Century of Slapstick #62: Fatty and Minnie He-Haw
11 hours ago
This is the former location of the blog of the Andrew Wood Acting Studio in Los Angeles.. The blog is now located at http://www.andrewwoodla.com/blog. This old location has been left in place as an archive.
The Alexander Technique educates the student's sense of kinesthesia or proprioception. This sense is used to internally calibrate one's own bodily location, weight and to judge the effort necessary for moving. The Alexander Technique also educates how to more fully carry intent into action with reasoning and constructive thinking techniques. These may demand a re-evaluation of the priority and value of motives that drove the goal-setting of past habits that the student must resolve. All Alexander teachers advocate the value of effortlessness and practical structure.
Alexander Technique teachers believe that humans have a built-in proprioceptive blind spot: people become habituated to repetitive motions. Repetitious circumstances lead people to create habits as they adapt and learn. These habits are both deliberate and non-deliberate responses that include physical movement patterns, coping and learning strategies. The advantage of adapting is that behavior and learning becomes simplified; it becomes possible to meet a given stimulus or interpretation of circumstances with a ready-made reaction. As a person adds one habit onto another, the disadvantage is they may train themselves to also repeat unintentional side effects - the tension, over-compensation and cumulative stress that the Alexander Technique addresses.
Adapting has a further serious drawback: habits diminish sensation. Using the habit decreases the importance of paying attention to perceptual differences. Also, sensory systems can flood from accommodating too many contradicting habits and intentions. From disuse or flooding, perceptual sensitivity shuts down and eventually becomes dull and untrustworthy, just as skin becomes numb if the same spot is rubbed. Loss of perceptual awareness encourages mistaken interpretations for the need to choose a particular response. In a panic, all opposing habits can fire off at once, pulling in all directions, sometimes without the person noticing it has happened.