weaving Voices 01.04.2025 issuu - Flipbook - Page 84
we each find our physical and intellectual bearings and orient both
to ourselves and the world around us. She explores the territory of
losing something we care about, losing ourselves, losing control.
Losing anything is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is
about the unfamiliar appearing. Either way, there is a loss of control.
“The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know
how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in
between lies a life of discovery.”135 (TB)
i Integration and Functional Integration
The Central Nervous system is responsible for integrating sensory
information and responding accordingly. It helps individuals to feel
and sense the world around them. As Feldenkrais teachers, when
we work with people in a one-to-one context it’s called a lesson
in Functional Integration136 (or FI for short). See also: entry on
Feldenkrais Method. It’s where the teacher guides an individual
student using gentle, non-invasive touch as the primary means
of communication, and where the teacher’s touch reflects to the
student how they currently organise their body and action. When
applying these principles to our artistic work with communities, we
are mindful to create environments in which participants can have
positive thoughts and sense their innate capacity for improvement
in whatever task or action they are engaged with. We ask ourselves,
how can I improve the quality of my attention, interest, orientation,
and the specificity of my questions in order to model new ways of
thinking and feeling for others in the group? How can I recognise
opportunities for functional connection and new options for taking
action? Feldenkrais states, “Functional integration turns to the oldest
elements of our sensory system – touch, the feeling of pull and pressure; the
warmth of the hand, its caressing stroke.”137 (TB)
135
Solnit, R. (2006) A Field Guide to Getting Lost. London: Penguin, p. 31.
136 Individual sessions - Functional Integration (2024) Feldenkrais UK. Available at: https://www.feldenkrais.
co.uk/about-feldenkrais/individual-sessions/ [Accessed 22 Sept. 2024].
137
Feldenkrais, M. (1981) The Elusive Obvious. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
166
c Choir and Community
Harmony Choir is a community group that consists of around 45
people from across the city of Leeds who come together and sing for
90 minutes each week. The choir was originally formed by Frances
Bernstein who wondered: Is it possible to form a choir that reflects
the multi-racial makeup of its community including refugees and
asylum seekers? Could singing help bring people from very diverse
backgrounds together? Frances says: “I see people’s physical demeanour
and facial expressions change. Smiles appear, eyes light up, bodies relax, people
loosen up and move to the music and crucially they start to engage with other
choir members”.138
One of the unintended consequences of the groundwork we
undertook for the Leeds leg of the Weaving Voices project, was
that I have been invited by Frances to take over the leadership of
this community choir. Leading Harmony Choir makes me feel like
I have something useful to offer people. It’s straightforward. I offer
my skills and facilitate singing. I feel a rush of endorphins because
I feel part of something bigger than myself. I feel more freedom in
these spaces. It doesn’t feel as ‘heavy’ as some of my other work. I
also didn’t set this group up; I am an invited visitor. I wonder if the
‘heaviness’ I feel on other projects involving people from diverse and
marginalised communities, is because the agendas I have to work
within are established by people outside of the group? It can often
feel more complicated and complex. In Harmony Choir the weight of
the work is collectively held. Individual members of the group bring
in and share songs from their own cultures and histories. I wonder
if the ‘lightness’ I feel in this context is because as long as we sing
together, we have done what we set out to do and there is a certain
level of gratification. We’ve also got into good ethical habits. We
don’t sing lyrics unless we know what they mean, we work to avoid
explicit religious references and we only sing in other languages if
we know how to pronounce the words. Yesterday B taught us Jambo,
a song that the Kenyan people created to help people speak their
language. Other songs in the repertoire are sung in Swahili, Spanish,
Congolese. It’s a mixed group with a wide range of languages and a
long line of lineages. (HB)
138 Forget Me Not Chorus (n.d.) Forget Me Not Chorus. Available at: https://www.forgetmenotchorus.com/
[Accessed 22 Sept. 2024].
167
84
