Feldenkrais Practice - Movement Research - Partner Work / Exemplary Lesson

"Sliding lesson"

a team-teaching format by Sascha Krausneker and Georg Blaschke

This IDOC has been written by Sascha Krausneker and Georg Blaschke

Content:

We will start the class with a Feldenkrais lesson during which the participants lie on the back and slide down the legs in different ways with different parts of their hands. The lesson focuses on a sliding experience that aims to open the sensation of touch, skin, friction, and the dancers’ perception to a profound level of three-dimensional inside awareness.

The participants report about a change in quality and qualitative images in lying and standing after having touched only one side of themselves. After completing the lesson with more variations we propose to enlarge their exploration to the outside.

Transition into space: The participants are now invited to walk around while staying in their exploratory mode and to find another person that passes by to stay with him or her for a moment, to touch and slide along any body part. Later we invite them to break the dominance of the hand and to use all parts of their body to slide and touch while engaging with the entire sensual perception and their whole self. We also invite them to extend their sliding and touching exploration to the entire environment and include architecture, walls, the floor, mats, chairs, objects, partners or anything else. - This period is very delicate and the process opens up gradually into the space. People are going on their individual sensual experiences. We give enough time and only few instructions in this part of the process. Many times we have observed that the group comes into a flow and the process takes over by itself, the space is conquered.

People raport to feel connected to themselves, the others, the room and the present moment. They now engage in an alive journey while being truly in contact and the creative process many times happens by itself.

Subsequently we invite the participants to observe in which role they perceive themselves, for example to feel more engaged with intentional action or rather to stay on the sensual level of experience. A game of role changes might be introduced. Like this the most peculiar and unexpected constellations and sculptures of interweaved bodies and objects might arise instantaneously. This moment of the class can be very interesting to be observed from a choreographers' point of view as well. At the same time it simply installs an atmosphere of playfulness and freedom to improvise with the qualities that have been introduced through the original Feldenkrais lesson and the following process.

In a next step we introduce constraints: The reduction of options and limitation of movements can help to focus on the execution of movement in a more specific way, that means to differentiate initial moments of movements and moments where they come to an end. That guides the process to a more individual research into personal experiences and concepts of articulation and how they can be repesented in space. Staying longer with one element, one object, one articulation or one sensation of touch possibly leads to a deeper and more differentiated awareness and shift of habitual body and self image, from the inside as well as from the observers point of view.  We question the need to change an option or to stay with it for longer. Less can be more!

At the end of the class there is time to improvise freely for yourself in space or in your imagination lying on the floor in order to integrate the resonance of the process and maybe recall qualities of the whole process and the functional theme of the original Feldenkrais lesson.

We attach a series of images from the same class that has been taught at the Vienna Impulstanz Festival 2012.