AT, Movement, and Emotion: Rachelle Tsachor on LBMS and the Alexander Technique
ASO Newsletter - Edition 64
Working together to enable greater understanding of the Alexander Technique through disciplined inquiry.
Introduction
This month we are releasing a conversation with Alexander Technique teacher and Registered Somatic Movement Therapist, Rachelle Tsachor MA, ATI, AmSAT, about how she uses the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System (LBMS) and Alexander Technique as her primary tools to analyse connections between motion and emotion. Rachelle has been involved with several research projects with Dr Tal Shafir around how using a somatic movement approach can help foster emotional resiliency, which will be the subject of our next post. This time, we are focusing on some background to LBMS and how this way of analysing movement can inform our Alexander Technique teaching.
The conversation includes how emotion is a bi-directional experience so that when we, as Alexander Technique teachers, are helping our clients and ourselves to respond to stimulus in a more conscious way, this can support emotion regulation. Rachelle gives an example of a lady she has worked with who has had a stroke. Emotions have a vital function informing us about our needs, driving us to take action to meet them, then they can shift. Our work in AT can be beneficial in this bi-directional system, in helping our psycho-physical whole release, and so return to homeostasis.
About & Additional links
Rachelle Palnick Tsachor is Associate Professor of Theatre Movement at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She is a teacher of the Alexander Technique (member: ATI, AmSAT, ISTAT), and is also certified in Laban/Bartenieff Movement System (CMA), Somatic Movement Therapy (M-SMT, ISMETA) and is a supervisor for the Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM.org) global trauma relief programs. Her research investigates body movement to bring a human, experiential understanding to how movement affects our lives. Tsachor analyzes patterns in moving bodies in diverse projects, researching movement’s effects on our emotions, health, learning.
She is co-author of original research into connections between motion and emotion: Emotion Regulation Through Movement; A Somatic Movement Approach to Fostering Emotional Resiliency, and How Do We Recognize Emotion From Movement, which explore ways that perception of emotions from movement relates to empathy. For each of these studies, Tsachor helped to develop existing LBMS methods and new approaches bridging qualitative observation to quantitative analysis, published in How Shall I Count the Ways? A Method for Quantifying the Qualitative Aspects of Unscripted Movement With Laban Movement Analysis. Tsachor’s NSF-funded research (with UIC’s College of Education) investigates the impact movement and drama have on science learning through projects such as the Young People's Science Theatre, where Chicago Public School students from diverse communities create plays that respond to how science stories--such as water contaminated by lead--impact their lives.
Tsachor also applies movement study to affective computing and intelligent interaction for fields such as robotics.
Erica Donnison is part of the ASO team.
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