Posturing for success: Alexander Technique helps eclectic group of students with pain, performance

By Nancy Wick
University Week

Cathy Madden says she can help people perform various activities better with the Alexander Technique. Here she helps pianist Colleen Young use more force with less strain.

The 20 students who gathered in Hutchinson Hall every weekday evening for two weeks were an eclectic bunch - several performers from the drama school, some musicians, a massage therapist, a teacher with neck pain and the stray senior or two just looking for an interesting class. What they studied didn’t look much like anything that would take place in the hallowed halls of academe. On a typical evening, teacher Cathy Madden would begin by moving around the room, placing her hands ever so lightly on students’ necks while standing behind them.

“Now,” she would say, “what would happen if you would echrysal so your head can move so that all of you can follow?”

Echrysal is a made-up word - made up specifically for this class, in fact. Over the years, Madden says she has used many words and phrases to describe what she’s trying to get students to do. “English simply doesn’t have a single word that describes an essential element of what I teach,” she says. “That element involves inhibiting a habitual pattern and simultaneously initiating a new, more constructive idea.”

Echrysal is an amalgamation of “emerge” and “chrysalis,” and although it’s metaphorical, what Madden wants students to do is concrete and physical.

Her subject is the Alexander Technique, something she describes as “the underlying coordination in what we as vertebrates do.” Created by Australian actor F.M. Alexander at the turn of the last century, the technique places emphasis on the neck and asks students to pay attention to ways in which they tighten muscles habitually and unnecessarily.

“It gives us choices about habitual patterns we didn’t know we had,” Madden says.

As someone who has been teaching now for more than 20 years, she’s aware of how “woo woo” that may sound. “With people who know nothing about the technique, it’s rather fun to watch that ‘Goodness, what did I sign up for?’ after the class gets going,” she says.

Yet the Alexander Technique has had a place at the University for many years - as part of the actor’s toolkit in the School of Drama. Madden has been working with Professional Actor Training Program students since 1987. She was recently made an assistant professor and now teaches an undergraduate drama class as well.

Performers tend to be drawn to it, she says “because they need to maximize their ability to think and move in tandem and they tend to notice poor coordination earlier than other people do, just because they have to.”

One performer who found her way into the class is pianist Colleen Young, a graduate student in music. Working with Madden on a piece that calls for forceful playing, she was coached on how to get the power without the strain. “It’s made me more conscious of what I’m doing,” Young says of the technique.

But Madden feels strongly that non-performers should have an opportunity to learn the technique also, which is why she teaches a class once a year that is open to everyone. This summer it was a two-week intensive, meeting three and a half hours a night for 10 nights.

The content is relatively slight - some readings, some in-class anatomical information. One night Madden asked her students to draw their skeletons, then followed up by bringing a full sized model of a skeleton into the room so they could compare their idea of their body’s support structure with the reality. The primary subject of intense investigation, however, is the students’ own coordination.

Mostly the class consists of practice. Students bring in various activities - activities ranging from singing or playing an instrument to walking with a backpack or taking their contact lenses out. They perform the activity under Madden’s watchful eye, then she suggests adjustments - usually small, subtle things such as moving the head back or shifting body weight during the movement - after which they perform the activity again. Other students are asked to observe and comment.

“Students learn as much from watching others make changes as they do from their own attempts at change,” Madden says.

It was watching Madden work with her students at Whitman College that brought Debby Holmes, a drama teacher, to the intensive. Recently diagnosed with osteoarthritis, Holmes was looking for things she could do to minimize the effects of the disease, which causes severe pain in the joints.

“Already I’ve noticed some pain relief,” Holmes says, “and there are ideas I can take back to work with on my own.”

That’s exactly the outcome Madden strives for. The Alexander Technique, she explains, is not a hands-on therapy but an educational technique. Students learn to be aware of their own patterns and to change if change is desired - not just when working with the teacher, but on their own, long after the lessons are over.

“Most people study the technique for a little while and then simply integrate it into whatever they do in life,” Madden says. “Then there are people like me.”

Originally an actress and director, Madden first encountered the technique while in graduate school and found it extremely useful. So, when she picked up her MA, she decided she would become an Alexander teacher to support her life in the theater. Over time her teaching has overshadowed her acting and directing, though she still tries to keep her hand in on the performance side of the business. She has no regrets about how things have worked out.

“When I started to use the Alexander Technique, everything I did was so much more effective than before,” she says. “And I thought, ‘Everybody deserves to know this. Everybody deserves to have this tool so they can do what they intend to do without getting in their own way.’ That moment when someone starts to be able to make that change in themselves is very exciting to be part of.”