Fredrick Hot Hot Hot, Hot Hot Alexander. That's his name. Don't get it Twisted.

Alrighty, so let's talk about the Alexander Technique and the great guy who made it!

Freddrick Mathias Alexander- well damn, that is a serious name. Put that on your business cards. This guy loved horses and theatre, which means he was probably really fit ( Freddrick Mathias Alexander, great name, great bod, great technique, what's not to love.) He grew up enjoying and practicing these two loves, until he couldn't live in the country any longer as a young adult, so he gave up his love for horses since horses probably were only used in buggies and such in the city, and continued to work on theatre. He taught himself violin, which is crazy hard, you don't understand- I wonder if he could read music or not, and eventually he moved to Melborne, to do guess what? Even more theatre, but this time with people teaching him. The best teachers, which I wonder, who were the best teachers of this time? Who taught him? Worth the research.

Anyway, he made money to live his luxurious life of theatre by doing odd jobs, including being a tea-taster, which makes me crazy jealous, I would love to get paid to taste tea, let me tell you. Also, there is a picture of him in here, and woah buddy, I was right what a knock out. He couldn't keep jobs very well though because like most artists ( See any almost any renaissance artist lol) he had a foul temper, along with his own personal ailments having to do with respiratory difficulties.

Those respiratory difficulties actually lead to him having trouble with his true love of life, acting, and when doctors told him that all he could do was rest his voice, it pretty much pissed him off so much that it brought him into being a doctor for himself. He understood that something he was doing was wrong, that it couldn't just be his illness hindering him, so he began to study how he postured himself when he recited. He began to research this, and his method became so effected as a taught form of improvement that his students came both for performance and medical needs, surprisingly more for the latter. After meeting Dr. McKay, who was prepared to tear his form a new one, the doctor found his methods very valid and encouraged him to get his ass to London where he could make some real headway with his technique. He ended up making it big, even through the world wars, and ended up training people to pass his technique on other teachers and writing a book to maintain the credibility of his technique. Basically? Super sexy, super successful, super dedicated to the craft.

Now, let's talk about use and functioning real quick. This was the fundamental point of Alexander's work and was so important because it was not a practice of leisure or a recommendation, it was designed to help with the actual functionality of the body both in performance and in life. This guy as the book says 'was not the sort to stay under a leaky roof'; he's a get shit done kind of man, so when his larynx wasn't doing what he wanted it to do, he chose to investigate the rest of his form, rather than simply resting his voice. Use is, according to Alexander the idea that "the choices we make about what we do with ourselves... determine the quality of our lives". It's basically the idea that we should make an effort to control what we can control when it comes to our body, to make those controls conscious and known, to observe our form.   So you use your body a certain way, it affects your functionality. Just like tuning an instrument so that it will function properly, Alexander sought to see what in his body was out of tune and causing difficulties with his voice, the tip of his head, the pinch of his shoulders, the shortening of his stature all causing 'out of tune notes' in his performing ability and functionality. In such, it's clear through Alexander's commentary about his work that you're responsible for the upkeep and tuning and quality of your body, and its functionality relies on you becoming conscious of the use of your body. This attention to the body branches out beyond the physical to the mental, since Alexander establishes that your body is one big, cohesive contraption and your feelings and thoughts are not separate from the experience of your body. That controlling and monitoring and modifying your thinking, feeling and physical postures, you can become a healthier, more successful, more functional human.

That idea, that every aspect of the human is what makes the human, not separated parts is what Alexander talks about when referring to the 'whole person'. His technique is unique in that it does not call for separated exercise of the intellect and the body, but for both to be stimulated, modified and conscious at the same time. This is what makes this technique so valuable to life beyond performance, and why medical practitioners probably found it to be the bee's knees. While Alexander's discoveries stemmed from a theatrical need, his work is a fantastic and logical criticism of modern medicine and the habit to separate the body into a series of specialized functions rather than encouraging the health of the whole body as a singular unit. By looking at the body without judgement or separation, by thinking of the brain as another organ instead of a separate vital to the body, one can assess a lot of seemingly physical or mental or emotional issues and eradicate them in completeness rather than section by section. So basically, for example, I carry my stress in my back a lot of the time. Is that where all of my stress happens? No, of course not, it happens in my mind and in my stomach and in the way I stand and in my back and shoulders and neck and sometimes even in my jaw. If I tried to adjust all of those things, care for all of those things separately under the pretense that it would get rid of my stress, I would never, ever get rid of my stress, I'd be stressed for forever, like I usually am! But working with the whole body through Alexander's technique allows for a change of the whole form and mind all together to the betterment of one's health, focus and personal comfort.