Event Details

About Bob Lada and Rachelle Tsachor

Bob Lada

Bob Lada is a Certified Teacher of the Alexander Technique having received his certificates from Tommy Thompson and from Alexander Technique International. Bob is a professor at Berklee College of Music and a member of the Effortless Mastery Institute there. He teaches at the Boston Conservatory, the Alexander Technique Center of Cambridge, Chesapeake Bay Alexander Studies as well as in private practice in Cambridge, MA. He has taught at American Repertory Theater and Harvard Extension School, conducted workshops throughout the USA, Asia, and Europe and is a charter member of Alexander Technique International. Bob has also completed Actors Secret training with Betsy Polatin which he continues to study. This training combines Alexander Technique with the trauma work of Peter Levine and the breath work of Carl Stough. Bob’s primary background is in athletics and analytics and he looks at the Technique as a tremendous aid in getting out of one’s way in performance situations so that creativity and skill can come through. His perspective on AT is one of transformation as the path to more fully participating in the present.

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Rachelle Tsachor

Rachelle Palnick Tsachor is Associate Professor of Movement at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is certified in Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM), Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis (CMA), Somatic Movement Therapy (RSMT-ISMETA) and is an ATI teacher of the Alexander Technique. 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 brains, emotions, health, and learning. She is co-author of a series of studies: “Emotion Regulation Through Movement” and “How Do We Recognize Emotion From Movement?” (Frontiers in Psychology), “A Somatic Movement Approach to Fostering Emotional Resiliency” (Frontiers in Neuroscience), and the chapter on movement in “Integrative Rehabilitation Practice – The Foundations of Whole-Person Care for Health Professionals”. At UIC, Tsachor’s artistic contributions as movement specialist serve to support kinesthetic empathy for diverse peoples and cultures through embodied understanding. She is co-PI in NSF-Funded initiatives to bring expressive movement and drama methods into Chicago Public Schools that primarily educate students of color, supporting learning in embodied ways. Resisting the colonizing pedagogy of the mind–body divide, this work aims to create pedagogical spaces and places in classes to sustain equitable opportunities for meaning-making through whole-person engagement.

Her work with trauma emerges from the Center for Mind-Body Medicine’s mind/body skills group approach (CMBM): Tsachor is a supervisor for the CMBM, taught the model in the Global Health Studies program at the University of Iowa, The University of Haifa and Wingate College in Israel. She is currently doing what she can to share this approach with therapists working with people displaced by the war in Ukraine.

rllalex@comcast.net

See also: Bob Lada and Rachelle Tsachor – Presenter Detail Page