Paul's Feldenkrais Projects

Welcome!

Hello! I'm Paul, a certified Feldenkrais Practitioner. I feel privileged to be able to help people work on a key element that can have a huge impact on their quality of living - MOVEMENT! You are of beautiful design, and I welcome you to discover the abundance of your movement potential and refine the usually overlooked art of self-use so you may feel freer, more masterful, more tasteful, and more spectacularly you doing what you need to do and, more importantly, what you love to do in your life.

Upcoming guest teaching calendar

2023

January

9-13 Of Curious Nature (Bremen, Germany)

23-27 Dansehallerne (Copenhagen)

February

HONG KONG

- City Contemporary Dance Company

- The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (Dance department)

- The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK)

- Le Studio Ballet

Paul Pui Wo Lee

I have been a Certified Feldenkrais® Practitioner since 2015, Jeremy Krauss Approach (JKA) Practitioner and Therapist since 2019. Formerly the rehearsal director/choreographic assistant for Of Curious Nature, a contemporary dance company based in Bremen, Germany.

Upon graduating from Canada’s National Ballet School, I trained a year at the Rotterdam Dance Academy and then moved on to dance with IT Dansa in Barcelona and then the Gothenburg Opera Ballet. Later as a freelance dancer, I worked with choreographers in Scandinavia, Italy, and Germany, and had the fortune to perform at The Barbican in London and The Kennedy Centre in Washington, D.C. with Andersson Dance's "Goldberg Variations - ternary patterns for insomnia".

As a Feldenkrais teacher, I have had the pleasure to teach at some major dance companies:
Danish Dance Theatre, Norrdans, Skånes Dansteater, Cullberg, Das Ballett des Staatstheaters am Gärtnerplatz in Munich, Hong Kong Ballet, Tanz Theater Regensburg, Regionteater Väst

...dance schools:

The Royal Ballet School of Antwerp, The Danish National School of Performing Arts, The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, Balletakademien Stockholm, The Royal Swedish Ballet School

...and cultural institutions:

Danscentrum Väst, Dansalliansen, The Danish Actors' Association

I have also taught online through The Exhale for musicians, Movement and Creativity Library, as well as my own private groups. Recently, my chapter about Feldenkrais and Dance was published in the new “The Feldenkrais Method® Learning Through Movement” book edited by Staffan Elgelid and Chrish Kresge.

Why I love what I do...

Feldenkrais: it's realising yourself as an artist in life

My career started as a contemporary dancer, and I am now shifting into helping people become better movers. I once felt that movement was frivolous - utterly impractical, but then I realised that life would be impossible without it. We're moving to breathe, eat, see, engage with others, communicate our thoughts and feelings, walk to work, take care of our families...

In helping people discover more of their personal possibilities to move, I see that I am equipping them to be masters of themselves; to expand their freedom to create and live their lives according to their dreams.

When someone learns to let go of unnecessary effort and use themself more intelligently, more creatively, they develop more flexibility and ease. They could feel liberation in their shoulders, their neck, and they might even resolve their chronic back pain. However, their comfort and pleasure is only the beginning. What are they more capable to do now? What curiosity and desire awakens and inspires them to create and give?! This is where the beauty and excitement begins...

Now my work as a Feldenkrais® Practitioner and teacher, and Jeremy Krauss Approach (JKA) Practitioner, I consider it a further extension - expression - of my artistic road.

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The Feldenkrais Method®

The Feldenkrais Method® is an educational method helping people learn to sense themselves more clearly to discover more intelligent and efficient ways of moving that increase their mobility and flexibility. It is certainly helpful for injury prevention and recovery, but it's true spirit is to help people continuously improve and essentially realise more of their human potential to take action in life.

Photo credit
© International Feldenkrais® Federation Archive, Bob Knighton

ATM® (Awareness Through Movement®) Lessons

An ATM® is a movement lesson held in a group setting. It offers the environment for people to slow down and gently rework the way they organise ourselves to move. The lessons are structured explorations, and everyone does only as much as they wish to at their own pace.

In the process, people learn to reduce their effort to help their brain engage their musculature differently for more efficient movement patterns, which gives them a renewed sense of balance and ease when returning to their usual activities: walking, sitting, talking, standing, moving our arms, seeing around us, etc..

In the ATM® lessons, we might explore all the possible movements of the pelvis, experience the gliding of the shoulder blades over the ribs, softening of the ribs for better turning of the head, fuller breathing of the chest cavity and abdomen for better stability over our feet, etc.

The majority of the lessons are done on the floor to relieve the nervous system of the work to maintain upright, so it can be calmer to sense differences in effort. This process of learning broadens their repertoire of movements and enhance their movement intelligence. Feldenkrais would be the opposite of the no-pain-no-gain mentality.

Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais

Founder of the Feldenkrais Method®

Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais was born May 6th, 1904, in a city called Slavuta, in what is present-day Ukraine. He left his family to move to Palestine in his early teens. He was an active man and it was here that he began learning jujitsu and even trained people in unarmed combat, as they were not allowed to carry weapons in this time.

In the 1930s, Feldenkrais moved to France to study, and after earning degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering there, he went on to obtain his Doctor of Science in Physics from the Sorbonne in Paris. During this time he worked with Nobel Laureate Nicholas Joliot-Curie in his laboratory. It was in Paris where Moshé met Professor Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo. Apparently in their first meeting Feldenkrais decided to test his martial arts skills against Professor Kano's. After being thrown down so effortlessly by this slight professor over and over again, Feldenkrais was convinced that he had to study with the professor. Feldenkrais became one of the first Europeans to earn a black belt, and also helped establish judo in Europe.

In the 1940s Feldenkrais moved to Britain to avoid the incoming Nazis and worked for the British Admiralty to research anti-submarine weaponry. He had suffered a serious knee-injury as a young man, and it worsened during this time. After surgeons predicted only a fifty-percent chance of him regaining use of his knee after surgery, he refused those odds and began immersing himself in a whole range of subjects, such as physiology, anatomy, etc. to understand the problem with his knee. This led to the discoveries that are the foundations to his own method.

*(An anecdote from our training recounts how Feldenkrais was asked about how he dealt with problems of the neck, back, knees, feet, etc. His answer was that he didn't deal with body parts - he always worked with the person.)

Feldenkrais trained thirteen students when he moved back to Tel Aviv and was presenting his method throughout North America and Europe. He was invited to the Esalen Institute in California in 1972 to teach ATM® lessons, as part of the Human Potential Movement, and in 1978, famed English theatre and film director, Peter Brook, invited Feldenkrais to work with his touring theatre troupe. These are just a few of Feldenkrais' many teaching engagements.

After the San Francisco training, and halfway through the subsequent training in Amherst, Moshé fell ill and passed away July 1st, 1984.

Photo of Dr. Feldenkrais by: Irene Sieben