E-News: A Foot in the Feldenkrais Door
Dancer turned Feldenkrais practitioner, Prisca Winslow Bradley has led Feldenkrais workshops for dance teachers across the country for over ten years. A somatic technique based on whole-body awareness, the Feldenkrais Method helps an individual experience and organize his or her own skeletal and muscular structure in order to obtain a complete freedom of movement. On April 11, Bradley will lead a workshop to explore the feet, legs and hips, Elegant Flexibility From the Ground Up, at the Feldenkrais Institute of San Diego (CA).
How can this exploration benefit dancers who already intensely use their feet everyday?
As dancers, we use our feet in very specific ways (like pointing and flexing). Although that requires incredible versatility and control, we're limiting what our feet can do otherwise. In the workshop, we will explore all the possibilities of movement in our feet, as opposed to only working the point and flex options. As we expand our awareness to other movements, we increase total foot mobility, aiding the foot functions necessary for dance. As dancers, we often think that there is either good movement or bad movement. But if you can expand your flexibility of mind and body to do all movement, you will be able to choose what movement you want to do for any technique or choreography, uninhibitedly.
The Feldenkrais Method helps one to move freely and naturally. Can you briefly explain what this means?
The Feldenkrais Method helps one to organize movement. When you move, the brain tells your muscles what to do. For example, if you want to pick up a cup of tea, you don't think, "I have to close my hand and use my bicep to bend my elbow..." You just go for it. So when you do something more complicated, like dance, it should be the same. Through training, you learn how to organize your movements so that if your intention of a movement is clear, you can do it easily.
The workshop focuses on lower extremities, but will there be an integration of the torso or upper-body?
Yes, from the first moment. We will explore how the way we use our feet affects our whole selves. At the very beginning of the workshop, I'll have everyone sitting and manipulate their feet with their hands. At that moment, their bodies will take a shape in which their whole self will be working. There will be standing lessons where one feels different relationships that occur between one's feet and hips and head during a shift of weight through the foot. So there will be a focus on the movement of the feet, but it all relates back to how they support your movement as a whole.
Click here to learn more about integrating other somatic practices into your dance classes.photo by Lenny Foster, courtesy of Prisca Winslow Bradley
