We will draw on The Feldenkrais Method®, in dialogue with creative dance & movement practices, to help us find greater awareness, ease, freedom and new possibilities in our movement choices and actions. This explorative class allows for time to sense and witness and re-enact ourselves as living and moving beings. We are guided to experience our center, our feeling for gravity and ground and our expressive interaction with our environment with greater clarity and curiosity for change. This session is for anyone interested in movement and embodiment, but also designed to meet the embodied needs and interests of experienced performers.
The Feldenkrais Method® was developed by Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-1984) as a gentle and intricate embodied educational process concerned with self-discovery, wellbeing and improved function. It uses movement, sensation & reflective experience as organic learning modes to support us in our ability to interact with the world in new ways with comfort, ease and curiosity. It invites us to slow down and listen to ourselves and to playfully explore the world of our internal sensation and supports our nervous system to form new pathways beyond our habitual capacities. The Feldenkrais Method® is taught in ‘Awareness Through Movement’® group lessons, guided through verbal instruction, and one-to-one touch-based ‘Functional Integration’® lessons as dialogues between learner and practitioner.
Thomas Kampe has worked as a performer, artist, researcher and somatic educator across the globe for 40 years and was Professor of Somatic Performance & Education at Bath Spa University (UK) between 2012 & 2022. Thomas initially trained in visual art and dance, and is a teacher of the Feldenkrais Method ® which forms a rich foundation for his teaching, arts practice and research. He is interested in critical somatic arts legacies, and his writings and performance works have been published internationally. He was editor of the Feldenkrais Research Journal Vol. 6 ‘Practices of Freedom: The Feldenkrais Method & Creativity’ in 2019, and recently co-edited JDSP Vol. 13.1 & 2 (2022): ‘Embodying Eco-Consciousness: Somatics, Aesthetic Practice and Social Action’. Thomas’ chapter ‘Dancing the Soma-Ecstatic: Feldenkrais and the Modernist Body’ was published in 2021.