alexander technique valeria primost

Frederick Matthias Alexander was an actor born in Tasmania, Australia in 1869.

He began his acting career at age 20 in Melbourne, where he quickly earned a broad reputation as an actor.  Until this activity was affected by an excessive tendency to hoarseness and the loss of his voice during his performance.

Medical help concerning this issue was always consisting of medicines, which would only have an effect as far as he didn´t use his voice professionally. This solution wasn´t enough for him, his interest was in solving his problem to be able to continue with his acting profession.

The only useful information he obtained from his failed attempts to use the help of doctors, was the diagnosis that there was no functional problem in his throat which could be causing the problem.

Therefore his logical deduction brought him to think that if there was no constitutive problem in the vocal apparatus, the problem should have been in less visible place: his use.

To approach the work of observing his use of the vocal apparatus he used the support of three mirrors, which he used to watch himself during experimentation in action.

This observation took him to discover what after several years of research that the use of his vocal apparatus was affected by his general use of himself and that only through improving his general use he could affect the specific use of his breathing and phonation.

 

From this experiences he started to develop his technique and to teach it in Melbourne and Sydney, where he directed the Drama and Opera Conservatory during four years. In 1904 he travelled to London to share his technique, there he became the “protector of the Londoner theater” and was known as “ the man who breath” . Actors attended massively to get his classes. Among his students where famous actors like Henry Irving and Viola Tree, and other known figures of that time, like Aldous Huxley, George Bernard Shaw, Sir Stafford Cripps and later in the United States, John Dewey.

 

In 1930 he funded the first teachers school. At age 79 he suffered an apoplexy that paralyzed the left side of his body. But thanks to his technique, he recovered the control of that side in less than a year and continued teaching until his death, in 1955, at age 86.

Alexander developed his ideas through a period of almost sixty years. As his teaching experience grew he broadened and refined the theoretical frame for his technique. Through those years he published four books:  “Man’s Supreme inheritance”, “Constructive conscious control of the individual” , “The use of the self” and  “The Universal constant in living”

Along the decades many scientific discoveries accumulated proving the principles of the technique. In 1973, Nicolaas Tinbergen devoted to the Alexander Technique most his speech as he received the Nobel Prize of Medicine and Physiology.