Amoeba Party – a.k.a. Actor Grad School

Lie on the floor and pretend you are a single cell. Roll, flow, seek and react with your entire cell membrane. Remember you have no bones, no eyes, no brain and no parts. You are one.

We usually introduce the amoeba exercise* to our acting M.F.A. students in their second semester. They’ve had five months of Alexander Technique. They understand the central concepts of inhibition, direction, primary control, the force of habit and faulty sensory perception. They can locate their atlanto-occipital joint and they know the fundamentals of skeletal anatomy. They are aware of when they are using themselves with habitual tension and they know how to redirect their energy to find more ease. But all of this knowledge can make students a little stilted, and a little too intellectual.

In contrast, wholeness within a fluid morphology is our reality. Fluidity is easier to grasp when we remember that muscle tension is maintained by habit, not by a property of the muscles. Our bones float suspended in a web of connective tissues, and the connective tissues themselves change from a solid state to a gel, depending on force and heat.  Like taffy, if you pull sharply on connective tissue it will harden and snap, but if you warm it and work it with smooth broad pressure it will stretch. Your nose is connective tissue. So is your Achilles tendon. So is much of the rest of you.

Although we have heads and tails, eyes and brains, bones and nerves, mouths and anuses, we are still much more liquid and continuous than we might imagine. What happens in your big toe just might affect your shoulder.

The amoeba, as it turns out, is a good metaphor for embodying fluidity and wholeness. And it doesn’t hurt that amoebas have no brains.

*I learned the Amoeba exercise from my teacher Frank Ottiwell.

 

Body Project Blog: Where Thought is the Active Ingredient.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Entanglement

Hands on direction from Betsy Polatin

Entrainment Chain via Alexander Technique hands. Photo by Jordana del Feld

Students often wonder how the light touch of an Alexander Technique teacher can communicate so much. Simultaneously, you might experience a wave of relaxation, an emotional sense of being seen and accepted for exactly who you are. Suddenly your breath becomes easy and your spine seems to grow tall. When you move to walk around the room, you feel inflated with helium.

You might ask the teacher what they are doing with their hands. They might say something like, “I’m having a conversation with your nervous system,” or, “I’m seeing your potential, and I’m projecting that,” or as Marj Barstow famously proclaimed, “Just a little bit of nothing.” It’s true that Alexander Teachers spend three years learning to communicate through a form of touch that is empty, yet energetically directed. But perhaps the reason students experience so much through so little lies in the way that we, as a species, entrain with each other.

Physical entrainment, on the extreme edge of the spectrum, can show up as a neurological disorder called mirror touch. In mirror touch a person feels the detailed body sensations of other people. For example, as a friend chews food, you might feel unwelcome sensations in your own mouth. However, a lesser degree of entrainment is quite normal, and is probably related to species survival and social intelligence. When people gather together, breath rate, heart rate and movement pace all synchronize. As we converse, our faces automatically match expressions, and our emotions follow. One is left wondering if a feeling stems from within or is absorbed via emotional contagion.

Physical entrainment might explain how the light non-manipulative Alexander touch can do so much. For a more detailed exploration of this phenomenon, listen to the new podcast Invisibilia – Entanglement To experience effortless improvements in movement and posture, contact an Alexander Technique teacher.

 

Body Project Blog: Where Thought is the Active Ingredient.