What I’m really interested in is how we learn by moving. Not only how we learn to move but how, through movement, we learn about ourselves and our environment, and how that in turn shapes everything we do. Because I started out moving so badly, I have a lot of compassion and patience for anyone who finds movement difficult. I can honestly say that if I can do what I do, then anybody can.
You can find out more about all my activities at my main web site at www.movetolearn.com
I became interested in movement out of necessity. As a child I had difficulty learning to walk – my legs were in braces from age three to five – but despite this I always loved to move. At 14 I was advised to, “lead a sedentary life: not move too much, avoid lifting things and never lift anything heavy”.
My first degree was in Fine Art Photography and Film, and for a while I worked as a journalist in London. At 24, suffering from terrible back pain, I turned to osteopaths, who encouraged me to swim. Swimming rekindled my childhood passion for movement, and in 1990 I started taking classes at Circus Space in London. It was like a big children’s playground for adults.
I studied mime and physical theatre, then circus arts and physical theatre at what is now Circomedia (1991). There I discovered the Feldenkrais Method and contact improvisation. In 1993, I went to study at the School For New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam and then developed a career in contemporary dance, a field in which I continue to work.
The Feldenkrais Method was the first somatic discipline I discovered in the autumn of 1991, and for that reason the most significant for me personally. It helped me to learn to move without pain which had until then been a constant feature of my teenage and early aduld life.
It opened the way forward to study dance and many other somatic practices. It brought my attention to how I learn and later as I began to teach to how everyone learns to move. Not only that but how movement underlies our experience of the world.
I studied with a Feldenkrais teacher for 11 years before entering a professional training programme (Biel-Neuchâtel 2002–2005 under the direction of Elisabeth Beringer) to become a practitioner myself.
In 2019–20 I completed an advanced training for Feldenkrais practitioners in theory and techniques from the Anat Baniel Method for Children, taught by Nancy Aberle.
These days I describe myself as a somatic movement researcher, educator and artist. I started by offering my work mainly as a resource for dance professionals – in dance centres, at festivals, for dance companies and on higher education programmes – and have also worked with actors, musicians and singers.
I was a senior lecturer in the dance department of the Theatre Academy of Finland (2008–12), have taught regularly at the Danish National School of Performing Arts, and helped to create and develop the one-year Dance and Somatics education at ISLO in north-eastern Finland. I began teaching in Vienna in 2006 at Tanzquartier Wien where I continue to teach and also give workshops and classes at ImpulsTanz.
I always thought that the radical potential of dance lay in bringing dance experiences to people beyond the dance world. I have taught courses for psychotherapists, philosophers, visual artists, social workers, architects and more. I developed a series of workshops under the title BodySchool which were open to everyone.
I have extensive experience of working with children with special needs. From 2005 to 2006 I worked at Mahdollisuus Lapselle (Chance for a Child) in Helsinki, and from 2017, while living in Denmark, I was invited to give regular intensive weeks of sessions for children together with their families and helpers which continue to this day.
The treatment I received as a child with movement problems was somewhat brutal. In working with children I try to create the kind of trauma-free and pain-free learning experiences I would have wished for myself. I start from what arouses a child’s attention and interest, and from what they can already do, and build new possibilities from there – gently, playfully and at each child’s own pace.
Occasional news of classes, workshops and new writing.