For several years now I’ve been trying to get a good audio recording of a really basic, important Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lesson. I always record my lessons live in class, so when I’m not satisfied enough with how it turned out to publish the recording, I can’t just repeat the lesson the next week because I like to offer my class a variety of ATMs.
So every now and then when the time is right I teach a lesson I’m calling (for the moment at least) “Simple Hips and Shoulders.” Feldies, you’ll be familiar with it as basic side-lying, learning to move the shoulders and hips forward and backward in various relationships, then up and down, and finally making small circles with them. It’s as simple a lesson structure as any. I’ve taught it dozens of times, and students seem to really like it. It’s a lovely lesson and great for longtimers and newcomers.
But somehow I’m just never excited enough about how I taught to want to share it with you! I tried it twice last week, including once as an intro lesson to a more challenging lesson (recorded here: Agile Hips, Knees, and Feet) in my Free Your Hips workshop. But, it just didn’t feel up to the quality I like to publish.
The next day I tried again, and I was pretty happy with how it went in class. But then I discovered that my digital audio recorder’s batteries ran out!
So I came home and listened to the 30 minutes that did get recorded, and while I still want to improve my teaching of it (it’s too chatty, there’s some pacing issues, etc.), what’s there has value. You can extrapolate the quality and types of movement, attention, and relationships I’m using to tie the lesson together.
I thought some of my frequent listeners might value getting this peek into a lesson in development, and experienced Feldies can certainly use it as a jumping off point for improvising a familiar ATM.
I’m also trying to do something different in my quest to get a good recording of this, and hopefully sharing this will shake up my recording karma enough to have my next attempt be the one!
And finally I’d like to invite your comments! Feldies and students, if you have ideas about how you’d like to improve on what you hear, I welcome the feedback, as always!
Here’s the mp3. There’s 4 1/2 minutes of pre-class chat, including meeting a new student, and then the lesson begins. (You can easily click to make it start at 4:30 if you don’t want the glimpse behind the scenes.)
Again, this isn’t a full lesson. Newcomers, you’re better off starting with something in my collection of dozens of fully developed, edited, and annotated free streaming ATMs.