Alan Caig Wilson

MA (St Andrews), MFA (Birkbeck), Adv Dip Drama (RWCMD), Cert IFF (Berlin), FG(UK)

I have been a Feldenkrais Practitioner since 1999, and completed my training under the late Dr Mark Reese (supported by a team including Arlyn Zones, Paul Newton, Allison Rapp, Donna Ray, Frank Wildman, Garret Newell and Jeremy Krauss) in Berlin in 2001. Since then I have been Tutor in Feldenkrais at London Contemporary Dance School, as well as leading workshops in the UK, Finland, Poland and Austria. In 2007 I became a Core Trainer at the Polish Institute for Dance Therapy in Poznan.

I run a Practice in Suffolk and, frequently, anywhere I happen to be when someone asks me to help them! I have worked with actors, people with disabilities,dancers, musicians of all kinds, children, horse-riders, nurses, expectant mothers short of breath, grandmothers who have put their backs out playing with their grandchildren, martial artists, sportspeople - in short anyone for whom freedom of movement is central to the fulfillment of the things they really want to do.

Alongside my day-to-day Feldenkrais work, I am currently developing two special interests:

  • Insomnia and the ways in which the special state of awareness created by The Feldenkrais Method can help this condition. I am currently in professional training in the Sounder Sleep System, a synergistic mix of Feldenkrais and Yoga-based breathing work, devised by Michael Krugman. - www.soundersleep.com
  • Working with those who demand much of their bodies - dancers and athletes. I have recently begun a working partnership with the former coach of the Turkish National Ladies Basketball Team.

I am a member of The UK Feldenkrais Guild - www.feldenkrais.co.uk


MY BACKGROUND IN THEATRE AND ARTS EDUCATION

I come originally from Scotland, and after completing an undergrad degree in Psychology (specialising in animal behaviour and child development), I trained as an actor and then as a physical theatre specialist in Cardiff and Paris respectively. It was in Paris, whilst studying at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq, that I encountered The Feldenkrais Method. I began a career as an actor, teacher and director with ideas from this amazing method at the heart of everything I do.

Whilst at Drama School, I had been told by an Osteopath that I should avoid any kind of  movement or dance because I had a scoliosis which would always restrict my work. Within a month of starting my training in Paris it was clear that there would be no restriction to my doing the thing that I had set my heart on doing.

The use of The Feldenkrais Method in my training as an actor freed both my body and my mind to concentrate on my development as an artist, rather than becoming beached on problems that I might encounter along the way. I have taught workshops, performed and directed in many different countries and worked with people of all ages, skill levels and social backgrounds. I am not well-known, but some of my work has won awards and some has been mentioned in the national and international press. I have always tried to choose projects that might extend my skills and my thinking.

In parallel with my work as a Feldenkrais Practitioner, I devise, develop and deliver arts projects with children in Suffolk and North Essex, all of them designed to introduce children and young people to an extended range of thinking and doing.


WHAT DRIVES MY FELDENKRAIS WORK

I first experienced The Feldenkrais Method® at a time in my life when I was being told that I had effectively made the wrong choice of dream. The best advice available suggested that I should choose another path to the one that had been firing my imagination for years. Within a month of my first Awareness Through Movement® lesson, it was clear that I was as capable as my classmates, and more supple and mobile than some. 

I quickly realised that the problems I would be facing in my professional life would definitely NOT be connected to the inability of my body to do what I asked of it. I was introduced to freedom of movement, and as a result freedom of thought, to explore as much of my world as I might choose.

Moshe Feldenkrais  lived to reintroduce adults to the fascination, simplicity and ease they once felt as children discovering the potential of their world. He believed that no-one should be limited by ineffective habits of moving, and that a healthy being is someone who has the capacity to recover quickly and fully from illness or trauma. He wanted for people to realise their 'unavowed dreams' and to be able to do the things that would contribute to their growth as human beings.

It is my pleasure to follow his teaching, to pass on the excitement that I myself derive from this work, and to add some of my own insights, gathered in the course of a widely varied working life as an artist, movement analyst, educationalist and bodyworker.