Wednesday 5th October
At the end of last week’s session, our lecturer, Laura briefly told us that somebody would be coming into the next 3 dance sessions to teach us Alexander technique. Between the last session and this week’s session, I did a small bit of research into what Alexander technique is as I had never heard of this before. I found that over the series of sessions we would be gathering a wider awareness of our bodies and how not to put more strain and pressure onto our bodies.
To start off the session, we carried out a warmup to get the blood flowing to the muscles quicker so we were able to move quickly for the first part of the session. Included in the warmup were some exercises from previous weeks but also new exercises. We carried out the breathing exercise which helped to open up our lungs and also some stretches which helped to gently loosen the muscles. A new exercise that we carried out consisted of sitting on the floor with our legs straight out in front of us and our arms were loosely on top of our legs with palms facing up. Slowly, we started to pull one shoulder back but as we did this, we pulled the whole side of the body with it. This acted as if we were a puppet and we being pulled by the strings. This helped to loosen up some parts of the body such as the shoulders and the neck.
Once we had finished the warmup, we moved onto the main activity. Before jumping straight into the Alexander technique, Laura decided that it may be a good idea if we show Anne, the Alexander technique teacher, what we have been doing within the past few lessons. As a class we decided to show her the 4 spot improvisation task. However, this was done much more quickly than the previous week.
We started off the Alexander technique by Anne talking to us about where you should be placing your weight within your feet. We learnt that the weight has to be evenly distributed within the 3 main points located on the sole of the foot. These points are in the centre of the heel, at the ball of the foot underneath the big toe and at the ball of the foot underneath the small toe. We then tried this out by walking around the room slowly, concentrating on distributing the weight evenly throughout the sole of our feet. I found this quite easy as it is easy for me to walk using the 3 points. We the0n started to think of the position of the head and where the end of the spine is. This helped us to think and we were then able to balance our head on top of the spine. We were then told to walk around the room with our head straight, balanced on the top of the spine and the weight disturbed evenly on the soles of the feet. However, as we started to walk around the room, I started to find this difficult because we were not allowed to move our heads and they had to be looking forward. I found this hard because I have limited peripheral vision meaning that I can’t see outside my tunnel of vision. This meant that we had to adapt the exercise so I was able to turn my head so I could see where I was going.Here is a picture of me and Angel walking around the room thinking about the 3 points on the soles of the feet and the head balancing on the top of the spine:
The next thing that we started to look at was sitting down. When Anne said that we were going to look at how we sit down, I did not think that there was a correct way to sit, however I learnt that there is a correct way in this lecture. When we sat down on chairs we talked about how often we use our sitting bones in daily life. We came to the conclusion that we don’t use them very often. To gain better posture and to minimise the amount of strain you put on your body, you should use your sitting bones.Here is a picture of us when we were thinking about the sitting bones and posture:
The last activity that we did consisted of lying on the floor. For this activity, we lay on our backs with our knees bent because this makes the arch in our back smaller and is more comfortable. Anne came round to us individually and assessed how much support she thought we needed underneath our heads so that our spine was straight. For the next session, she said she would bring a few books to place under our heads to support the head a bit more. Once we had been lying on the floor for a few minutes, we rolled over onto one side. Once we were led on the side that we thought was the comfiest, we curled up by bringing our knees into our chest. This exercise stretches and lengthens the spine. We also did this exercise the other way by moving our legs away and behind us and our arms above and away from us. This also helps to strengthen and lengthen the spine.
From this lecture, I learnt a lot of new things about the body such as balancing the weight evenly through the 3 points on the soles of the feet and how to lengthen and stretch the spine. This information will be very useful to me as we go through the course this year. I will take all of these pieces f information into consideration when improvising my dance piece.
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