Feldenkrais And Acting
Character
Based on my experience, I would say that Feldenkrais, on the one hand, improves the use of the whole body in character acting. These questions—How does the character eat, walk, run, bend over, or gesture?—become increasingly a matter of fluidly allowing these actions to happen naturally, rather than forcing them to happen.
It becomes much easier to anchor a character in a specific part of the body and then simply let the rest unfold. You become more attuned to the finer details. On the other hand, the body parts are better connected and interact more effectively; the fingertips sense what the abdomen is doing.
Rehearsal becomes more about testing where the flow takes you, so that you get a much more improvisational sense of the—let’s say, according to Laban—range of movement within which the character operates, while retaining much more freedom to allow the character, for example, to be in a different mood from day to day, or to develop a new quirk that simply arises out of nowhere. The character becomes, so to speak, more of a real being, more like a jazz improviser.
“If you know what you’re doing, you can do whatever you want.” (Moshé Feldenkrais)
Voice
The same applies to the effect of a altered voice. If someone speaks in a higher pitch than usual, for example, their body moves or contorts in a completely different way than usual during certain acting strategies—such as pleading, explaining, or motivating. If a body is “permeable” according to Feldenkrais’s concept, the actor can also embody this much more easily or allow it to flow naturally from within.
It no longer exceeds their physical limits, so that they don’t, as it were, slip back down at the edge and lose the character—or believe they aren’t even in character at all. Playing a physical character is basically simple if the body is capable of acting—or, in other words, permeable enough.
Under certain circumstances, the character may also take on a different voice, because the altered body posture naturally steers them in that direction.
The Emotional
Your emotional resilience—both within yourself as an individual and then within your character—also improves, because here, too, you have to react to a specific environment or generate something from within yourself, and your character channels that energy in a certain way. Your sense of self—your willingness to try such things—grows because Feldenkrais helps you become more aware of yourself, notice more details about yourself, and thereby find more reasons to believe that all these things are not arbitrary.
Feldenkrais as a relaxation ritual
Feldenkrais can always be good to get back into the body from everyday life with stress as a ritual. It can be understood as a kind of 'moving meditation', for example, if one also observes thoughts that arise during it. The movement is a good way to prevent the head from being cut off from the body and to continue writing bills in one's mind or planning the shopping or reflecting on the conversations of the day like earwigs. Feldenkrais is a good way to come to yourself. That works as well before a shoot or a stage performance.
