Feldenkrais Conference Düsseldorf  April 2007

Prof. Amos Hetz
Learning Movement and its Aesthetic Value
(The lecture will include visual examples)

Beauty is not only the responsibility of the arts.
Everyone cares in his own way about beauty.
It plays an important part in our daily life and, although often unconsciously, it is present in the way we perceive and relate to other people and to the world.
It is not only involved in choosing our clothing or the objects around us, but is a hidden part of the way we think and feel about our own body, and is a crucial part of our self image.

In movement education we are called upon to respect each person’s unique personality and individual qualities. Tall and small, fat or slime, young and old, with all the twists and turns nature presents us with.
We are called upon to be aware and to make a clear distinction between the form of the personality and the way it functions, which expresses itself through movement.

Yet in many fields of our life beauty is still a fixed idea; it is quite often held to be indisputable.
For some, apparently, beauty is an eternal value.    
Observing  the history of advertisement, fashion, movies, theatre, ritual, art and dance, we can see how many transformations it has gone through, how differently beauty manifests itself.

We accept the fact that we change our opinions, thoughts and ideas through learning and experience. And that throughout our lives we go through processes that widen our horizons and sometimes even cause profound changes.
Yet beauty is considered a fixed, holy thing. But it can be changed too, and open the way for other deep changes in our self image, in our locomotive self-expression.

A change in the posture without a change in the body image (which includes, among many other factors, the aesthetic values of the self) will not hold.
A change in the way one moves without a change in the aesthetic values of one’s ideas about dance will lead again and again to a clash between technical demands (which do not respect the individual) and one’s unique, whole self.

In the field of movement education we are faced with many challenges.
A - Movement and body need to be differentiated.
B - We need to respect the different expression of each individual through a clear definition between posture and movement
C - We need to respect the inhibition of each individual spine, which is a result of early imprinted information, including beauty.
D - We need to develop a conscious education of aesthetics, and to realise that notions of beauty are also a matter of culture, environment and time, and as such are an important part of education.  
E - Being such a deep part of our self, each of our actions is coloured by our sense of beauty, including the way we teach.

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