F M Alexander

Frederick Matthias Alexander was an Australian. He was born in 1869 and
grew up in the small town of Wynyard on the North Western coast of Tasmania. He was the eldest of eight children. Several significant themes stand out in Alexander's childhood. Alexander had a deep and enduring relationship with his mother who was a very strong character. She acted as the local nurse and midwife, saddling up her horse and racing off to help, when the local doctors needed her. She was self-taught and from her he learned self-sufficiency and the determination to find his own solutions to the problems of his life.

He was an extremely difficult child to 'school', partly because he didn't respond well to formal education and was an awkward pupil, and partly because he suffered from respiratory problems in his early years. The teacher of the local school offered to tutor Alexander in the evenings and this was the only education he received. Possibly this was a blessing in disguise because his individualistic nature and enquiring mind were not thwarted by traditional teaching methods. Alexander was an intelligent child and won prizes for the school, despite his lack of attendance. Because he did not attend school, he was able to indulge his love of the country and in particular his passion for horses. He spent a lot of time with horses, and developed the skills of careful observation of their movements and the handling of these sensitive creatures, skills that were to be helpful to him later.

His other passion was for the theatre, and particularly for Shakespeare. When Alexander was seventeen he began his first job in the office of a Tin Mining Company in Mount Bischoff. He was sorry to leave his country life behind. He occupied his spare time with amateur dramatics and teaching himself to play the violin. After three years he had saved enough money to go to Melbourne, where he stayed with an uncle.

Of this time he says,’For three months or so, I was chiefly interested in seeing and hearing all that was best in the theatre, the art galleries and in music. By this time I had decided to train myself as a Reciter'. Also, at this time Sarah Bernhardt was touring Australia and he went to see her twice a day.

Alexander embarked upon his career as a recitationist with some success. Like many actors today he sought out engagements, and when times were hard he took odd jobs here and there to earn some extra cash. In time he gained recognition and he formed his own theatre company. But his career as an actor was marred by a tendency he had developed to become hoarse and lose his voice during a performance.

It was this difficulty that was the turning point and, from another point of view, the great opportunity in Alexander's life. He tried every way he could to solve his voice problem. His doctor advised him to rest his voice before a performance, and on one occasion he rested his voice for two whole weeks before going on stage, only to discover that he still became hoarse during his recitation. His doctor could offer no further advice although he agreed that it must be something that he was doing when he was reciting. Alexander decided to find out what he was doing on stage that was causing him the problem.

At this point Alexander embarked upon a process of self-observation that went on for about nine or ten years. He worked with mirrors, developing in more and more depth and detail an understanding of the use of the self. He discovered what he was doing that caused his vocal problems, and how to develop improved co-ordination throughout the body by means of his method or technique.

During this time he continued to live the life of an actor, but increasingly other actors would come to him for help with their voice and breathing problems, and Alexander's career began to move from acting to teaching others his unique technique. He taught
in Melbourne and then in Sydney where for four years he was the director of the Sydney Dramatic and Operatic Conservatorium, and then in 1904 he travelled to London to make his technique known there.

In London actors flocked to Alexander for lessons and he became known as ' the protector of the London theatre'. His pupils included famous performers such as Sir Henry Irving and Viola Tree. Sometimes he would work with the stars in their dressing rooms before the start of the show. There were many famous and respected people who became devotees of the Alexander Technique, including George Bernard Shaw. Aldous Huxley, Sir Stafford Cripps, and later in America, John Dewey, and many more.
During the first world war Alexander went to New York to teach, and so spread the knowledge of this method further abroad. After the war he returned to England, but moved backwards and forwards between England and America for the next few years. His brother Albert Redden Alexander had learned to teach the technique and worked alongside him until 1924 when 'AR' stayed in America and Frederick Matthias, or 'FM' as he was called. settled back in England, where he established a school for children from the ages of three to eight, based on the Alexander principles.

He began the first training school for teachers of the Alexander Technique in 1930. Being a self-taught man he was not skilled at teaching others to teach what he had learnt through self-observation and experiment, but slowly new teachers of the Alexander technique became qualified and the teaching of it became more widespread. The Second World War disrupted his work in England and so once again he transferred his entire practice, including the school for children, to America, returning to England in 1943. Four years later at the age of seventy-nine he suffered from a stroke which paralysed the left side of his body but through using his technique he regained conscious control of this within a year, and returned to his teaching. He continued to teach until his death in 1955 at the age of eighty-six.

This brief outline covers the essential details of Alexander's career. I have omitted a great deal, such as his unhappy marriage to an Australian actress and his long and drawn out, although eventually successful, libel action against the South African government. He never lost his passion for horses and horseracing. Equally he never lost his love of the theatre, and at one point he thought the best way he could train teachers of the technique was to teach them how to perform Shakespeare, and he presented 'Hamlet' at the Old Vic and 'The Merchant of Venice' at Sadler's Wells. Unfortunately most of his student teachers had little talent and no desire to act and from the reviews of these plays this was apparent. As an actress myself, I think it is a pity that Alexander never produced a play with professional actors, during the latter part of his career, as I believe this would have resulted in an exciting evolution of acting technique. But if his work had developed in this direction there might never have been a generation of new teachers to pass on his discoveries, discoveries which are important for the wellbeing of the human race as a whole.