Feldenkrais and the Art and Science of Healthy Practice
This six-week series is for any musician who wishes to breathe new life into daily practice, work around patterns of injury/discomfort, improve focus and self-awareness, and gain insights into transition from practice to performance.
As both a musician and as a Feldenkrais teacher who works with musicians, Lisa Burrell is fascinated by the array of mechanical insights that Moshe Feldenkrais’s unique movement lessons provide. She is, perhaps, even more excited by the pedagogical ideas they present. Feldenkrais frequently told his students that he would be the last teacher they would ever need because he was really giving them the necessary tools to “learn how to learn” anything.
In this series we will examine how Feldenkrais’s pedagogy fits into the art and science of practice. The “art” of practicing refers to the act of continuous creation and evolution of our practice that changes as our bodies change and as our relationship to music deepens. The “science” is the learning theory and strategic organization that makes us both physically safer and more effective when it comes to improving function.
The topics for each of the six classes will be as follows:
Wednesday 16 February | Variations on a Theme: Warm-ups and “Routines”
Breathe life into your old, repetitive technical exercises and gain new insights into your playing
Wednesday 23 February | Feldenkrais’s Differentiation and Integration: Trouble-shooting Technique
Discover Feldenkrais’s formula for infinite exploration so that you never feel like you are “out of options” when it comes to a technical problem.
Wednesday 2 March | Building Awareness: “If You Know What You Are Doing, You Can Do What You Want”
This famous quotation from Feldenkrais is at the heart of his pedagogy. We spend much of our practice time focusing on trying to achieve something that remains elusive to us. Feldenkrais believed that changing the focus to what we are already doing is what illuminates the path to change.
Wednesday 9 March | Slow and Simple: The Weber-Fechner Principle
Many of Feldenkrais’s lessons borrow from the field of psychophysics and the reduction of stimulus so that we can make small changes that have a big impact on overall. We will look at strategies to improve your sensory experience through very slow, small, and gentle work.
Wednesday 16 March | Working Around Injury and Discomfort
Feldenkrais’s work with his own knee injury, which led to the creation of his method for working with other, was not so much about healing as it was about finding alternatives. So much of our training in music centers on notions of right and wrong, schools of technique, allegiances to teachers, etc. Very often we perpetuate patterns of injury or tension because of how narrow our options have become based on our beliefs. This session is all about playing the “wrong” way and developing choices in how we approach both musical and technical aspects of our playing.
Wednesday 23 March | Preparing for Performance
This session is for anyone who has ever felt that they “played it better in the practice room.” Here we will look at why we need to create many pathways to the same outcome as we transit from practice to performance.