Who Benefits? Everyone!
The Alexander Technique offers you a method for life-long learning. Anyone can learn to understand the basis of coordination and how to attend to process. You can use it to develop self-awareness and self-reliance. The Technique adds a new dimension of creativity to your life and leads to ongoing self-discovery. These tools can enhance performance and functioning for anyone – athletes, CEOs, musicians, computer users, actors, parents, seniors, and you!
If you want to explore the possibility of lightness and freedom of movement, you can use the Alexander Technique to expand your awareness and change your habits. Through gentle hands-on work and practical experiments, you can learn how to notice tightening, release muscle tension, re-establish better balance and move more efficiently. If you are searching for more ease and centeredness in your life, the Alexander Technique is a specific tool to help you learn how to find it. Many public speakers, performing artists, and athletes around the world apply the Alexander Technique to their practice to increase clarity of perception, free up spontaneity, and manage stage fright, and improve stamina.
Alexander Technique for Musicians
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 mostcomplex and demanding physical movements of any profession. By helping musicians release undue tension in their bodies, the Alexander Technique improves the quality of movement and therefore the quality of the music itself. It makes possible a performance which is more fluid and lively, and 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.
The Alexander Technique for Actors
You’ve seen the Alexander Technique on stage and on screen. Christopher Reeve used it to transorm from Clark Kent to Superman, slumping “down” so his movements became awkward and unbalanced as the mild-mannered reporter, then standing “up” with obvious balance and ease as the Man of Steel. Other actors that have studied the Alexander Technique include Paul Newman, Jeremy Irons, Joel Gray, Mary Steenbergen, Julie Andrews, Patrick Stewart, Kevin Kline, Joanne Woodward, John Cleese, John Houseman, Robin Williams, James Earl Jones, Judy Dench, Ben Kingsley, William Hurt, Keanu Reeves, Hillary Swank, Heath Leger. The Alexander Technique is taught at the The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, the American Conservatory Theater, the York University department of Theatre, and at many other acting and theatre programs, universities and colleges.
The Alexander Technique for Athletes
Many world-class athletes have used the Alexander Technique to improve their performance. Athletes can improve flexibility, timing, and efficiency to be on form more consistently. The list includes British rower Matthew Pinsent, Canadian marathon runner Paul Collins, Australian track-and-field coach Percy Cerutty, American equestrian Sally Swift, and British decathlete Daley Thompson, among many others.