Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery

Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery, Second Edition, expands on the classic text and reference written by Eric Franklin, an internationally renowned teacher, dancer, and choreographer who has been sharing his imagery techniques for 25 years.

In this new edition, Franklin shows you how to use imagery, touch, and movement exercises to improve your coordination and alignment. These exercises will also help you relieve tension, enhance the health of your spine and back, and prevent back injury.

This expanded new edition includes

• more than 600 imagery exercises along with nearly 500 illustrations to help you visualize the exercises and use them in various contexts;

• audio files for dynamic imagery exercises set to music and posted online to the book’s product page; and

• updated chapters throughout the book, including new material on integrated dynamic alignment exercises and dynamic alignment and imagery.

This book will help you discover your natural flexibility and quickly increase your power to move. You’ll learn elements of body design. You’ll explore how to use imagery to improve your confidence, and you’ll discover imagery conditioning programs that will lead you toward better alignment, safer movement, increased fitness, and greater joy. Further, you’ll examine how to apply this understanding to your discipline or training to improve your performance.

Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery, Second Edition, will help you experience the biomechanical and anatomical principles that are crucial to dancers, other performing artists, yoga and Pilates teachers and practitioners, and athletes. The techniques and exercises presented in the book will guide you in improving your posture—and they will positively affect your thoughts and attitude about yourself and others and help you feel and move better both mentally and physically.

Eric Franklin is director and founder of the Franklin Institute in Uster, Switzerland. He has more than 35 years' experience as a dancer and choreographer, and he has shared imagery techniques in his teaching since 1986.

Franklin has taught extensively throughout the United States and Europe at the Julliard School in New York, the Royal Ballet School in London, the Danish Ballet in Copenhagen, the Dance Academy of Rome, and the Institute for Psychomotor Therapy in Zurich; he was also a guest lecturer at the University of Vienna. He has provided training to Olympic and world-champion athletes and professional dance troupes such as Cirque du Soleil and the Forum de Dance in Monte Carlo. Franklin earned a BFA from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and a BS from the University of Zurich. He has been on the faculty of the American Dance Festival since 1991.

Franklin is coauthor of the bestselling book Breakdance, which received a New York City Public Library Prize in 1984, and author of 100 Ideen für Beweglichkeit and Dance Imagery for Technique and Performance (both books about imagery in dance and movement). He is a member of the International Association of Dance Medicine and Science.

Franklin lives near Zurich, Switzerland.