The Art of Presence in Life and Performance

(These notes formed the basis of a lecture given at the Music Department of the University of Rio de Janeiro, September 1997. Some of the material used can also be found in the article "The Alexander Technique and Musicians".)

Introduction

Good evening ladies and gentleman. I would like to start this lecture by saying that it is an honour and a pleasure to speak at the Music Department of the University of Rio de Janeiro, and I would like to thank the Brazilian Association of Alexander Teachers for the invitation.

My name is John Hunter and I am a teacher of the Alexander Technique. I first discovered Alexander's work in the early 1970's and began having lessons in 1978. In 1981 I began the formal three year training course in London, where I live, and started to teach in 1984. One of my fellow students at that time, Ms. Lois Philips, was also a professor of Piano at the Royal Academy of Music. Seeing the relevance of Alexander's work to musicians, especially young musicians, she persuaded the Academy to begin an experimental programme of Alexander Technique lessons for the students there. I was fortunate enough to be one of a group of newly qualified and enthusiastic teachers involved in the project. Twelve years later, the Alexander Technique is very much an integral part of the Academy's programme, and many young musicians from Great Britain and other countries choose to study there for that reason. We have now hosted two conferences for teachers of the Alexander Technique in Music Colleges.

What, then, is this 'Technique' so valued by musicians and other performing artists, and who was Alexander, the man who discovered it all? I would like to start to answer that question by talking about the man and his life.

The Man and His Life

Frederick Matthias Alexander was born in 1869 in Wynyard, Tasmania. He was a sickly child, not expected to live. It was only because his mother did not give up on him that he survived. In his youth he learned about agriculture and animals, and developed a passion for horses which stayed with him throughout his life. Financial pressures made him leave his rural background and find work in a mine. He amused himself in his spare time by teaching himself to play the violin and taking part in amateur dramatic performances. He found he had a particular talent for drama and decided to try to make this his career. He saved some money and moved to Melbourne where he could develop his talent. He began to develop a particular style of performance, giving dramatic recitals of poems and extracts from great works, in particular Shakespeare, and had considerable success.

However, recurrent problems with respiration, loss of his voice and lowered vitality meant that he had to have long periods of rest. This problem threatened to ruin his career as a reciter. He sought help from doctors and voice teachers, studied all the various methods available at that time - old and new - but nothing seemed to help. Most people would have found a new career, but Alexander was an extraordinary individual. He decided that if no one could tell him what was wrong he would have to find out for himself. He then began his voyage of discovery into human functioning which was eventually to lead to what is now known as the Alexander Technique.

Over a period of some ten years he continued to refine and develop his method, gradually integrating it with his work in the theatre. There were many people who were eager to learn his method - originally focusing on respiration and voice production, and his reputation soon spread. His 'sales' technique was to travel with a small troupe of actors and give performances in different places in Australia and New Zealand. He would then advertise lessons in elocution and breathing in the local paper. Impressed by his voice production, he soon filled all his teaching hours.

It became obvious, however, that what he had discovered was more than just another method of voice production. His pupils reported an improvement in general health and well-being, and many Doctors began to send him patients. One very famous doctor in Sydney, Stewart McKay, began to take an interest in Alexander's work and told him: 'If your teaching is sound, I'll make you; but if it's not, I'll break you.' Alexander accepted the challenge and began to give McKay lessons. The Doctor was so impressed by what Alexander could do for him and for other people he sent to him that he persuaded Alexander to go to London. He argued that Alexander's discovery was important for humanity, and that if he stayed in Australia (at that time very isolated from the western world) his discovery would die with him. Alexander accepted this advice and in 1904 he moved to London.

The medical profession in London proved to be very unresponsive to Alexander's work, but the acting profession took to it instantly. In those early years Alexander would travel around the centre of London from theatre to theatre, giving famous actors and actresses lessons before they went on stage. He became quite the fashion in London Society .

When the war started in 1914, he moved to the United States of America and became equally successful there. When he returned to live in England he was persuaded by pupils to open a school for children and in 1931 he started the first teacher-training course. Both of these continued up until the start of the second world war, when he again went to the United States. After the war he re-opened the training course, but in 1947, at the age of 78, he fell and had a stroke. The left side of his face was paralysed and he lost the use of his left arm and leg. During this period he was suing the South African Government for libel, as he had been accused of fraud in an official publication.. He won his case against the South African Government and by 1949 had fully recovered from his stroke. He continued to teach until 1955 when, at the age of 86, he died.

The Discovery

What, then, was it that Alexander discovered which is now of such interest to men and women, particularly in the performing arts, all over the world? What are the mechanical and psychological aspects which contribute to what Alexander called "good use" of oneself? I say "aspects" in the sense that they are different ways of looking at that which is not really separate: they are parts of a whole, albeit a not well integrated one.

Alexander was to say in later years that he was lucky that his own particular difficulty was in the area around his head and neck (he had developed the habit of depressing his larynx when speaking and thereby causing a shortening and narrowing of his back) as this led him to the discovery of a very important principle.

The body is subject to expansion and contraction depending on many factors, some mental, some emotional and some physical, which inter-relate in a very subtle way. Some of these factors can be brought more under the control of our consciousness. One particular factor which has a great deal of influence on the activation of the expansive tendency is the way the head is carried on top of the spine. If it is held in a locked position with a lot of unnecessary tension, then the weight of it - some 5 kilograms. in an adult - begins to press down on the cervical spine. This then has a "knock-on" effect down the rest of the spine, and causes a general collapse. In order to counter-act this collapse - the body, as ever, has various back-up ways of finding support: muscles start to become rigid in certain areas such as the abdomen, lower back, chest, neck and shoulders. Even healthy people with "good physiques" may be using a lot more tension than is necessary to support themselves and move.

If, on the other hand, the head is allowed to have its natural poise then the spine finds its natural length and begins to support the body. Once the body is supported the muscles which have been substituting can relinquish their grip and a general sense of release, lightness and freedom of movement is experienced. With a good teacher, such an experience can happen almost immediately. However, one cannot depend on a teacher to always make it work for us and sooner or later we have to work something out for ourselves.

Once someone has been shown the effect of this relationship between the head and the spine, you may think that it would be easy to change and do it all the time. This is far from the truth, however, and the reasons for this are very significant Let us take the example of the musician. The physical aspect of playing a musical instrument involves a complex series of movements. The movements are, however, essentially no different from those needed for other activities; they are movements of the arms, hands, fingers and respiratory mechanism. Although complex, they are not complicated; not complicated because the body's capacity to repeat learned movements is very efficient. It can function well in spite of excess tension or poor muscle tone, although there is often a price to pay for this. Given the fact that the body can learn to carry out movements efficiently, what is the problem? For many, there is no problem, but for others they are myriad. The difficulty experienced by most people, not only musicians, who suffer from a complaint related to repeated movements is often caused by the fact that these movements have been learned while unnecessarily contracting certain groups of muscles. This happens just below the sense register and one is not usually aware of it. Each time the movement is repeated then, by association, so is the contraction; the two have become so linked in our sensory awareness that it is no longer possible to separate the necessary movements from the unnecessary contractions

Faulty Sensory Appreciation

Our sensory feed-back is not reliable. As Alexander found when he started to study himself, his awareness of what has going on in his body was not at all accurate. I see this every day in my teaching practice. People invariably think they are standing, sitting, moving, using their arms in a normal way. They do not associate the difficulties they are experiencing with the way they are going about doing things. Sensory feedback, or kinaesthesia, only registers change: it does not function objectively.

(pause for demonstration)

The Force of Habit

Another reason is the force of habit. Habit is a kind of conditioning of our brain and 'neural network' to work in a particular way. These habits exist somewhere in the area in between stimulus and response. Looked at from this point of view, it can be said that, in the case of the musician, the stimulus is the wish, desire or intention to play their instrument and the response is a mixture of necessary and unnecessary muscular activity and movements. Just the thought of playing is enough to trigger a whole series of habit patterns: shoulders lock, arms tighten, jaw clenches, abdomen pulls in or pushes out - the list is endless. Like a computer programme, or worse a computer virus, once activated it obediently, ruthlessly and blindly follows each stage of its preordained obligatory path. (pause for demonstration)

Learning to say "No", or "Keeping one's Options Open".

Ironically, perhaps, the way out is very simple; simple, but not easy. Instead of trying to "rewrite the programme" (to continue the computer analogy) while it is being run by saying to oneself "relax the shoulders, do this with the hands, that with the arms, breathe like this, move like that" etc., what is needed is to refuse to run the programme. When the stimulus to act is experienced one simply has to say "No" and, by means of this conscious decision, one has liberated oneself from all one's conditioned responses. In terms of our computer analogy, there are two ways of responding to the stimulus: the first way, the most common one and requiring no conscious decision, is that the programme is run and certain circuits are closed according to a predetermined pattern: the second way, which can only be a conscious one, is to respond to the stimulus by initially keeping the circuits open. This demands a high degree of inner activity. It is experienced as a state of readiness without a definite objective: a kind of flux of possibilities - as if one were prepared for anything, not just the task in hand: keeping one's options open. In this state it is possible to make a link between one's mental alertness and sensory awareness in such a way that one has a sense of one's own presence; to oneself, to the environment, to the pull of habit and the possibility of the new. Such experiences have to be earned through a process of work on oneself. This is not to say that one does not do anything. On the contrary, it liberates one to do what one has never done before, if one so chooses, or to do something in a new way. And, extraordinarily, we find that underneath all those accumulated layers of tension and habit, like so many layers of old paint, the new, the unspoilt, the "right" is already there and "it" knows how to walk, to sit, stand or walk, how to breathe and how to move arms hands and fingers. As one pianist put it, "I don't have to think about what to do with my arms and hands, I just play". The challenge is to find this kind of responsiveness not only within the parameters of one's music but in front of one's own life.

A New Way of Thinking

The shift in attitude which is necessary to allow these changes to take place is, I would say, the most difficult of all Alexander's ideas to put into practise, even though it is easy to understand as a concept. It has to do with what Alexander called "end-gaining". End-gaining is where the main focus of one's attention is on achieving a result in any given activity at the expense of attending to the process (the means) by which the end is achieved. Alexander's concept of "end-gaining" and "attending to the means-whereby", is very close to certain Eastern ideas such as Mindfulness, or "being in the moment". It is quite striking to see the similarities with, for example, Zen Buddhism or Taoism. However, this is not the place to expand on such parallels.

What is the Relevance of the Alexander Technique to Performing Artists?

A performing artist relies on the human instrument to portray their art. For the actor, good voice production is dependent on efficient functioning of the whole self. A dancer needs to understand the mechanics of movement from the inside: i.e. trough awareness of joints and the degree of muscle tension, not only in terms of visual impression. A musician has to carry out some ordinary and some unusual movements, sometimes involving great force and dynamism, sometimes involving great subtlety and delicacy. For all performing artists, the body is the means of expression.

The Application to Music

I would now like to look in more detail at the question of playing a musical instrument in the light of what has been discussed above, with reference to some specific difficulties and their possible causes. Each instrument makes its own demands on the player. Violinists and flautists, for instance, are required to hold their arms and heads in unusual positions while playing and frequently suffer from pain and stiffness in arms, shoulders, neck and back.

The inherent patters is that of "holding something up" and they often loose their, as it is called, "grounding", whereby support for the body and whatever weight it is carrying (back-pack, suitcase, shopping etc.) is experienced as a natural upwards response to gravity. (This is an experience which a teacher can give quite easily to a pupil, although it is not so easy to find it on one's own.) When this natural upwards response to gravity is not working, muscles which are not meant for postural support begin to tighten in an attempt to, so to speak, brace the body. The result is pain and stiffness.

Double-bass players, on the other hand, have a tendency to become very heavy in the chest and shoulders. The pattern is one of being pulled down by gravity and failing to find the necessary upward response.

Wind instrumentalists and vocalist, as may be expected, often have problems with respiration. Although there are subjective variations, according to the individual and the instrument, the general underlying pattern is that of trying to "do" breathing with excessive tension rather than allowing breath to move freely in and out of the body.

Learning the Technique involves several levels of understanding, which I group into three sections.

1. Letting go: 2. Letting be: 3. Letting do

Most people are holding excess muscular tension in the body. In order to start to learn about ourselves, our instrument - the body - needs to be more free. This means release of muscular tension. Teachers of the Alexander Technique will usually start a course of lessons by helping the pupil to release tension in very simple positions and movements: sitting, standing, walking and lying down.

As muscular tension is released, a new awareness of the body starts to emerge; a sensory awareness. We start to develop more frequent and more accurate feedback as to the relative position of parts of the body and the degree of muscular tension being used. As this awareness develops, it becomes clear that the degree of muscular tension is dependent on our mental and emotional states; they are not separate; they are part of a whole.

A new awareness of our selves as a potentially integrated human being call for a new kind of brain activity: a new way of thinking.

The first stage in this new thinking is to learn how to stop: how to get off the merry-go-round. Stopping is a definite and recognisable state. One in which we are simply 'being'. We are not doing anything; not thinking about things - but we are. Alert, receptive to impressions but not reacting.

From this point a new co-ordination can emerge. The key to co-ordination is the relationship between the parts of the body and how it is animated. The body is not constructed like building blocks, one on top of the other, but more like a suspension bridge. The parts of the body tend to pull away from each other, creating space in the joints and a dynamic and expansive quality. Because we are vertebrates, the most important of these is that of the head to the spine.

The head leads, the body follows. If you watch a cat or a young child in movement, it is clear how first something catches the attention, through the senses, then the head begins to move and the body follows. The head, not the neck.

As this awareness grows we begin to see the force of habit. We are continuously reacting to stimuli. We do not function consciously. We run on automatic pilot. We can manage in this way, we can survive, we can even be successful; but it is not all that is possible for a human being.

In his great work, 'The Ascent of Man' Jacob Bronowski wrote: 'We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex.........In Man, before the brain is an instrument for action it has to be an instrument for preparation'

A human being can have choice. In order to choose, we need to make a stop between stimulus and response: this is the only place where real choice is possible - otherwise a chemical process begins and neurons become charged with force. There is a part of the mind, a higher function of the human brain, where decisions are made. To start to become aware of this is a great responsibility. It means that we can no longer blame others or circumstances for our difficulties. A human being can make decisions. The hierarchy of functioning begins to take shape: stimulus - pause - choice - decision To enact a decision, it has to become an intention. Intention is a powerful force; it begins to activate the nervous system and triggers nerve impulses into muscles. This force flows into the body along certain paths and in certain directions. It is possible to learn to channel this animating force consciously. At this stage of awareness, life becomes process - choice, decision, action - from moment to moment. A certain immediacy appears as we experience ourselves as here, now. This quality, quite palpable and recognisable - brings a different quality to one's life. It is also recognisable in others: we call it presence. In performance it brings everything to life. The performer becomes a living bridge between the invisible world of creative intent, the expression of emotion and an audience. Presence calls to presence, and in this way a quite special event can take place during performance.