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© copyright Arona Primalani & Cristian Santesteban 2010
The Feldenkrais Method is a movement education system for performing artists, athletes, and anyone who seeks to excel at activities they love doing. With a focus on refining sensory perception, the Method guides students to become sensitive to increasingly finer levels of differences as experienced in the sensation, feeling and image of an action. This increased sensitivity opens students to be more nuanced in their qualities and ways of moving. As the originator of the Method once said, "I am not after flexible bodies, I am after flexible brains." For tango dancers this means a bigger playing field for movement, creativity and sensory pleasure.
An essential element of the Method is where and how attention is paid in carrying out an action. Research in neuroscience shows that placing active attention on how a movement is being done already begins to affect what is being done. Dr. Feldenkrais liked to say, "If you know what you're doing, then you can do what you want." Accordingly, a Feldenkrais-inspired tango lesson typically begins with a scan where attention is paid on the feet and by comparing and contrasting the pressure of each foot on the floor. Then, in walking, students learn to sense the skeletal pathway as this pressure traverses from each foot to the spine and the head. Sensitivity to these differences allows the students to become more aware of their posture and alignment, clearly essential in dance and many other activities; it also enables students to express different movement qualities, e.g., light rather than grounded or legato rather than staccato. In another class focused on partner sensing, students may be asked to find their partner's center of gravity by intentionally taking them off axis and back again. A third example is a lesson that involves variations in the points of contact of the embrace. With each change of the embrace, the couple will experience new possibilities, but also new constraints. By finding their partner's axis through the points of contact, each dancer will be exposed to innovative ways of connecting with new partners. These exercises are designed to stimulate greater sensory awareness in partnering and ultimately to give each dancer a dynamic gestalt of the couple's movements as a unit.
The efficacy of the Feldenkrais Method stems from its use of our evolutionary endowments as human beings. A baby's brain, essentially a tabula rasa or blank slate, is driven by innate curiosity and survival instinct to learn new actions in part by experimenting with variations. Feldenkrais capitalizes on our inherent familiarity with this process. An example would be a lesson where the students begin with a simple and familiar movement such as turning to the right. The lesson would progressively evolve into more challenging turns with variations in the use of the head, eyes, spine, torso and eventually the whole self. By the end of the lesson, students loosen fixed habits while developing new movement pathways that facilitate novel improvisation. A common adage in the method is, "Make the impossible, possible; the possible, easy; and the easy, elegant."
While opening avenues for improvisation and higher sensory acuity, the Method acknowledges that the choices made by each person represent the most intelligent choice available to that person at specific points of time and situation. For example, take a dancer whose head tends to tilt to the right. Rather than straightening the position of the head by placing it squarely over the shoulders, a common pedagogic practice, a Feldenkrais practitioner would help the student explore new relationships of the head to the body in various configurations and orientations. As a result, the student becomes aware of the original orientation and easily finds a more optimal orientation of the head. This adaptation happens without inducing a sense of fear or threat of losing the body's familiar "home" position.
The Method also recognizes the unity of the bodymind (or mindbody) and has developed a comprehensive collection of movement lessons designed to open our Pandora's box of unconscious patterns long visible to everyone around us. In these lessons students might explore how different attitudes and personalities expressed by their bodies and movements convey distinct meanings to their partners and those around them. Dr. Feldenkrais introduced the notion of "acture," a blend of action and posture, to signify that even when sitting still, our bodies are speaking. In tango, the tone and position of the torso speak volumes about the person with whom you are dancing, speaking or even approaching to invite. The hands are another central point of interest as they are one of the main vehicles through which we engage with the world, and in tango, with our partners through the embrace. Their orientation conveys a dancer's disposition in the dance, whether intended or not. Most expressive is the face, where even a muscular twitch of a millimeter can make the difference between a "Yes" and a "No" to a prospective invitation. The importance of this non-verbal communication in tango should be clear, even for beginning students, the moment they enter a milonga the world over.
In summary, with its emphasis on sensory-based learning (rather than imitation-based learning); acuity of perception (rather than repetition of movement); and learning by variation (rather than correction), Feldenkrais empowers dancers with new tools for improvisation and self-expression in order to bring more of themselves to the dance.
About the Authors
Arona is a Feldenkrais Practitioner, a Somatic Movement Educator and a Tango dancer. Cristian is an Economist, a free-lance writer, and a Tango dancer. They offer Tango-Kinetics classes, a blend of Contact Improvisation, Feldenkrais and Tango. They live in San Francisco but hail from other parts - she from Singapore/Malaysia, he from Argentina. Arona and Cristian both like to follow and lead, and you can frequently spot them exchanging embraces on the dance floor and elsewhere!
You can reach them at www.embodyingself.com.