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"You cannot improve yourself without improving your relations with other people."-- Moshe Feldenkrais, 1980 |
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Feldenkrais for dance |
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Many dancers have found the Feldenkrais Method beneficial to their dance practice. Benefits include injury prevention, biomechanical understanding and a deeper awareness of your own body. "The Feldenkrais Method has helped my dancing more than anything else. I'm more flexible, my joints move easily and I can balance longer than ever before. As a dance instructor and Director of The DanceLoft in Tucson, I feel strongly that Awareness Through Movement(R) classes are an essential ingredient to every dance studio. I was first exposed to the method through the Prisca Winslow Bradley's Dance Taos summer workshop "Intelligent, Injury-Free Dance" and returned to Tucson to take ATM classes and receive Functional Integration(R) lessons with Lindley Hunter Silverman. After immersing herself in the method again at the workshop the following summer, she invited Lindley and Bonnie Angelie to teach at the studio. By the time the series of classes were over, I wanted to become a practitioner myself. "You'll find the need becomes stronger and stronger," Lindley told me when I expressed an interest. Now a practitioner myself, I try to integrate what I've learned into my dance teaching. I am learning to ask more questions of the students, to open the floor for self-discovery. Rather than barking out a series of directions for finding placement or balance, I'm finding it more useful to set up situations in which students can discover for themselves what works best-- much like an ATM class. Laura Reichhardt, a professional dancer with
NEW ARTiculations Dance Theatre,
has taken
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Feldenkrais ATM classes at the DanceLoft. She said she finds
that she is more stable and doesn't have to think as much about what she is
doing because it comes more naturally. "I am more in touch with my body.
I think I'm less alarmed when things don't go right because I trust that
my body knows what it's doing. I no longer feel the need to command
it with my mind-- I've learned that my body's the expert, not my mind," she
commented. She credits Awareness Through Movement classes with alleviating the muscle
spasms she used to experience. She also noted, "I am now also aware of the
obstacles that I need to overcome in my dance."