Eros and inquiry: the Feldenkrais Method® as a complex resource

This essay discusses the Feldenkrais Method® as a critical resource within performer training. The essay draws on performance research undertaken between 2004 and 2012 and on pedagogical practice within international dance and actor training contexts. It examines the development of Feldenkrais-informed performance pedagogies as means to facilitate conditions for embodied self-care, collaborative creative inquiry, and an embodied criticality through movement. There is a trend towards democratisation and collaborative practice in Western contemporary performance ecologies and training, calling for autonomous learners and reflective practitioners with a highly developed sense of agency, empathy and psycho-physical flexibility. The essay proposes that informing performer training through Feldenkrais processes and value systems can offer timely educational models that transcend notions of reductionist, discipline-oriented skills provision, by offering embodied modes of artistic questioning and aesthetic inquiry. It argues that the Feldenkrais Method (FM) offers emancipatory, empathy-forming, and agency-constituting processes which can support an open-ended and rigorous approach to performer training. By drawing on trans-disciplinary critical theory frameworks the article suggests that FM, as a bio-psycho-social practice, fosters improved mobility, creative inquiry skills and complex thought through inter-subjective de-conditioning processes. It argues that the Feldenkrais Method offers a pedagogical foundation for the vitalising and integration of the learners’ sexually potent self into training and performance processes.