Peter Ribeaux & Catherine Kettrick
Teaching without touching: touching without teaching.
Education or manipulation?
This joint workshop arose out of a typographical error (fortunately detected prior to printing) in Catherine’s synopsis for the Oxford Congress. Peter was amused by it and jokingly suggested there was material for a joint workshop. He was slightly surprised to be taken seriously but could see that that here was an opportunity for a dialogue between two apparently quite different approaches to the Technique. How can these two ways of teaching, that look so different, both be teaching the Alexander Technique?". This of course begs the question of "What is the Alexander Technique?" and the follow up: "And how the heck do we teach it?" or put another way: "Why do we do what we do when we teach?".
Hopefully this practical workshop will point the way towards some answers to these questions. We shall use a variety of methods to engage with these issues: demonstration, commentating on our own and each other’s work, working with participants, having participants explore and relate the methods we use to their own work and………simply sharing our work in a supportive environment.
Catherine Kettrick
Catherine Kettrick, Ph.D., studied with Marjorie Barstow and began teaching
the Technique in 1976. She has taught in the US, Europe, Japan and
Australia, including being a guest teacher at the Sydney 1994 Congress. She
is a co-founder of The Performance School and Alexander Technique
International, which she chaired from 2005 to 2007. Catherine is fascinated
with the simplicity of the Technique and with finding ways of conveying its
principles in ways that students can immediately use.
Peter Ribeaux
Peter Ribeaux qualified with Patrick Macdonald in 1965. He is co-director with his wife, Ellie, of an AT teacher training course and has taught in the Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Switzerland and the USA. For many years he combined his Alexander work with teaching occupational psychology at Middlesex University in London. He still gives short courses in business schools. These are increasingly slanted towards the AT and its potential in stress management and back pain prevention at work. He is fascinated by all aspects of the Technique, in particular trying to work out what it really was that Alexander discovered. He loves working with others to improve their work (and his own).
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