Freedom to Choose ??
Valentin Kannicht
& Ali Schwartz
Friday
14:30 - 16:30
ONLINE
Workshop
This interactive online-seminar is designed as a group-exploration on our freedom to choose using body-feedback and mental orders. Following the main principles of the Alexander Technique, we explore how we habitually react within our bodies to stimuli. We guide the group to discover awareness skills of inhibiting automatic reactions and finding tools to open our mindset to new options of reacting that in a first place may not seem available to us. Following a systemic approach, we reflect on our embodied responses to normative expectations in the context of diverse and intersecting identities. Introducing the capabilities perspective as developed by Amartya Sen in The idea of justice (2009), we offer a thinking tool on how to understand mechanisms of social exclusion as a limiting force on our freedom to choose and explore new ways of responding to these limitations fighting for real options to choose as part of a political activism towards a growing social and ecological Justice. We offer an empowering guided lying down to embody the personal experience and finish the Workshop with a short personal or political statement of all participants to express our freedom to choose!
Valentin Kannicht has been teaching the Alexander Technique in individual lessons in the “System-Körper-Raum” (Leipzig) since 2019.
'I attended two different online-trainings about teaching the Alexander Technique online in 2020 and since then I am offering online-teaching (group-workshops and individual lessons). I worked as a social worker in a national pilot project of the “Internationale Gesellschaft für erzieherische Hilfen” (IGFH) between 2015 und 2018 with Diana Düring and Friedhelm Peters and as an ombudsman in the “Kinder und Jugendhilferechtsverein” between 2018 and 2020. I have published several articles and a book on pedagogical and political issues and I am part of the editorial board of “Forum Erziehungshilfen”. I studied special educational needs (B.A.) and social work (M.A.) and trained as a certified Alexander Technique Teacher with Dan Armon'.
Ali is a white, jewish, queer, cis woman and works with systemic body therapy and dance as emancipatory practice in Leipzig.
She is part of the multi-abled performance collective POLYMORA Inc. Her Contact Improvisation practise is centred around consent culture and community building. Within the POLYRHYTHMS project she works with the TaKeTINa rhythms method with queer refugees.
She loves to play-fight, cuddle and lie down on the floor and hum.
https://system-koerper-raum.de/info/ali-schwartz/english/, https://polymora-inc.org/