ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE and BODY MAPPING can help you find:
Ease in Playing
Comfort in Performing
Whatever the level of your playing, performance anxiety can be a factor, whether we are performing to thousands in a concert hall or sitting down with friends to play a quartet.
In the supportive environment of a camp or workshop we can take the time to explore some of the issues that distract us from being fully with the music in the moment.
Musicians are highly trained athletes of the small muscles and for the small muscles to function at a high level it is useful to learn how the rest of our body, the bones, large muscle groups, and the breath can support us, keep us in balance and allow the fine motor skills we need to become more fluid. When we are more fluid we can embody the music we play rather than just physically survive the effort!!
A Body Mapping class is designed to help musicians learn to play their instruments with their whole body. We all have an internal representation of how we are constructed called a body map. If our map is accurate and adequate our movement is free and fluid. If we have an inaccurate map our movement can be restricted causing frustration, fatigue, discomfort or pain and possibly injury.
Our body map is also plastic and can change. In Body Mapping we use pictures, bone models and we palpate our own boney structure to correct any mistakes in our internal representation. At our instruments we will work through the basics of body mapping to answer the questions:
How do I sit? ………………How do I stand?……………….How do I move?
And the reason behind these questions is: So that we can make music!
In combining the two disciplines, we use the hands-on experience of Alexander Technique with Marion to help guide you physically to a place of greater physical freedom, and Body Mapping with Cathy to provide the images, models and self exploration of our internal map that helps our very plastic brain make the changes we desire.
A wonderful benefit of this work is how it can help us with performance anxiety! This is useful to every musician, regardless of their experience or instrument. Through exploring physical balance and correcting our internal map we find ourselves much more physically present and aware of sensations we experience inwardly and outwardly as we play our instrument. This is called Inclusive Awareness and it opens us to an opportunity to make peace with the challenging physical manifestations of performance anxiety and relegate them to a proper and useful role. Which brings us back to what we all want: to make music –and preferably without the exhausting muscle tension and anxiety we may experience in public.
