Open Journal Montreal

Following these first few notes on Alexander, Open Source and other techniques for interaction, and then this article contributed by Alexander teacher, Lawrence Smith, I thought it might be interesting to ask him a few questions about how he came to this relatively unknown practice. Secretly, I’d just like to get him telling stories…

I was first exposed to the Alexander Technique in 1978, at a summer dance workshop. I had been acting professionally for a couple of years, had just completed a year-long contract with a small repertory company, and had decided that I needed to study movement to improve my acting. Actually, I was convinced that I could learn to control and choreograph every onstage movement and gesture. I had been exposed to the work of Etienne Decroux (notorious for having been the teacher of Marcel Marceau – but you can’t blame the teacher for everything), and to the work of Francois Delsarte (through an acting teacher and through Ted Shawn’s book “Every Little Movement”).

I enrolled in a university dance department to take daily ballet, modern dance and corporal mime classes. The Alexander Technique is often presented to actors and dancers as part of their training. I took group classes with Marjorie Barstow, who trained with Alexander in the 1930’s. At the same time, I had some private lessons with a teacher from England, Howell Jones, the companion of the theatre director and teacher James Roose-Evans, who was teaching at the summer workshop. The group workshop was pretty worthless, although I will not deny that Marjorie had excellent hands. But she was a poor teacher, and presented Alexander’s work in a manner that he would never have endorsed. The A.T. is never directly about how you do things, but is more properly concerned with the muscular condition that is used to support action. So her approach in which large student groups work on activities particular to each individual, consistently missed the mark. In the twenty-five years following my work with Marj, I have yet to encounter someone trained in this manner who has a profound understanding of the Alexander Technique.

If you have a problem with your car that is evident when the car is parked — for example, misalignment in the chassis — the most productive solution to your problem will not be to learn to drive the car in an idiosyncratic manner to correct the car’s tendency to pull to the right. It is a possibility, but a much better one would be to change the underlying condition of the machine. (Actually, the comparison would be more apt if we were to speak of the car’s computer being badly programmed.) At least in the beginning, the Alexander Technique is mostly about discovering how to do nothing – that is, it has little to do with trying to do things with less effort, everything to do with removing acquired postural habits that constantly create poor use. Alexander wrote very clearly about this in “The Use of the Self”, when he stated that he realized that, even after he discovered how to free his neck, etc., he was unable, for quite some time, to sustain this new use in movement. He opted instead to do nothing, but to continue projecting directions until he was able to sustain them when confronted with the stimulus to do something. Good luck doing this in a large group in which you are told to walk around and notice how you are walking, and in which the essential hands-on guidance is practically non-existent.

So I took a couple of workshops, had a couple of private sessions (really only table work, and thus not very helpful in a teaching sense), and went on with obsessively positioning myself to meet the requirements of my dance and mime work.

It was not until several years later, after I had spent several years performing work based on Decroux technique, that I returned to the Alexander Technique. By this point, I had torn both patellar tendons, had chronic bursitis in both knees and shoulders, arthritis in my hands and neck, chronic tendonitis in both wrists, and other problems with my knees that prevented me from running (this problem actually pre-dated my dance study). Still, these problems were not really what led me to try real study of the Alexander Technique. I was motivated to try to change what I viewed as problems with my personality which, I felt, led to what I called a lack of generosity in my performing. Watching myself in film and video, I always saw a kind of implosive muscularity, and the absence of outgoing movement and expression. I could go on about this, but I will restrain myself. It will suffice to say that I thought that I needed to change habits associated with my personality in a profound way. My girlfriend at the time (now my wife) and some of her friends were going to an Alexander training school in New York City to get cheap work from trainees. They encouraged me to go. After reading Frank Pierce Jones’ book, Body Awareness in Action, I got very interested, and began having lessons. I was in transition at this time, having just quit the company with which I had been working for over 3 years. I had just finished a draining period during which I had written and directed a show that went well but left me feeling that I could have done much better. I felt certain that my work in mime had led me in a wrong direction, and that all I had accomplished was to build upon myself a carapace of impressive movements which were, ultimately, unexpressive. Decorative, but not communicative.

The Alexander work hooked me in immediately. Once guided out of my contractive patterns, I felt remarkably different. Actually, very stoned. I walked out of some early sessions thinking I was having acid flashbacks. I jumped into a teacher-training program almost immediately. Ordinarily, one is required to have quite a number of lessons before one is permitted to enter a training. In this school, my teacher required that everyone audit for 14 weeks before actually beginning the training. This meant that, every week-day morning for 3 hours, I was in the class and getting worked on by students and teachers alike – it was not very different from the beginning weeks in any training course, I think, except that it didn’t count towards completion of the 4 year program. After the auditing period, I was accepted into the training class, which met 44 weeks a year, for 3 hours per day, from 6:30 am until 9:30am. It was a very good group, and we learned a lot from each other. The quality of constant feedback between students was very impressive, and was, I think, somewhat unique to that school.

I have really gone far afield, haven’t I? Time for my medication. What was your next question? Oh, what other ideas and experiences did it resonate with? I studied tai-chi chuan for several years, and I did a kind of meditation that was similar to shikan-taza (spelling?) in Zen. This was just sitting. No mantra, no breath counting, just sitting and letting go of anything that popped up. Of course posture is all-important in this kind of meditation, because poor posture is a kind of “doing”, whereas good posture is due to unimpeded reflexes – it is non-doing. Like in some mediation practices, the Alexander Technique is a process of learning to inhibit immediate reactions, and therefore to be more present and conscious throughout all activities.

What else? I found that the Alexandrian idea of outward release linked with the idea of egolessness contained in some philosophies. It seemed to me that contracting myself together was being more “I”, while releasing outward felt more like being part of the matter swarming around and within. Do you know those new-agey Ken Wilbur books like “No Boundary”? Well, the Alexander experience made me feel like I was giving up the artificially imposed boundaries that I placed between “I” and “it”.

Also, when I was dong meditation, I would have these very strong surges and releases of energy up my spine. They would cause extremely rapid breathing, bright lights in my internal vision, spastic movement of my arms and legs. They felt great – orgasmic, even. Every time I sat down to meditate they would start. They transformed over time, from intense lower sensations to intense higher sensations, but they would always come. I thought, at first, that I was pretty cool. I read about Kundalini and figured I was having some build up towards enlightenment. But after a couple of years of this stuff, I found I was the same old fuck-up, with no noticeable improvement in any realm – at least none that I could identify. And I started to develop terrible insomnia (I later discovered that the insomnia was caused by food sensitivities, not by meditation). So I put the meditation aside. But — here’s the point of this seeming digression – when I started to study Alexander Technique, the shaking and automatic breath-of-fire restarted. I would just free my neck, and it would all start up. You must understand that it feels very good, so, although it was easy to stop, I wasn’t tempted to block it.

One day, it started under one of my teacher’s hands, and she pointed out that I was tightening up, and asked me to direct and not to harden against the flow that I felt. When I did this, there was a huge rush of energy through my head, and I could not stand. I sat down and began weeping and shaking uncontrollably. I lay on a table and my legs bounced around wildly. No one paid much attention (I think they didn’t, anyway) to what must have looked like a scene from The Exorcist. I figured that it wasn’t all that unusual, but I have never since seen anything quite like it. The opening in my neck and shoulders was so great and sudden, that I could not wear any of my shirt or jackets the following day. The sleeves where too short, and the chests were too narrow. I guess that during all those years of meditation, I must have been generating sensation by tightening against the movement of energy. Now, if I were to sit and meditate (when I work quietly on myself in the Alexander way, it is not unlike meditation), I would feel the same flow beginning, but it never becomes spastic or dramatic if I remain open and unfixed. It just flows pleasantly upwards and out along my limbs. It seems quite normal, and not like some dramatic Kundalini kria. (There is a lot more to this story, but it is probably of no interest to anyone, unless they have or are going through similar stuff).

tags:   

[ originally posted on Friday, September 16th, 2005 at 6:51 pm and is filed under Communication, Everything, Open Source. ]