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July 27, 2013  

Being with Erika: #08, “It’s all the same”, London, 1993

A lot of teachers wanted to come and meet Erika, so I organised several half-day workshops over a period of two weeks in my apartment in West London. The participants spanned a period of thirty-odd years experience and came from diverse training backgrounds. The interaction between them and Erika was of great interest to me.

Here was a woman whose contact with the Alexander Technique (her first lessons from her aunt Ethel Webb were in 1919) predated anyone else still alive. For all of the teachers who came, their link with Alexander was through their head of training or that person’s head of training – in all cases leading back to the same eight people: Patrick Macdonald, Peter Scott, Walter and Dilys Carrington, Dr and Marjory Barlow, and Dick and Elisabeth Walker.

Erika, however, had distanced herself from what had been going on in the Alexander world after World War 2. For some time she had felt uncomfortable with certain attitudes in Ashley Place 1 and when the training course reopened in September 1945, Erika found the atmosphere very different from the pre-war era. With FM playing a smaller part in the running of the course, the three ‘crown princes’ (Patrick Macdonald, Walter Carrington and Bill Barlow), as she called them, were already vying for who was going to ‘pick up the mantle’. Consequently she saw the contemporary Alexander world from the perspective of what it had been to her in those early experiences with Ethel Webb, Irene Tasker and the Alexander brothers. She was like a time-traveller who had jumped forward fifty years and could see how, over just two generations, ideas and practices had developed in unexpected and sometimes, to her, unusual ways.

Like many of my contemporaries who trained in London in the 1980’s, I was trying to understand the difference between the various ‘styles’ or ‘approaches’ to training. As the different teachers, from those very backgrounds, came and interacted with Erika, bringing with them (just like me) their mixture of ‘idées reçues’, misconceptions, insights, discoveries, frustrations and ‘strongly held beliefs’, it became clear that she had a somewhat different way of seeing things.

Some people came with very definite ideas about what they wanted to ask, but she stepped deftly aside in the face of ‘specific questions’. What she was interested in was people, and what made them tick. Who was asking this or that question, and what way of thinking was behind it?  She tried to get through a person’s outer shell and connect with the individual with whom she was in discourse. Some found this frustrating; they were waiting for when they could start getting in and out of chairs. Some felt the rug pulled out from under their feet; they were looking for a rational explanation of this or that idea or to justify this or that point of view. Others found it like a breath of fresh air.

When she ‘worked’ with someone, she never allowed it to become the seeking out of certain sensory experiences. She brought the person into the moment, into their own presence in the here and now. One could see the scales fall from their eyes as the questions or concerns which had been dogging them, and were preventing them from entering into a direct experience, disappeared.

Speaking for myself, still the old questions fought to reestablish themselves in my mind. I asked her to talk about the differences between the major lineages of the Alexander Technique.

“But they are all the same” she said. “Can’t you see that?”

“No I can’t” I replied. “What do you mean?”

“They are all about ‘teaching‘.”

I still didn’t understand. But my curiosity was piqued now, and I wanted to find out what she meant. This took quite some ‘unpacking’ and involved an exploration of events which took place in London long before I was born.

1. “…there seemed to be a tendency at Ashley Place to have the attitude that we were the clever ones and the people out there don’t know anything……..I wanted to find out what else was going on in the world”. Erika Whittaker, Annual Memorial Lecture, STAT 1985. (… back to text).

© 2013 John S Hunter

Other Posts on Being with Erika:

#01, London 1985 – Annual Memorial Lecture
#02, Brighton 1988 – Key Note Address
#03, Melbourne 1991 – “Come for lunch!”
#04, Melbourne 1991 – Tea Ceremony
#05, Melbourne 1991 – Jean Jacques by the Sea
#06, Back in Melbourne, 1992
#07, “Where did you train?”, London, 1993
#09, “Making the Link”, London, 1993
#10,  A Lesson in Stopping, London, 1993
#11, Hands, London 1994
#12, “Yes, but you’re worrying!”, London, 1993
#13, “Nothing special”, London, 1994

July 18, 2013  

Patrick Macdonald: #2, “Yes! That’s it! That’s right!”, London 1983

Patrick J Macdonald was the son of Dr Peter Macdonald, one of a number of medical doctors who strongly supported Alexander.

The young Patrick was sent to Alexander by his father when he was about twelve years old because he was, as he said himself in later years,  “rather poorly co-ordinated”.

Soon after graduating from Cambridge he joined the first training course, which was already up and running at Ashley Place.

My work with him was intermittent over a period of eight or nine years.

He was certainly extraordinary. The awe and respect he commanded in his students – some of whom who had been with him since the late fifties – forewarned one of what one might expect, but the experience of a lesson with him could not really be imagined. His touch transformed you; you became a field of energy which, only incidentally, caused the physical body to move. This approach, the flow of energy – particularly along the spine – seems to me to have been uniquely Mr. Macdonald’s.

His 1963 Annual Memorial Lecture repays careful study, as does his book “The Alexander Technique as I See It”.

Key passages are:

“He (Alexander) found that the body was a fluid thing, its various parts held in their proper relationship by a continuous flow of impulses”

“These impulses, which are analogous to electrical currents, are small, but their effect over years is very large”

“It is possible to demonstrate two forces, or sets of forces, acting in the human body, and, in particular, along the spine”

“Force “A” has a tendency to contract and distort”

“Force” B” has an expansionary or elongatory tendency. It is often referred to, in a general way, as “life”. It produces a “lightness” in the body, which I take to be the natural, though not any longer the normal, condition. This lightness is …. not that of avoirdupois. It has an anti-gravitational direction. I presume that the natural interplay of these two forces brings about the integrity of the body, which sets the stage for proper health.”1

I recall a very early experience in my second or third lesson.

I asked Mr Macdonald if I could work on him. His back, though deformed from some condition he had, struck me as having an unusual quality of ‘aliveness’ – like an animal.

At first I was only aware of the force of gravity acting through him, very strongly, but when I stopped trying to ‘do’ he moved lightly in and out of the chair.

I carried on, rather like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice – not quite knowing how to stop, until he got fed up and said, rather sharply, “Do something else now!”

I put him in a monkey and did one or two other ‘procedures’, which I cannot recall. He did not have a negative word to say. This surprised me as I had heard such stories about him and how tough he was. He just muttered, “Yes! That’s it! That’s right!”

I learnt a day or two later, from colleagues who were training with him, that when he went back into his class he was full of praise for this “student from another course who knows something about the Alexander Technique”, almost using me as a stick to beat his students for their ‘general indifference and uselessness’.

I do not recount this story out of pride. I had little idea at the time of what was really going on in my lesson. Mr Macdonald had, in working on me, brought something to life in my body; he had transmitted a certain energy. I was, for a few moments, able to let that energy flow in me without getting in the way. However, I was not at that time able on my own to ’embody’ that energy; it soon wore off. But the experience did confirm what we were working on daily with Misha Magidov, with whom I was then training; that it is possible to be animated by, and to animate in another, a different quality of energy.

1. The Alexander Technique As I See It, Patrick MacDonald. Chapter 3: Why We Learn the Technique. Published by Rahula Books, 1989.  (back to text).

© 2013 John S Hunter

July 16, 2013  

Dr Wilfred Barlow: #2, Deep Tissue Work, London 1979

I began having lessons, three times a week, with one of the teachers at Dr and Mrs Barlow’s “Alexander Institute”, behind the Albert Hall, in April 1978.

Dr Barlow would try, at the first consultation, to match a new pupil to a teacher he thought would be suitable, and for me he chose Alan Rowlands (who sadly died last year).

Alan was a pianist and a professor of piano at the Royal College of Music, just across the road from the Institute. He had a deep interest in the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti and was involved in the education programme at Krishnamurti’s Centre in the UK at Brockwood Park.

Although Alan had been a pupil of the Technique for many years, he had only been teaching for about a year when I began having lessons. After several months, because he was having some difficulties with me, Alan asked Dr Barlow to come into my lesson one day and have a look at my shoulders.  Working on the table, he was able to very quickly bring about a release of muscular tension in my neck and shoulders, which in turn spread into my arms.

One really had the impression that he understood how the body fitted together and how particular muscle groups worked.

When I got home I could enjoy for many hours the new freedom in my shoulders, and then I got a very deep and intense pain in the lower right side of my abdomen. I knew straight away what it was, as the pain was very localised around the scar from the appendectomy I had some fifteen years earlier, but deep in the tissue. The pain lasted for quite some time, then I felt something let go.

Over the years Dr Barlow helped a lot of people with some very serious difficulties.  At one time he was the ‘go to’ person for many of the rich and famous who wanted to try the Alexander Technique, but he also helped many young teachers and trainees who were struggling with various physical problems and low incomes.

© 2013 John S Hunter

July 12, 2013  

Dr Wilfred Barlow: #1, “You’ll have to come three times a week!”, London 1978

My contact with Dr Barlow was limited but significant. It was undoubtedly because of his book The Alexander Principle that I began to have lessons.

I’d come across several references to the Alexander Technique in various books and magazines I was reading in the 1970’s, but had no real sense of what it was. Being at that time unable to walk past a bookshop without browsing (yes, people did ‘browse’ before Internet Explorer or Firefox had been dreamt of), I wandered into one in Muswell Hill, North London, and came across Dr Barlow’s book. I was impressed with the detail about the head, neck, back relationship and believed there was something of real significance there.

However, reading voraciously as I did back then, my attention was soon taken with something else and I did not pursue my interest until, perhaps a year or two later, I saw Dr Barlow on a TV ‘magazine-style’ programme talking about the Technique.

“Oh! That’s that ‘thing’ I read about and am really interested in,” I said to myself. “Why aren’t I doing anything about it?”

Fortunately for me, my Guardian Angel – or some unknown force – impelled me to not put it off any longer and to go and phone Dr Barlow right there and then. I made an appointment to see him in Albert Court, just behind the Albert Hall in South West London.

Dr. Barlow, I later learned, was the first person to conduct any research into the practical benefits of the Alexander Technique – both during his time in the Army and later at the Royal College of Music.  The former was, perhaps not surprisingly, to lead nowhere, but the latter was almost certainly the precursor of the widespread interest today in Colleges of Music and Drama throughout the world.

When Alexander decided to sue the South African Government for libel, it was Dr. Wilfred Barlow who went to Johannesburg to give evidence.  This was, according to his own account in “More Talk of Alexander”, to cost him dearly:

“I myself had seen a medical career totally destroyed by the South African case, even though in every respect our evidence had been vindicated.

……it was clear that orthodox medicine wished to have nothing to do with me because of the part I had played in Alexander’s ‘victory’.”1

Towards the end of Alexander’s life Dr Barlow was instrumental in preparing the ground for a Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique (STAT).  Alexander himself, however, was not ready to hand over the reins to a democratic society, and STAT was not formally constituted until after the originator’s death.

Dr. Barlow’s book The Alexander Principle brought about a revival of interest in the work after a period of relative quiet.

But none of this I knew in April 1978 as I waited to see him in the large basement apartment in Kensington Gore; home to Dr and Mrs Barlow, to a busy practice with some dozen or so assistant teachers, and to the office and secretary of STAT.

His approach to new pupils, whom he rather treated as patients with the manner of a medical consultant, was to put them – stripped to the waist – in front of a mirrored grid of horizontal and vertical lines.  He would then proceed to point out all the various mal-alignments in the body and the places where there was collapse or excessive tension.

While attending a conference in Australia on proprioception, organised by the late Dr David Garlick, Dr Barlow confessed to my colleague Terry Fitzgerald, that his method was basically to ‘frighten’ the pupils into having lessons.

After I had been suitably ‘frightened’, Dr Barlow reassured me that ” … it will all come loose in time, but you’ll have to come three times a week you know”.

By then, I was ready to sign in blood.

1. More Talk of Alexander, Edited by Dr Wilfred Barlow. Research at the Royal College of Music, by Dr Wilfred Barlow, p191, Victor Gollancz Limited, London 1978.  (back to text).

© 2013 John S Hunter

July 11, 2013  

Patrick Macdonald: #1, “Too serious!”, London 1983

I was in my second or third year of training with Misha Magidov when I had my first lesson with Patrick Macdonald. I had seen him only once before, to the best of my recollection, at a STAT Annual Memorial Lecture.

When I arrived in his basement premises in Victoria, London, he was just finishing giving a lesson to a middle-aged woman who, he said to me, wanted to stay and observe my lesson, if I had no objection. The woman was Rivka Cohen – curious, perhaps, to ‘check out’ one of the first trainees of her Israeli colleague of many years.

Mr Macdonald put me in front of a chair and began to get me in an out of it. He had already ‘sussed me out’ by then, and when Rivka asked him something about me his response was “He’s OK, but too serious!” Then I laughed; something let go and everything flowed freely – so long as I did not try to work out what was going on or even think about it. I just had to get out of the way.

“Ahh! That’s more like it!” he said.

Then he put me on the table, moved quickly around me taking my head, arms and legs; then off the table and into lunges and monkey. Then it was over.

The lesson did not seem very different from what I was used to. As I left I felt somehow ‘the same’ as before,  but with ‘something extra’. A different quality of energy had been awoken in me; an energy to which I did not normally have access.

© 2013 John S Hunter

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