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Training for
the Artist
Learning to
achieve your highest creative potential
 As a performing artist, you
place unusual and extraordinary demands on your body, yet your
mind may be more focused on producing a specific tone, playing
notes correctly, achieving a certain technical level, or
trying to communicate a specific meaning or message to your
audience. Like an athlete, you may have unconscious habits of
psychophysical misuse that impede your ability to realize
these goals. You may be more successful if you learn to
prevent these harmful habits, than if you practice longer and
try harder. Over-striving often leads to injury, as well as to
feelings of frustration and self-criticism. The original love
for your art form can become a burden rather than a joy. The
first aim of the lesson is to help you unlearn unconscious
habits that block your ability to move with skill and ease.
 In addition, as an artist you
must develop a finely-tuned system for transforming the
personal and non-visible realm of your inner emotional world
into acts of skilled physical coordination that are understood
by your audience—whether dancing, speaking, singing, or
playing an instrument. Again, however, you may be hindered by
habits of psychophysical misuse that not only limit your body
but limit your ability to connect with, and to better
understand, your own inner experience and thus to allow this
experience to flow into action.
It is often a surprise to
performing artists to discover that lessons in the Alexander
Technique not only heighten their physical coordination and so
extend their technical range, but they also enable them to
better understand their emotional and creative self, and how
to expand the full expression of that self into movement,
sound, and language.
Everyone wants to be
right, but no one stops to consider if their idea of right is
right.
F. M. Alexander
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