The Performer’s Body: Part III. “Alexander Technique and the ‘Kinesthetic Sense.’”

New podcast folks! Check out this excerpt from the collected writings of F. Mathias Alexander, genius/creator of the renowned Alexander Technique.

Here the book’s editor explains the revolutionary challenge that Alexander faced: to introduce into common perceptions of physical work this idea of a “kinesthetic sense” - a sense, as important as any of Aristotle’s five senses, that feeds us information about how we use our bodies. Any acting, voice or movement teacher I’ve met has bemoaned how disconnected we as a culture are from our bodies. Alexander was trying to awaken that repressed awareness of the corporal self.

Tangent: Why are we so disconnected? Too overdeveloped a sense of reason? Has enlightenment over-triumphed? Has industrialism disconnected us from primal manual work, severed us from the fields, removed us from the physical world, to the point that we have so little awareness of our bodies that specialists like Alexander had an issue to address in the first place?

I am a firm believer that physical intelligence begets intellectual intelligence. On that note, some thoughts from William Wordsworth, who writes about the beautiful lands of Tintern Abbey:

“…These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As in a landscape to a blind man’s eye;
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owned to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration…”