“This work doesn’t change you radically; it makes you more completely and efficiently yourself.”
— attributed to F.M. Alexander by Robertson Davies (theater critic), via Lulie Westfeldt (teacher of the Alexander Technique)
* EMBODIED INTEGRATION FOR ACTORS
My teaching practice is particularly focused on working with actors and students of acting, using somatic practices based on the Alexander Technique as a set of first principles.
We start with awareness of the neck and skull.
This always gets an eyebrow at cocktail parties (“…what does that even mean?”).
And we probably don’t have to start with the neck and head; we could start with the knee; or the pelvis, as other modalities do. But what with the twelve cranial nerves passing through a joint right between the skull and the top of the spine, it’s a very good place to start. It’s global: what’s happening there is reflected elsewhere in the body/self.
It’s that act of awareness — light, but profound — that we’re concerned with. Connecting with the self via the body. We’re already in new territory.
We might be in a room together, or on zoom; we might be having a private lesson, or with a group. You’d be wearing comfortable clothing you can move in. We might start by sitting or standing or walking, but if you’re an actor, we also might go right to starting with text. Or playing the piano, if you’re a piano player. Or picking up a baby if that’s what you do all day. Or typing.
I might start by inviting you to imagine the muscles in your neck releasing, so that your head has the freedom to move, so your body can come along with it, while you’re doing what you’re doing. I might ask for permission to touch your neck; or ask that you place your own hands on your own neck; or not, maybe I’ll suggest that you just imagine it. I will probably ask you to notice what you sense about yourself while you think those thoughts. I’ll be asking you to do a lot of noticing, and reporting on it.
You might not know what the result is “supposed” to be; and I might ask you to try some of these ideas on without understanding them intellectually. Above all, this technique is experiential. The one thing I know for sure: everyone can do it, and the scope is wide enough for anybody to practice it. As for the results, we can’t chase them; but they’ve been known to include release of chronic tension, remission of chronic aches and pains, a sense of calm centeredness, a sense of alertness, a feeling of spaciousness, a feeling of grounded-ness. Better balance. A more resonant voice. Coordination of the mind, body and emotions. All of these are possible, all of them essential, yet your own response to the work may include all or none of these descriptions. The field is open.
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“I learned that not everything which is clearly understood may be clearly expressed — not, that is to say, in words. I have had several Alexander teachers and I have never had one yet who could explain the work to me adequately…and I doubt if any two people feel it quite alike because that which is perceived is perceived in the mode of the perceiver….”
—Robertson Davies
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If there is one critique I could level at our culture, it is this: there is a tendency to perceive our body, mind and emotions as separate realms. We [meaning Westerners] might perceive that these realms are unified (they are); but then we act as if they function separately. In order to get through the day, we act in favor of the tasks that need to be completed, and disconnect from the needs of the body. We push away emotions that threaten to knock us off the time-table. We ignore pain, or numb it — not realizing that we are ignoring real wisdom available to us from our body and our emotions. We ignore pain in order to get onstage, we push through a headache in order to meet a deadline, we postpone grief in order to take a child to a playdate — there is always a goal that seems more important than the process of how we get there.
But the body will scream if you ignore its truth for too long, if you treat it like it’s a mere shed for your brain, rather than the palace itself.
What could be more important than wholeness? (Real question.) At some point, the world will let us know when we’ve ignored too much. The world is letting us know, right now, in myriad ways: we have ignored whole swathes of vulnerable population, whole forests, our health. Collectively.
(And: there are times in a person’s life when the information coming from the body is overwhelming. During trauma, sensory and emotional stimulation is from the outside world is too overwhelming for a person to stay present. I can think of lots of examples where shut-down is adaptive. But we can’t stay split indefinitely, or decide that the body and emotions are merely inconvenient to the rest — we say we “live in our head” as if that’s an actual option.)
Or sometimes we continue to react to the (metaphorical) monster in the closet long after it has (not metaphorically) disappeared. When the immediate trauma is over, we need a pathway to re-integrate our body-mind-self.
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We humans have all come through our own personal histories with a self that reflects everywhere we’ve been, and where we think we are going. As a teacher, the last thing I want to do is “fix” my students or even “improve them.” Rather: I’m engaged with the process of coordinating my own specific human design with my perception of myself and of the world around me — and encouraging my students to join me on their own version of that journey. The tools I use come from a lifetime’s worth of information pulled from various sources: my experiences as a performer, for sure, but also as a teacher of movement for 20 years, including a very somatic version of Pilates and most recently, the work of F. M. Alexander.
He was a problematic guru, an actor — a declaimer of Shakespearean blank verse in large auditoriums in Australia. Edwardian in aesthetic, with terrible-if-temporally-typical politics, and a large appetite for self-aggrandizement. When I think back through my career, most of the gurus my teachers studied with — or their teachers — were this way too; the pedagogical lineages lead back to George Balanchine, Constantin Stanislavsky, David Mamet, Joseph Pilates. F.M. Alexander. All men, mostly European immigrants, all functionally white and privileged. All gathered to them eager young acolytes, many of them female, most of them young. If I boil away the misogyny and racism, what’s is it I’m teaching?
Embodiment. Coordination. Somatics, the art of self-perception. Breathing. Integration. Non-judgemental observation, as a means to increased awareness and self-expression. We might even call that kindness to the self. My teacher Cathy Madden calls this “coordinating with your particular human design.” In my journey as an actor (and as a human), I haven’t found a more powerful set of tools.
Frequently Asked Questions:
What is it?
The Alexander Technique is a method of understanding and developing one's own movement patterns, and by declension, one's whole self.
The focus is on becoming attuned to one's entire "psycho-physical" functioning, which F.M. Alexander referred to as a person's "use." This can also include habits of mind and emotion as well, although we begin by looking at the relationship between the skull and the spine.
Studying the Alexander Technique can result in greater presence, breath capacity and vocal function; diminished chronic pain, improved coordination & balance, a better relationship to gravity, increased proprioception & spatial awareness; and a finely tuned sense of the learning process in any human endeavor.
I am also an acting teacher and coach, working privately with actors on scene work and auditions. My MFA in acting is from the University of Washington (Professional Actor Training Program), and I am a member of the National Alliance of Acting Teachers. See below for a mini-CV.
What happens in a session?
Students wear loose clothing that permit movement. A session usually includes a "turn" in a chair during which a teacher will use light touch and verbal directions to guide the student's patterns.
Part of the session may occur with the student lying on a table. Additionally, if the student would like to integrate the Alexander Technique directly to an activity, part of a session might be spent working with some spoken text, or playing an instrument, or typing at a computer, or simply walking.
Who does it?
Well, anyone can do it. Often, actors and musicians do it, having encountered it in training programs, since it is so effective at developing a performer's sensitivity and awareness of their learning processes and habits. Actors in particular use it for the freeing impact it has on breath and voice, for the ease and expressivity of movement that come with the practice, for the imaginative release as well as the general increase in emotional permeability and presence onstage.
The other group of people most commonly pulled to this work are people with chronic physical pain.
For these two populations particularly, the stakes are high enough that they are willing to attend deeply to themselves, often in opposition to cues from the mainstream culture. However, all kinds of civilians have found great relief and improved quality-of-life by studying with an Alexander teacher. Everyone -- not just those who are injured, or professional performers -- can benefit from this work. Because of the emphasis on finding freedom and coordination within the self, it can be a powerful tool no matter what a person does all day.
Longer answer: Often, we have unconscious patterns we have developed over the course of a lifetime that aren't optimal, and inadvertently those patterns cause chronic issues (e.g. back pain, shoulder pain, etc.). But this work is not limited to the physical realm, nor are most of these patterns conscious. For example, in the course of working on, say, picking up a heavy object, we may discover the unconscious habit of being hard on oneself, which is often culturally supported — or we may not discover the the cause itself. Regardless, we can gently re-teach a more balanced, functional way of encountering the world and its challenges. Or maybe we discover something more corporeal-seeming, for example that part of your back is over-working with regard to the rest of you. We are seeking balance, coordination, efficiency, flow. Unlike physical therapy or other more familiar modalities, the Alexander Technique approaches injury holistically, with the understanding that your shoulder pain (for example) may originate somewhere besides your shoulder. We look at the whole person, gradually re-integrating into the whole self the parts that may have lost their rhythm.
Why do you do it?
As an acting student, I found that the Alexander Technique freed me from a nervous-system storm I experienced every time I had to audition. In general, acting felt freer and more relaxed, it improved my voice, I became both more expressive, simpler, more self-aware and less self-conscious in my work — and in my life. It gave me a set of tools that improved my capacity for attending to the field of stimulus around me.
It has also transformed my singing.
And it made my body feel better. From a lifetime of dancing, I had some patterns that were based on aesthetics rather than anatomy, and these had become painful over time. My Alexander Technique teachers helped me unwind those old chronic injuries and they are virtually gone.
Who was F. M. Alexander?
The short answer is that he was an actor with vocal trouble.
Born in Tasmania in 1869, he spent most of his life trying to hide his humble Australian roots, attempting to appear like an Edwardian English gentleman. In his twenties, he had started to earn a living in Melbourne, performing Shakespeare's great speeches in large concert halls (un-amplified), when he began to lose his voice. After a battery of doctors and specialists failed to "cure" him, he began the process of studying himself in a three-way mirror, only to discover that he had a habit of sucking in air and tightening his neck before he spoke -- every time. Over time, as he worked to unwind his habit, his voice recovered. This process was the beginning of what we now call the Alexander Technique. Today, it ranges in scope well beyond vocal work, from highly technical patterns in the body, to more subtle psychological/emotional shifts in a person's learning process.
Alexander was a notably terrible writer. In his lifetime he struggled to get the medical community to understand and scientifically support his work. His writing betrays a patriarchal, top-down style of pedagogy that is misaligned with the actual values he was teaching. And his politics, as we look at them through the lens of 2020, were simply terrible. (They were always terrible, but the contemporary movement towards racial and social justice have perhaps helped many of us who teach his work to examine him with clearer vision and better standards than he had.) Most of us who teach his work had, as students, profound experiences that were about deepened sensory, physical and emotional awareness before we ever touched his writing. At heart, it is experiential work on the self. I think now is the perfect time to connect the work on the self out into the broader community. We are now working and teaching several generations removed from the man himself. I recognize that what I teach has more to do with my own teachers and mentors: Ann Rodiger, Cathy Madden and Jed Diamond. I (and most of this field of teachers) are continually engaged in a process of examining my own teaching to find and nurture in the work the most inclusive, universal aspects — and leave behind the able-ist, racist framing of the founder, leaving the faulty hero worship to generations past.
Who are you?
I'm a professional actor with an MFA from the University of Washington.
Before getting certified to teach (with Ann Rodiger at the Balance Arts Center, 2016; 1600-hour AmSAT certification), I studied the Alexander Technique with Cathy Madden as part of my graduate acting training at UW. Prior to that, I studied Alexander with Jed Diamond at the Actors Center. I understand intimately how this work supports actors.
I'm also a singer with a long background in classical technique, as well as more contemporary musical theater. The Alexander Technique has given me improved facility to incorporate the adjustments my voice teachers give me, to integrate everything with my acting choices. My understanding of the anatomy of singing has given me a great set of tools for working with singers.
As an injured 16-year-old dancer, I began studying the Pilates method while my right foot healed. When it did, I discovered that I was stronger than I had been before the injury. I was certified to teach Pilates in 1999 by the Pilates Center in Boulder, Colorado by Amy Alpers and Rachel Siegel. Over the next 15 years, I taught in studios all over New York City, including at the Hospital for Special Surgery, TruePilates in Tribeca, Equinox, Bridge Pilates and the Pilates Garage, as well as privately in Southampton, Barbados, Salzburg, London, Seattle and New Orleans.
Areas of specialization include (but are not limited to):
helping actors find greater expression and freedom in their work
navigating the physical effects of the crises of performance, character work and integrating direction
coaching auditions of any kind
acting coaching specifically for singers
working with non-actors to find greater ease, strength, balance and amplitude in their general daily experience
addressing somatic patterns in quotidian life (e.g. sitting or standing at a desk) to prevent work-related injuries
teaching Pilates-based movement to dancers (and civilians) using the Alexander Technique as a set of first principles
Mini CV:
upcoming winter 2022: January Term at Middlebury College: “Embodying Choice for the Actor”
Fuller Theological Seminary, Houston TX, 2020 — semester-long guest teaching an Alexander technique module within a course for preachers, Embodying the Word (on zoom)
American Academy of Dramatic Art, NYC, 2017 - present (Alexander technique for actors, group class in person and on zoom)
Montclair State University Department of Theatre and Dance 2013-14 (Acting)
Tulane University Department of Theater and Dance -- visiting Assistant Professor, 2010-11, current guest (Acting and Alexander)
University of Washington School of Drama (Acting)
teaching assistant to Ann Rodiger in the Balance Arts Center Teacher Training Program 2017-19 (AmSAT)
affiliated with AT Motion, Belinda Mello, 2018-2020
Areas of expertise:
MFA -- Professional Actor Training Program, University of Washington, 2003
AmSAT Certificate, 2016 -- certified teacher of the Alexander Technique, Balance Arts Center
Trained singer: Mannes College of Music, Indiana University, University of Washington. Past teachers include Ray Fellman, Julian Patrick, Vicki Clark, Ellen Shade, Bruce Kolb, Marc Schnaible, Aaron Hagan, Paul Lincoln and (currently) Virginia Grasso
Trained dancer for twenty years, Joffrey Ballet School, David Howard, Maggie Black, Simon Dow, Zvi Gotheiner, Paul Taylor school.
Pilates instructor for 15 years -- resume available, certified in 1999 by Rachel Taylor Siegel and Amy Taylor Alpers at the Pilates Center in Boulder, CO