MAKING WAVES: Alexander Technique and the undulating self

Aileen Crow, is a woman whom I consider one of my "mothers", and whom has been an invaluable mentor (and friend/"playmate") to me for over twenty years.  In my mind she is the quintessential "maverick", who has modeled and taught credibility through self-ownership; that is, when one is true to oneself, there can be only rightness (in relation to bodywork and everything else).  Aileen is someone I have worked and played with with the greatest of intensity.  She meets you.  She matches you.  Brilliantly.  Even when the vibration is extremely (unbearably?) deep or profound.  Aileen is a Master.  For me, she is a model of love, gratitude, appreciation and most of all Joy.  She walks her own truth and is absolute in her permissiveness that you walk your own. It is my great pleasure to print here, respective writings she produced in 1992 (Inner Flow and the Spiraling Spinal Wave) and for the Alexander Technique International Conference on Consensus, (Making Waves), 1996.

"We all know that the Alexander Technique [AT] leads to expansiveness and lightness. Once we attain that, what do we do with it?  If we just maintain an expanded shape or a state of expansion and lightness, it is static.  Oscillation and inner movement define control of movement impulses and its torso held in one piece sometimes looks like an elegant empty suit.  In our desire for "good use," we must be careful not to eliminate the fluidity of movement that allows torso rotation and undulatory, spiraling movements of the spine.

To make contact with the flow of inner movement impulses is essential for actors, dancers and singers--- for anyone who wants to make emotional contact with others.  The inner movement impulses communicate emotions.  Often involuntary and spontaneous, they may not suit our self-images, but they have their own reason for being and if they are ignored they will reappear in symptoms or in dreams until their wisdom is received and integrated into our lives.

In a cross-cultural study of movement styles, the Choreometrics Project (1) demonstrated that the world can be mapped into areas defined by two different body attitudes.  One is a one-unit torso, associated with patrilineal control of sexuality.  The other is a two-unit torso, with twisting and undulating, from matrilineal cultures in which sexuality and fertility are valued. FM Alexander lived and taught within a Northern European one-unit torso culture; the limited range of movements used in his teaching and in most Alexander teaching today reflects the attitude toward sexuality inherent in that culture.

If Alexander's principles are cross-culturally valid, Alexander lessons should include movements that use three dimensional torso twists, spirals, and spinal waves; and not be limited to those that maintain a straight spined, one-unit, flat torso that only folds and unfolds at the hip joints (as in 'monkey').  Unfortunately, many people see that carefully maintained (if high class) limitation as a cliched 'Alexandraoid' look.

Every bone, muscle and organ in our bodies have a three dimensional spiral to it; there are no straight lines.  Even our DNA spirals.  From conception, living tissue is formed from spiraling, flowing plasma.  Anything that flows, spirals. (2)

The design of the human body is that of muscles in a double spiral pattern - left and right twin spirals - around the bony structure (3,4) with its wave-like spine.  And or bodies move in complex spirals and waves, if they are not culturally conditioned otherwise.

Any such influence that restricts the  natural fluidity of the body also tends to isolate the individual and distort emotional communication within their human relationships.  We naturally move in synchrony with each other on a micro-movement level (5). People with communication disorders are out of movement synchrony with themselves and with others.

In parts of the world characterized by a two-unit torso (such as parts of the Middle East, Africa and India), undulating movement promotes communal harmony.  In the Middle East, it is a way of passing on the skills that inform sexual communication; women wave/dance together in unison, forming harmonious support groups for themselves; and women wave/dance around a woman as she gives birth, to encourage her.

I personally feel that the relationship problems within the Alexander community are related to a mistaken idea of what 'good use' is.  Carefully maintaining an ideal body state or shape restricts fluidity and sets up a hierarchical mind-over-body relationship within the individual because of the constant need to control inferior, non-ideal body impulses.  Maintaining the Alexander ideal of good use necessitates inhibiting any movement impulses incongruent to that ideal.  Those incongruities may very well be the body wanting to speak its mind, perhaps expressing dissatisfaction at having 'one right way imposed on it by even a benevolent director.  The unwanted bodily impulses may be offering another point of view, or counter examples to the ideal, or even new discoveries and new connections that could benefit the total person.

That's analogous to the political situation in the Alexander community, with its problematic concerns about who's in and who's out, and who gets to approve of and controls whom, etc.

It is also interesting to me that so many Alexander teachers are doing Authentic Movement in which spontaneous 'incongruent' movement impulses are followed and expressed until they yield their indispensable meaning. I hope this ATI conference work on Consensus will help lead the Alexander community to this kind of complementary [alignment] and to a broader cross-cultural identity."

(1)  The Choreometrics Project, Forestine Paulay and Irmgard Bartenieff in Folk Song Style and Culture, Alan Lomax, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1968
(2)  Sensitive Chaos, Theodor Schwenk, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1965.
(3)  The Double Spiral Arrangement of Voluntary Musculature, Raymond A.Dart, Human Potenial, Vol. 1, No.2, 1968
(4)  Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation, M. Knott and D. Voss Harper & Row, 1968.
(5)  Cultural Microrhythms, William S.Condon, Interaction Rhythms, edited by Martha Davis, Human Sciences Press, NY 1982.

Aileen Crow has been an Alexander teacher since 1969.  She taught at ACAT in New York City until she formed her own AT training program in 1978.  She is a Creativity Counselor in private practice in NYC and in New City, NY, is a Laban Movement Analyst (since 1969) and a Dreambody Process-Oriented therapist.   Her most recent interests are calligraphy, Solo Focusing and transforming trauma.

Aileen's more recent writings have been in A Moving Journal (1993-2006 ),  AuthenticMovementCommunity Blog, and the Journal of Authentic Movement and Somatic  Inquiry (JAMSI) AuthenticMovement.Journal.com.

Unimitable Aileen at Play

The Body as Political Forum

In my posts Violence: a Cautionary Truth and Use: The Alexander Technique, I broach the subjects of the impact on the body by external influence.  In other past posts I've supposed the malleability of the psych/body to cultural influence and the often disempowerment of self to these forces.  In an article, The Architecture of E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E in Performa Magazine (http://performamagazine.tumblr.com/post/33854559841/), the suggestion our bodies are a political forum because of their materiality ties these deductions together.  Author Cassie Peterson, puts forth some provocative conjecture:  "The body is a material representation of the ways we exist in relation to the social (dis)order. In her essay 'How Can We Have a Body?: Desires and Corporeality' (2006), psychoanalyst Susie Orbach writes, 'All our known ways of being create physical and neural pathways that become constitutive of self, not just on a psychological level but on a physical, material level.'  Much like Foucault, she believes that our bodies are constituted by the social discourses that shape them. She asserts, 'bodies are made, not born,' meaning that we become our 'selves' through repetition of language and social practices. Accordingly, E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E begins with a performer asking us, 'What’s the difference between uncirculated money and heart disease?'

Nothing. There is no difference. Social discord manifests as personal dis-ease. The social body is becoming in the physical body. "

a stylized (socialized?) image of the human form

She continues, "Our relationship to our bodies mimics the perpetual privatization of space and resources. We are socialized to dominate our bodies, to 'own' them, and shape them to meet idealized consumer standards. In 1975, Foucault wrote an essay called 'Docile Bodies,' in which he concluded that the more a body is coerced by dominant social forces, the more equipped it is to reproduce these same disciplinary forces unto itself and others. The more 'productive', economically viable, and groomed for service our bodies become, the less political force we have because we have become isolated in narratives of individuality and exploitation, ensnared in the competition and tyranny of the market." 

This is a powerful and meaningful conjecture.  Much of F.M. Alexander's work was about healing the impact of this relationship between the natural inner and the unnatural outer influences.  But it usually takes much physical pain and kinesthetic dysfunction for a person to seek help in addressing the negative impact of the external world on their organism.  For those who don't turn to a modality like the Alexander Technique to right the wrongs of this influence, doesn't mean they don't need it or their bodies aren't under this social influence.  Trend and fashion are at our heels (literally; five inch stiletto heels being the rigueur of urban women), at our hem lines, in the trends of cultural cuisine and the neighborhoods we choose to identify and live in.  As is indicated in Peterson's, Orbach's and Foucault's writing the apparel we cloth ourselves in force us to have a relationship with our body, for better or for worse.  Not only does it actually change the way we move and behave in our bodies, it can't help but change our perception of social issues such as poverty and probably disables our awareness of pretty much everything but the superficial. To the impacted (us), this veneer becomes our reality.  Social context becomes political.

Pina Bausch embodying the "let go"

As might be indicated by Foucault's writing on these dominant social forces, the "perfecting" of our physiques through rigorous "health" regimens is part and parcel of this concept, especially when done for appearance.  This holds true for the perfecting of anything;  a newly minted resident doctor once confided to me she was worried the medical training (which would include the social influence of the training) she had received would kill the right impulse she had in becoming the doctor she had hoped to be.  So it is with the exacting training of being an artist and maybe more so, a dancer or musician.  

The politicizing of the art of dance begins with the rigorous training and even "branding" of the type of dancer made.  A dancer doesn't become the artist until (s)he lets the training go.  It is only in the melding of the natural self to the almost militaristic trained self when the honest, authentic self is revealed and the art of it surfaces.  Perhaps I speak of "performer" more than artist in this way, as I am not at all sure that a non-trained person is not a dancer-artist. I just know that the relinquishing of the material one's cells have adopted by virtue of a long and perfecting process (training) need to be surrendered before the genuine truth of movement can be known and seen.  All those jetes and arabesques need to become fodder for the natural movement/expression impulses waiting in the wings.

All of this is an interesting premise in relation to nature, pointing once again to the enormous sensitivity of the organism.  If our bodies are indeed "made and not born" and they are "constituted by the social discourses that shape them", we as material beings are as powerlessly impacted by our surrounds and social influence as we are by the automatic release of hormones coursing through our blood stream.  There is indeed no difference between uncirculated money and heart disease.

So, are we damned to "become isolated in narratives of individuality and exploitation, ensnared in the competition and tyranny of the market."?  What makes us free? (Is that an impossible premise?)  Even though they too are subject to social influence and hormones (among other things), I turn (once again) to the young child for perspective; they are somewhat more free then the general population, social indoctrination not a huge factor until age five or so.  Young children rest in themselves and their all consuming interest in Being and response.   Their worlds are not huge yet (or is it miniscule?).  They are Nature, heavily weighted in what Is; the body's process, sensation, the ephemeral.  They are working on being indoctrinated, but they are not there yet.  They are a little more free than you and me.  What freedom they enjoy is one we could return to (partially) when we return to our more authentic nature also in our body's process, sensation and the moment.  Unlike children, we have a more global, mature and experienced intelligence to support the notion of a freedom.  It is dependent on an integrated intelligence, meaning an all of me that is informed, body, mind and spirit.  Like the highly trained dancer or medical resident, a letting go of materiality is required in order for there to be a return to the authentic, a hope for a life to become art.  And this is not an end product, a static performance, but a rich and moving process dependent on a cultivated awareness, deep interest and patience.