One’s certainly different when one comes up out of monkey.
—Marjorie Barlow
Apparently us Alexander teachers are passing on a ‘Technique’. At least that is what it says on the tin. But I think some of us have a nagging discomfort at this way of characterising what we’re up to. We may feel that the sort of explicit, procedural, codified approach to achieving an end which the word ‘technique’ implies no longer quite fits what we do. Perhaps we feel a little lumbered with it. A teacher recently told me she was thinking of changing the name of what she teaches to ‘Alexander Work’. I can sympathise with that.
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Perhaps one thing that is appealing about the word ‘Technique’ is that it may give the impression of being quite simple, straightforward and contemporary. ‘I will give you this simple, neutral technique which you can apply to solve your problems’. It’s tempting to think of techniques as being ‘pure’ things which, in themselves, are relatively culture and value free, and which be applied in an uncomplicated way to the world or to ourselves to make hoped-for changes for the better.
But though this is a nice thought, it is not a very valid one. Techniques are invented by human beings who exist within cultures; they arise in specific cultural contexts in response to certain specific needs or values. Inevitably they embody those needs and values in some way.
Think of something as simple as the technique of hammering wooden boards together with nails. To engage in such a process requires certain things. Firstly, obviously, the existence of hammers, nails, and milled timber. The existence of these implies the existence of physical and mental toughness in the culture — the courage and fortitude required to win metal ores from deep underground, inventiveness, a willingness to cut down beautiful trees and harness the power of water or fire to make tools and to shape raw materials. They require not only the culture’s acceptance of, but also to some extent its valorisation of, such things as hard work, division of labour, focus, determination, the over-riding of physical discomfort, and the domination of the natural world in pursuit of our own ends: a certain brutality even. These things may take very harmful or relatively benign forms, but they are an inherent part of the activity of hammering together milled boards to make buildings and other structures, and are inseparable from it. You can’t have one without the other. The American West was dominated and the native people driven out as much with the hammer and nail as anything. It’s such a simple technique, but it’s hardly value-free.
If we’re involved with hammering nails then we know this, perhaps only unconsciously, and feel the presence of the back story. When I use a hammer skilfully I feel — literally, physically feel — ‘like a man’ in the way that many in my father and grand-father’s generation would have understood and related to. It’s a good feeling — competent, independent and strong, matched by the feeling in my body of skilfully controlling a metal tool, and perhaps a sense of continuity and identification with previous generations of craftsmen.
Learning and applying a physical technique gives us a set of kinaesthetic and emotional experiences which we tend to come to identify with. To use a hammer feels like this or that in my body, and that feeling is accompanied by a sense of the values associated with the activity and the emotions that accompany them. This sense of how we feel kinaesthetically in activity is an important part of how we know we exist as a ‘being’. “There’s this feeling, it is familiar, I know it, it is me”. Hammering becomes, in a sense, a part of me and my identity. There is an emotion and there is a kinaesthetic experience, and these form a gestalt which we could call a kinemotional experience [my term]. These kinds of experiences are not additional to technique, they are part and parcel of it.
As we learn to hammer wood and nails efficiently (in other words in such a way as to make wooden buildings economic and feasible) we are absorbing not only a by-the-numbers skill, but a particular cultural mindset and the way of feeling that goes with it. Even if we dislike hammering nails, if we resent it, or if we are a woman taking possession of what was traditionally a male-dominated skill, we are in dialogue with history, culture and values.
Let’s bring this back to our own rather refined and quirky Alexander Technique. As a member of the teaching community passing it on to others I might like to think I am engaged in a relatively value-neutral activity, un-complicatedly helping people to fix their bad backs, or to be better at their chosen artistic pursuits. But I might also wonder what conditioned values and experiences are lurking in the work which I may be passing on at the same time without quite noticing.
Firstly and uncontroversially (in its classical formulation at least) the Technique encodes enlightenment and modernist ideas about the pre-eminence of reason and order in human affairs. These are impossible to separate out from the work, they are literally what it is. It also contains an assumption that refined, as opposed to ‘good enough’, skill is important and valuable and worth pursuing at the expense of other things. After all, nothing we pursue in life is free.
More subtly, however, the Alexander Technique in its classical form also encodes a sense of the desirability of certain ways of experiencing ourselves. It encodes certain kinemotional experiences which were considered desirable and high-status at the time the Technique was originally formulated. For example if I work in the rather formal, disciplined, procedure-based manner in which I was trained, I tend to feel rather like F.M. looks in some of the well-known photographs. A little regal; very certain and clear; kind but rather uncompromising, with a sort of restrained power — and I find those feelings and ‘ways of being’ reflected in many of the writings and descriptions of the early teachers. When I play at being a classical Alexander teacher (which I like to do sometimes) I feel like a man rather in the way that Arthur Rubinstein looked like a man as he lifted his hands to begin a Beethoven sonata.
All of which, it has to be admitted, has a certain appeal. There is a lot to be said for it. It’s nice to feel that way. As the rather diffident and uncertain young man I was when I first came across the Technique it was astounding to feel that power and authority in myself and in certain circumstances to be able to project it in a way that landed with other people. What a revelation!
There is a lot of sense, and sound rational reasons, behind the classical Alexander procedures which became ‘canonical’. But there are an enormous range of other ways we can explore the principles which are equally interesting. Inevitably, and quite unconsciously, procedures and ways of working were chosen which tend to produce and promote the kind of kinemotional experiences which were considered desirable at the beginning of the twentieth century, and which conferred advantages in the cultural context in which the Technique evolved.
As trainee teachers we may admire our teachers, often with good reason. We may feel a sense of community and continuity — perhaps among the most moving feelings of this type we have known. This baggage can, and does, become attached to what we are learning and passing on. It’s likely that we come to ascribe some kind of absolute value to the kinemotional experiences we are having. “This is what it’s like to experience how humans are supposed to be”, we think. “This is what it’s like to move as evolution designed us”. In this way we get attached to experiences of self which we believe are value-free ‘good use’, but which are in fact conditioned, and as much to do with cultural factors and kinaesthetic experiences embodied in the particular poses and movements which were valued by F.M. and the first generation teachers.
This is all fine, if it’s what you want. For my part though, I’m not sure it really is what I want. For a start I’m very much drawn to not being too technical in what I’m up to. There’s a lot to be said for exploring the principles with ourselves and others while avoiding letting what we are doing solidify too much into technique — and while avoiding leaning too much on technique we were taught by the tradition. Of course there will always be something of that: to have technique is necessary and part of what it means to be human. A little bit is quite alright.
But my experience is that when I play with the principles in less formal, disciplined, technical ways, I experience myself very differently to the regal Alexander teacher of old. I seem to become rather more intimate with myself and others: closer, more flexibly boundaried, more equal, yielding, more ‘in-tune-with’. I become less concerned with ‘up’, and more concerned with flow. Less bothered about widening and more interested in openness. And this for me has a sense of rightness, and of something more fitting for the times and challenges we face as human beings at this curious point in our shared history.