Awareness Perception Presence
physical dialogue with ourselves

This workshop is a practical exploration of how somatic movement practices can be applied to the performing arts as a kind of "invisible technique". While they do not necessarily teach any performable material, somatic practices can enhance how you perform, your ability to learn new skills and suggest new movement vocabulary. They also offer a way to deal with longstanding aches and pains, and your ability to recover from or, better still, avoid injuries.

In these classes, we will use the Feldenkrais Method, experiential anatomy and other specially-devised material to enter into a physical dialogue with ourselves and the environment in which we are situated. I am particularly interested in how the seemingly internal changes that result from exploring these somatic practices are mirrored in the way we perceive the world around us and how the world perceives us.

Classes begin with a guided exploration/lecture/dialogue in which the theme of the class is introduced through exploring reference movements and looking at associated anatomical details. Then follows a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement (ATM) class which aims to clarify some aspects of the theme and generates a more general state of self-awareness. The final part of the class is spent in self-directed exploration taking the references movements as a starting point and offers the possibility to connect, integrate and further explore discoveries made during the first two parts of the class.


Perceiving Choices
Exploring Composition Through Improvisation

Composing dances is about making choices. About how dancers organise their own bodies and their compositional relationships to their environment and others co-existing within it. These choices can be set before the performance or made live in front of an audience. They can be made by the dancer themselves or by someone else. Whatever the case, it is our perception that presents us with the elements from which to choose. The more fine-grained the perception, the more elements we can choose from and the more subtlety we can employ in combining them.

In this workshop, the body is our starting point for compositional choice making and improvisation is our tool. This is a simple back-to-basics study of how we choose to move and place ourselves in space as time passes, taking perceptual skills as the base. We will explore how we make choices inside our moving and also observe each other's choices, in the process gaining some clues as to how they can be read.

The working pattern will be first to explore and clarify a particular perceptual principle or focus in relation to our own movement, and then take this into a group situation and see what emerges. The intention is that what you learn through your experience in the workshop can later inform your choices in making choreography, no matter what genre or style you work with. It can also form the basis for performing improvisation.


Malcolm Manning
I am a somatic movement researcher, educator and artist. I work as part-time senior lecturer in the dance department of the Theatre Academy of Finland (TEAK) and for the last four years have been involved in developing the Dance And Somatics one-year course at ISLO in Joensuu, Finland.  While in Helsinki I also work as a Feldenkrais practitioner. The rest of the time I tour internationally teaching. Sometime during the many years I have spent learning to move, I realised that I was in fact moving to learn, hence the name of my web site where you can get more information – www.movetolearn.com