This week I gave a workshop on stage presence for a lovely group of A-level students in Saffron Walden. I didn’t make it over in person, I did it online, but it was great to see the changes in how they sat and moved, even by the end of their short session!
We talked about what they viewed as successful and unsuccessful stage presence, before drilling down into anxiety, fear, and how Feldenkrais uses a different neural network than anxiety. When we’re really paying attention, with curiosity, it’s harder to stay anxious. The act of moving and paying attention to what we’re doing dials down, or down-regulates our nervous system. we can start to work with the way we work in order to feel better on stage, or in front of a roomful of people. Stage presence starts with our self image.
I taught them some of the tools I use in my longer courses on Reducing Anxiety & Building Resilience, to give them some memorable tools to use in the moment,. It was a bit of a whistle stop tour, but they really enjoyed it!
This month’s lessons will be looking at the role of the centre of the body in relation to gravity and the extremities. Feldenkrais uses a lot of proximal-distal inversions to give us unusual and new experiences of ourself in a lesson. For example, moving the ribs around the shoulder/arm, which we don’t tend to do; rather than the more normal moving the arm around the ribs. It’s where we’ll start this week. When we have a new movement, there’s a possibility to do feel ourselves differently to usual. To move ourselves differently to our habitual way. And in there is the space for growth, for learning. For moving with greater attention, awareness and quality.
the Feldenkrais Method with Emma Alter 