Alexander Technique and Posture
An Alexander Technique teacher helps you to identify and lose the bad habits you have built up over a lifetime of stress and learn to move more freely. The Alexander Technique can also help you if: * You suffer from repetitive strain injury or carpal tunnel syndrome. * You have a backache or stiff neck and shoulders. * You become uncomfortable when sitting at your computer for long periods of time * You are a singer, musician, actor, dancer or athlete and feel you are not performing at your full potential. Have you already had Alexander Lessons? How was it for YOU? F.M. Alexander (1869-1955), an actor who began his career as a Shakespearean orator, developed chronic laryngitis while performing. Determined to restore the full use of his voice, he carefully watched himself while speaking, and observed that undue muscular tension accounted for his vocal problem. He sought a way to eliminate that restriction. Over time, he discovered and articulated a principle that profoundly influences health and well-being: when neck tension is reduced, the head no longer compresses the spine and the spine is free to lengthen. From work on himself and others, he evolved a hands-on teaching method that encourages all the body's processes to work more efficiently - as an integrated, dynamic whole.(From the 1996 North American Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique Directory) Alexander devised a teaching method, the Alexander Technique. Even the most glaring bad habits cannot be stopped until we recognise them for what they are. To do that requires an objective view of ourselves, which cannot be provided by our existing kinaesthetic sense. What we feel ourselves doing will almost certainly not be what we are doing. A teacher (or a mirror, or video) provides this objective view, which enables us to learn to stop doing what is harmful, while establishing a more reliable kinaesthetic sense in order not to revert to type afterwards. This video will hopefully show you how the alexander technique and posture fit together:
Alexander Technique and the musician Here are some accounts of musicians who have had problems in their musical lives: Some fingers (no doubt because of too much writing and playing in earlier years) have become quite weak, so that I can hardly use them. - from the 1839 biographical notes of Robert Schumann, pianist and composer In 1988, the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians surveyed orchestral musicians and found from the 2,212 respondents that 76 percent had a significant medical problem that affected their ability to play.
The Alexander Technique has a long history of helping instrumentalists and singers to perform with less stress and likelihood of injury. Musicians do some of the most complex and demanding physical movements of any profession. In recent years, the term Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) has come into popular use, but musicians have always had to face the challenge of performing the same complex muscular actions over and over again. By helping musicians improve the quality of the physical movements involved in playing an instrument or singing, the Alexander Technique and posture changes help improve the quality of the music itself. A violinist's stiff shoulders and arms will get in the way of a pleasing sound; a singer's tight neck or jaw will cause the voice to become less resonant. By helping musicians release undue tension in their bodies, the Alexander Technique makes possible a performance which is more fluid and lively, less tense and rigid. Over the years, a number of prominent musicians have publicly endorsed the Alexander Technique: Yehudi Menuhin, Paul McCartney, Sting, Julian Bream, James Galway and the conductor Sir Adrian Boult, to name but a few. The Technique is taught at the Juilliard School of Performing Arts in New York, The Royal College of Music in London, The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and at many other schools of music, universities and colleges.
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