Carol Ann Clouston

Carol Ann Clouston has been teaching voice and speech at the American University in Cairo for 16 years: 8 in the Theater Dept. and 8 at the Adham Center for TV Journalism. She was born and raised in Newfoundland, Canada, graduated in 1967 from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, with a B. Mus. in Opera and two years later obtained a Diploma in Pedagogy, also from UBC. She went on to a distinguished career as a singer-actress, playing many lead roles both on stage and Canadian TV, and, in 1971 won a "Best Actress" award for her portrayal of “Marie” in Michael Cook’s “Color the Flesh the Color of Dust”. Cairo audiences have known her as the featured soprano soloist with the Cairo Choral Society, from its inception in 1982 until 1990, when she retired from performing. In 1991 she was certified by the Feldenkrais Guild of North America as a Feldenkrais Practitioner®. She also teaches private voice /singing lessons. Ms. Clouston explains how the Feldenkrais Method has become the basis of all her teaching:

“I divide my 30 year teaching career into BF and AF –Before and After Feldenkrais® ! During the B.F. years my voice and acting students were quite successful, however I always had a strong sense of some essential missing ingredient as regards posture and breathing, so I was always on the lookout for better approaches. Fortunately, for both myself and my students, in 1985 I had my first taste of the Feldenkrais Method® when I attended a conference at NYU, entitled, “Mind, Body and the Performing Arts”. I found not only that ‘missing ingredient’ but a whole new career as a Feldenkrais Practitioner® -not to mention the fact that 35 years of scoliosis back pain disappeared in the first 3 weeks of my training, and has never come back!

As a Feldenkrais Practitioner®, I no longer teach voice; I teach people! Whether a person comes to me with vocal problems, migraine, back pain, fibromyalga, a particular addiction, or simply wanting to improve their golf swing, or whatever the perceived problem is, I simply see people with diffuculties through the prism of the multi-layered Feldenkrais® Training.

The Feldenkrais® Method is an advanced educational approach to well-being (as opposed to a therapeutic one) that goes to the root source of most human difficulties. The particular way a person ‘organizes themselves’ (i.e. their whole posture) to sit, stand, walk, talk, play the violin, speak or sing in public and so on, reflects the person’s entire inner state: body/mind/emotions, or, better said, reflects the person’s self image. We act according to our self image and, as most people’s self image ‘is not what it might be’, we tend to acquire subtle but damaging physical, emotional and mental habits of functioning. Over the years these habits begin to exist on a psychomotor level and become deeply ingrained as ‘who we are’.

As a Feldenkrais Practitioner®, I endeavor to create conditions wherein a person’s ‘organization’ is gently disturbed in such a way that they themselves can experience -sensorily, the various details of how they’re inadvertently creating obstacles, or even pain, by the way they ‘organize themselves’ to carry out their intentions. In that very process new organizations emerge spontaneously, an expanded self image begins to take shape, posture and breathing improve, self confidence is enhanced and more pleasure and satisfaction are experienced, -or, one might say, become habitual!”

Carol Ann conducts regular workshops about Feldenkrais®, awareness through movement.