LEAVING MYSELF IN YOUR HANDS

2022

CLASS 11

Overview

Why the title, Leaving Myself in Your Hands. To share with others how I perceive/receive the world and people through my hands, much like a painter wants to share how they receive/perceive the world through their eyes. Also, leaving you, if you should decide to take it on, with the responsibility of passing my understanding and way of working onto others. I think of my work as a folk song.

Personal Integration via Fertman Fundamentals

Here is how I see the content of this course unfolding.

Always personal integration practice as a foundation. We have done lots of spine/three sphere study. Now to integrate arms and legs into our practice.

We will continue to put together my movement kata I am developing, which I am fondly referring to a the Fertman Fundamentals.

Learning a choreography, a kata, and then allowing yourself to improvise with it. But, I find, it is good first to learn the kata. In his book Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder writes of being on the path, of maintaining paths. From the path we are able to walk into the wild always aware that there is a path to which we can return. I think as working through a kata as walking on a path and then improvising off the kata as walking into the wild. Both are good.

The Essential Movement

Over these 10 weeks, we will put together a kata that invigorates the essential movement, through the the spine/spheres, through the legs/ ankles/feet, and through the arms/wrists/hands.

The shape of the ripple/wave pattern.

How we interfere with it in the spine, arms, and legs.

Paper Straw Ripple

I suggest watching at .75 speed.

In Good Hands

If we train ourselves to move well through our days and use our hands well through our days, then we will bring a naturally good use into our teaching when we use our hands. Obsessing on your use when you are teaching someone is not helpful. Think of an accomplished performer – how they think when practicing and when performing.

So, when learning our Rising/Falling Patterns, let’s be imperfect and have fun. The rest will follow.

Specialized Tactual Skills for Teaching by Hand

Tree Frog Hands

Hands – how to join, how to stick. how to swim under the surface, how to contact the inner body, the person through their body.

Rising/Falling Patterns

Tell story behind how they came about. After my first experience of feeling a person’s shoulder structure free under my hands, I became obsessed with discovering pathways within the body that are freeing.

In Japan. Obsessing on how all the patterns fit together into a larger pattern. Steam room. I saw it in the steam. Went to class and tried it out with Midori. A guest was watching. Reminds me of Water Falling and Salmon Rising.

How does the water fall, cascade, so that the salmon are able to shoot up through the water?

First Passive Scapula Stroke

Class Structure

Stability Study – Fuji

Central Mobile Etude – Mermaid

Tentacle – Wing Etude

Unicycle – standing

5 count phrases.

Rising/Falling Pattern

Passive Hand Scapula Stroke