Tilting the wrong way

It’s a tradition that each day of the annual conference of the Feldenkrais Guild® of North America starts with Awareness Through Movement® classes. Members of the FGNA teach a series of ATM® lessons that follow a specific theme before any of the workshops, advanced seminars, or forums get underway, giving the conference attendees a chance to connect with themselves and the personal practice of the method before engaging in professional development and politics. It’s a wonderful chance to experience how colleagues from all over teach and to find out what’s intriguing them.

Well before the 2012 conference, my friend and colleague, Anastasi Siotas, and I were discussing whether either of us was going to submit a workshop proposal. After kicking some possible ideas back and forth, I had a CAI. (I’m sure you know the CIA, but a CAI is something else altogether: a Crazy Ass Idea.) Since we enjoy developing curricula as much as we love teaching together, why not teach one of the morning ATM series together? 

Anastasi liked the idea, so we began brainstorming possible themes. That’s when I had yet another CAI: why not teach the ATMs that Feldenkrais had taught in the summer of 1977 for the third year of his San Francisco teacher training? Granted this would be a highly condensed version of the series but this rather wacky idea was inspired by the Reduced Shakespeare company, which is world-famous for performing all of 37 of the bard’s plays — The Complete Works of William Shakespeare — in 97 minutes! (Check out their 2020 US tour dates here.)

For nearly 20 years, I’d been teaching this series around the world in the programs I directed and in other trainings. I’d fallen in love with the ATMs the very first time I experienced them. Most of the lessons definitely revolved around one main idea, one functional action: being able to go from lying on your back to standing — and then coming back from standing to lying supine — keeping one leg straight the entire time. 

To teach the series during a two-week segment, I’d already distilled this series into 18 or 19 ATMs lessons. But could we teach an even more condensed version of only five classes? We were bolstered by the fact that in the lesson, DRAWING A CIRCLE WITH THE ARM ABOVE THE HEAD SIDE-SITTING, which is ATM 62 in the Alexander Yanai series, Feldenkrais taught a lesson that gets to a version of the same final action in only one lesson.

To us, the summer’s program of 42 lessons seemed to be composed as an interwoven braid.*  Though there were a few other incidental lessons along the way, it was clear, from our careful investigation of the summer’s series, that there were four main strands leading up to a finale. Each strand was a series of its own, built around what we now consider a classic ATM structure: