden apple, those ideas that opened doors of innovation for her and for many with whom she worked and admired. "There's Picasso in art, and there's Stravinsky in music, and there is Wigman in dance," says Russell. "And that's it. I don't want to hear about Martha Graham." Others, in fact, have paralleled Graham with Picasso and Stravinsky, but where Graham popularized modern concert dance as something as rigorous and high drama as ballet, Wigman viewed modern dance as useful, experiential, holistic, individually expressive. When Wigman instructed her class, Russell remembers, "It was a lot of emotional feeling, not that you should bend this way and turn that way. And let the group feel each other and create out of that. Basically, you had to get out of yourself, and you had to sense not only your body but the others." That kind of kinesthetic concern is part of what Russell sees as "the Wigman connection," the forces and ideas that link her seemingly disparate experiences.

Russell's post-Depression, middle-class upbringing in Philadelphia poised her to soak up the ideas she would later encounter with a creative, compassionate, autonomous point of view. As a schoolgirl, she memorized the paintings in the art museum, watched foreign films at the public library, and saw countless plays and ballets with her mother from $2 seats. "I had one sweater and one skirt when I was in school. We did not have money. But these things were available! When I was in elementary school, we could go to the Academy of Music for a special children's performance and hear [Leopold] Stokowski conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra. We sat up at the top, but at the Academy of Music, the acoustics were just as good up at the top - that's why it was so wonderful."

Then there were the dance classes. As a girl, Russell studied with a former premier danseur of the renowned Littlefield Ballet - the first U.S. ballet company to tour Europe - as well as Marion Cuyjet, famous for her dance school that welcomed students of color. "A lot of people studied with her and didn't give her credit," Russell says of Cuyjet. (One person who did, however, is former Alvin Ailey star Judith Jamison.) In Cuyjet's class, in the 1940s, Russell was often the only white student. "I was studying dance," she shrugs. "It didn't matter to me at all." Later, as a teenager, Russell and her mother took the train into New York City on Saturdays so she could study with Syvilla Fort, who had danced with "queen mother of black dance" Katherine Dunham: "Every big-time, small-time black dancer studied with Syvilla." In New York, Russell also took classes at Ballet Arts.

In the summers, she and her mother would stay in the city for a month at a time, so Russell could take classes and they could attend the theatre. It was because her mother would "yak it up" with the woman who ran the studio that Russell was allowed to stand in the back of a class given by Antony Tudor, the English ballet choreographer. "It was very scary - I wasn't that good. Agnes de Mille was in the class," she laughs. "She was terrible!"

Like de Mille, Russell wasn't cut out to be a ballerina, but she didn't want to be a chorus girl in a musical, either. Grappling with the question of how to continue dancing while getting a college education, she called Mary Hinkson, a family acquaintance known as "Bunny" who went on to become one of Graham's few African-American dancers (one of Hinkson's performances proved to the young Virginia Johnson, now director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, that women of color could dance onstage). Hinkson encouraged Russell to apply to the University of Wisconsin program, one of the few college dance programs at that time. It was headed by movement scholar Margaret H Doubler, whose connections between kinesthetic awareness and emotional well-being were akin to Wigman's, and whose ideas spawned the current multitude of dance departments across the country. After graduation, Russell took the Wigman course in Berlin, and from there took a train to Switzerland to study with influential choreographers Rosalia Chladek, Kurt Jooss, and Harald Kreutzberg (all of whom had fled Germany during World War II).

After returning to Madison to get her master's degree and teaching a few semesters of Wigman-inspired classes at Ohio Wesleyan University, Russell headed to New York. Hanya Holm, whom Wigman had enlisted to open an American school in her style, hired Russell to teach children's classes, and Russell took classes with other teachers at the school. (Holm, who was in the midst of rehearsing Broadway dancers in her choreography for My Fair Lady, taught only occasionally.)

It was there that Russell heard about choreographer Alwin Nikolais, a Connecticut native who ran a dance company out of the Henry Street Playhouse on the Lower East Side. By the 1970s, Nikolais was world-renowned for his use of lighting, color, design, synthesized sound, and dance to create abstract spectacles - "He was a whole auteur," says Russell. But in the mid-1950s, his small company of dancers took an evening class alongside "regular people" with day jobs. With the class on the stage, Nik, as he was called, sat in the first rows of the 350-seat theatre with a drum or two - like Wigman, he often used percussion to accompany his classes. When she first joined the class, Russell hid in back: "I had no idea of the way he wanted you to move. It was very different, very organic. No fancy schmancy stuff. It was the extreme opposite of Martha Graham, which delighted me, because I couldn't stand anything she did."

At the 1956 Connecticut College School of Dance summer program (a predecessor of today's American Dance Festival), Russell assisted teacher Margret Dietz, another Wigman protégée, and Nikolais' company was invited to perform. Russell fondly recalls the ovation following Kaleidoscope, his first show for a national audience: "I was in the audience, with Nik. It was tremendous. People had not seen them, and here was his full company on this big stage, and the roof came down. People stood up and cheered - I get emotional now thinking about it.

It was fantastic, because you see, until that time there was Graham technique, and all these damn people who had been around, but nobody went down to see Nik. And he was the biggest thing to hit that summer at Connecticut College. He said afterward, it was like a cold waterfall, an ice-cold waterfall falling over him as he heard this applause."

Wigman visited New York in 1958, and Russell escorted her around the city, first to watch a Graham class at Juilliard and then to meet Nikolais. "Nik and she fell into each other's arms - you know, to Nik, this was this goddess - and they had a wonderful time. She sat and watched as they did a typical class, and I think I sat with her - I'm sure I didn't get into that class!" Afterward, Russell recalls, Wigman summed up their day: "She said, 'Graham is autocracy, and Nik is democracy.' She was very sharp and had a sense of humor."

While continuing to take classes with Nikolais, and stage managing Ruth Grauert's children's productions for the Playhouse, Russell entered the barely existent field of movement therapy. She had no formal training in counseling or psychology, although her interest was no doubt piqued in part by her relationship with the psychologist Albert Ellis (he developed rational emotive behavior therapy), whom she married in 1956. Perhaps more importantly, she had intuition and capability for empathy, along with the fruits of her college education: Her undergraduate and graduate theses were on dance as a reflection of social change and choreography based on feeling. Russell says that in H'Doubler's program the student's purpose wasn't to become a professional dancer. "It was to become a more integrated, well-adjusted human being." Russell began leading movement therapy sessions at the Manhattan State Hospital, as a volunteer. "I worked with very severely disturbed patients, because in the Fifties, they were just beginning to use the psychotropic drugs," Russell explains, and points to a photo in a 1956 Life magazine article about new developments in helping the mentally ill. In the photo, Russell, barefoot, is leading a roomful of patients in a partner dance, while others sit on the sidelines, playing maracas.

Russell gave up the volunteer position in 1958, when she divorced Ellis to marry Dr. Murray Russell, a Californian urologist. But when Dr. Russell died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving her a single mother to their 3-year-old son, Harlow, Russell moved back east and began a full-time career in movement therapy at the Philadelphia State Hospital. There, and later as the director of creative arts therapies for the New Jersey state hospital system, Russell was known as someone who not only moved with the patients but took them on outings and spoke up for them. She invited the patients to sit in a circle rather than against a wall. She convinced the hospital's business manager to order smaller Kotex for the female patients. She got rid of the dead plants.

Now in Austin, where she's lived since she retired in 1994, Russell sifts through memories as vivid and colorful as a Nikolais production, between travels to evaluate the gaits, muscles, and temperaments of show dogs. A skill she's been honing on the side since the 1980s, judging dogs is an aptitude, she says, that developed out of her lifelong concern for animals and - you guessed it - the philosophies of Mary Wigman.


Rhoda Winter Russell
September 27, 1930 - July 26, 2019
Her passions and her causes

Rhoda loved animals. All her life. It started with her first little dog, at age 13 in Philly. But blossomed in early adulthood in the early 1960's showing Afghan Hounds in Southern California and racing Saluki's on Long Island, NY. Then through the 70's and 80's and 90's she loved showing Irish Wolfhounds and Salukis across the East Coast before becoming an International Dog Show Judge. Her passion and achievement culminated in beloved Dog Show Judging assignments in Australia and New Zealand. She was truly in her element and her love. Which is why she has requested her ashes be dispersed in beloved New Zealand, so she can return to the place she loved the most.

Her love of dogs carried forward in Austin in the mid 90's, the 2000's and to her final decade with her beloved rescue dogs Lady Bird, Ursa Rose and her last, "Ringo", a lovable mixed Chow. She refused to move to assisted living until we found one that would accept her AND Ringo. We finally did find one and they moved in together in November 2018. Ringo gracefully passed away at age 9 at the foot of her bed in February 2019. And her final doggies were two wonderful "Therapy" Dogs, Ari and Rango, who visited her since March 2019 and made her smile right up to the end.

Her love of dogs was amazing and part of her daily life. She also spent a considerable amount of her extra time pursuing the cause of animal rights globally. Some may remember Rhoda's classic station wagons and the "big white van" over the years, "plastered" with various animal rights stickers showing her concern and attention to gorillas, seals, turkeys, birds, ostriches, and creatures great and small. One particular one I remember well was "Club Sandwiches, not Seals".

Rhoda also had concerns from "way back" about the Environment and the Earth. So, she donated as well to organizations that she felt were and are making a difference for the planet.

Rhoda desired some of her estate to go to these causes. So, we share these organizations with you today. If you wish to donate on her fond memory of her grace, her sarcasm, her style, her "eclectic" sense of self... here's a list of several she donated to. Please choose as you have time and desire to. In her name: Rhoda Winter Russell.

Rhoda - In memoriam from Mastiff Club Fall. 2019. 2 pages. Link to see the wonderful write up.

Write up about Rhoda and Neapolitan Mastiffs. 2010. 2 pages. Link to see the wonderful write up.

Environmental Defense Fund
International Primate Protection League
Food & Water Watch
MSPCA Angell
Earth Justice
Chimp Haven

Thank you! Harlow, Nicole and Karina Russell

Tributes