A Workshop for Musicians, Music Educatorand Health Professionals
TBA
12pm -5 pm Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Marin (UUCM)240 Channing Way, San Rafael, Ca 94903
Tuition $100, $65 students
Enjoy a full, pain-free and long career in music
This Workshop offers practical tools to help you:
- Use your capacity for self-awareness and self correction to bring about greater comfort and efficiency while performing
- Dramatically improve the quality and pleasure of your movement as you acquire new coordination and movement skills
- Understand the causes of music-related injuries
- Recover from and prevent injury
- Move beyond prevention and injury to improving performance
- Access the power of the brain and nervous system to change old patterns and restore lost function – to change the pattern in the brain itself
contact: maryspire@optimalmoves.com· www.optimalmoves.com· 510.847.9613
In this workshop Mary will use innovative and potent Awareness Through Movement® lessons and demonstrations, which will focus on how to use the powerful muscles of the lower back and pelvis to free the neck and shoulders, thus reducing the strain in the arms, fingers and wrists. By improving posture, breathing, coordination and thinking as you learn to move in new ways, you can prevent injury and improve your performance skills, increase mobility and flexibility, gain freedom and choices in movement and enjoy an increased sense of vitality and well-being. Bring your instrument!
Mary Spire is an experienced Feldenkrais® practitioner and Trainer in international Feldenkrais trainings. She is the Educational Director for Optimal Moves, LLC Feldenkrais Teacher Training Program currently in progress. For more information about the Teacher Training Program click here. She holds a Master’s Degree in Piano Performance from U.S.C. and performed for many years before becoming a Feldenkrais practitioner. She has taught Feldenkrais at the San Francisco Symphony’s Prevention and Wellness Program, U.C. Berkeley, U.C. San Francisco, Boston University, SUNY Stonybrook, McGill University, the Tanglewood Music Center and at other schools and hospitals. In addition to her frequent workshops, lectures and symposia, Mary maintains private practices in Berkeley and San Rafael, California, where she specializes in working with infants and children, older adults, people with neurological conditions and performing artists. In 2004, the San Francisco Symphony recommended Mary as the best RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) specialist in the Bay area (San Francisco Magazine 2004).
“Thank you for a superb first training session in the Feldenkrais Method. You are a topnotch teacher, and so real and available. More than ever, I feel open, relaxed, and at one with my feelings and my body. As a musician, this is very important to me. My neck, shoulders, and spine have never felt so supple and unified. I have more mobility as a violist than at any time during the last ten years, and am enjoying a new appreciation of how I practice.”
– David Daniel Bowes, Viola/Violin Teacher and Performer, Philharmonia
“Thank you for a wonderful wonderful experience–it’s been quite a special three weeks! It’s a tremendous amount of work to put together a training, and I am so glad you are doing it…. I like very much how you emphasize the `method’ part of the Feldenkrais Method. And thank you also for your spectacular ATM teaching (and sequencing) in the first two weeks!”
– Student from Teacher Training Program
“Feldenkrais lesson with Mary Spire have helped me overcome serious arthritic conditions. As a musician the work not only is sustaining my career – it has improved my tone and created more freedom and ease in my playing.”
–Brian Marcus, Bassist, San Francisco Symphony
“Working with Mary Spire has given me profound insights along my road to recovery from a repetitive strain injury. With her patient guidance I have learned to play my instrument more efficiently and also to do many other things with greater ease and pleasure.”
-Gina Feinauer, violist, San Francisco Symphony
I appreciate the “how” of Mary’s teaching. Her teaching praxis directly reflects the principles of the method, providing rich layers of experience and learning to her students. The classroom environment, instruction, feedback, progression through content, all coalesce to reveal dynamic applications with the method.
-Sarah M. Nemecek, MFA
“Mary is more than an experienced Feldenkrais instructor. She is sensitive, caring and perceptive about each person she works with. She is innovative and challenged to find solutions, even with the most difficult and challenging problems. I enjoy having the opportunity to work collaboratively with her in the care of our common patients.”
-Nancy Byl, PH.D., PT, UCSF School of Medicine