Matthias Roth
- born in Hamburg
- studied German Language and Literature, Philosophy and Theater Science at Freie Universität Berlin for four semesters starting in in 1980
- moved to New York in the summer of 1982 to become a dancer
“Through my teacher Aileen Passloff, then head of the dance department at Bard College where she teaches to this day, I got to know Jin Shin Jyutsu from the beginning as a path to more self awareness. She simply incorporated exercises from Mary Burmeister’s Self Help Book I into the warm up before rehearsal.
Soon, the immediate effect of the art on a very painful sore throat introduced me to the physically practical aspect of the method, but even here my fascination was not so much with the question of how to “treat things” but with what might be the root of the efficiency of such simplicity.
I suspected even then that the root of efficiency was the simplicity itself, even if the search for ‘greater’ efficiency through more complicated and presumably more specialized ‘doing’ was to remain a temptation for some time.”