This workshop is primarily for teachers and trainees of the Alexander-Technique. Depending upon the space available, the course is also open to non teachers who wish to explore the Alexander Technique more in depth.
Tommy’s workshops are largely guided by the participant’s questions; but his description of what he will be focusing on in this workshop is provided below.
Saturday October 30th and Sunday October 31st, 2010
10am to 1pm and 3pm to 6pm
Cost £235 (£190 for trainees)
There will be private lessons available to both students and teachers on October 29th, 2010
Cost of private lessons: £70 for an hour, £60 for 45 minutes, or £40 for 30 minutes
Booking:
Please email your booking requests to sarasolnick@gmail. com
Full payment should be made to Sara Solnick and sent to 9 Chiswick High Road, London W4 2ND once your booking has been acknowledged. Your payment confirms your booking.
A NEW DIRECTION FOR THINKING ABOUT WHO WE TEACH
No matter how committed to habits of identity a given person is, Tommy
reminds us that we are working with that person’s potentiality for becoming other than who they are currently committed to being – this is often preferable than working with a person’s “habit of use” in the negative sense. In this way, we don’t work with the habit, we work with the potentiality using the habit as a point of reference..
His version of inhibition revolves around the idea of a fixed ‘me’ that is given life by tensional patterns of behavior that interfere with the natural function of primary control. Tommy uses his hands to disperse your commitment to who you think you need to be to be you so that your Self truthfully emerges moment to moment, depending on the conditions present.
Tommy’s introduction and use of the inhibitive moment involves withholding definition of who I am committed to being to allow in new information that informs the experience I am having of me, rather than me always informing and managing my own experience, based on past perception.
TOMMY THOMPSON, Co-founder, Charter member, and past Chair of Alexander Technique International (ATI), a former Assistant Professor of Drama and Managing Director of Tufts Arena Theater at Tufts University, has lectured and given over 350 workshops for Alexander teachers and students in the United States, England, France, Switzerland, Germany, Hungary, Canada, Italy, Israel, Austria, the Netherlands and Japan. He has taught on teacher-training courses for over twenty trainings worldwide. Co-author of Scientific and Humanistic Contributions of Frank Pierce Jones, Tommy has contributed numerous papers on the Alexander work, Tai Chi, and Theater to Alexander and Theater journals, periodicals, Martial arts journals, and newsletters. Tommy presented papers at both the First and Second International Congresses for Alexander Teachers, and was one of the Second Generation Teachers invited to give master classes at the Third International Congress in Switzerland in August of 1991. Tommy presented three classes as part of the presenters’ forum at the Sixth International Congress in Freiburg in 1999. In addition, he delivered a paper on “Inhibition as Direct Experience,” which was published in The Congress Papers. He was one of the teachers selected to give Continuous Learning classes at the last Alexander Technique Congress in Lugano and will give the same at the forthcoming congress in 2011.In 1976, Tommy was special assistant to the 1976 Olympic USA Heavyweight Rowing Crew.
In 1982, he was cofounder of Alexander Technique Association of New England and the Frank Pierce Jones Archives and the F. Matthias Alexander Archives, housed in the Wessell Library at Tufts University, and was the organization’s director for six years. Since 1983, Tommy has directed a Teacher Training School for Alexander teachers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where for the past 35 years he has taught the Technique to professional and Olympic Athletes, dressage riders, scientists, physicians, musicians, dancers, actors, and children.