Last week I was working with young professional musicians in Bucharest as part of the Ad Musicam programme run by the Romanian Cultural Institute. It’s a real privilege to be spreading the word about the Alexander Technique among Romanian musicians, and it is the third time I’ve worked on this programme (here’s another post with some fantastic participant feedback from my previous visit).
This time, I tried something new with them: an ‘Alexander étude’ which I’ve explained in detail elsewhere. The short video below is an absolute joy to watch if you understand what is going on – and frankly baffling if you don’t! So I’d definitely recommend reading my explanation of the Alexander étude first.
Participants were also given quite a lot of hands-on work – as much as I could fit in – and I took ‘before and after’ photos as well, such as the ones below:
Now, the images above are quite literally a ‘snapshot’ of the changes going on with the Alexander Technique. In no way do they tell the whole story, yet they are interesting nonetheless (As an aside, I would certainly set things up differently were I to repeat this exercise in future; for example, by making the camera angle consistent, taking the ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots on the same day, and stopping baggy clothing obscuring changes).
Finally, here’s a photo of an exercise participants enjoyed: exploring flexibility of attention while playing in ‘virtual’ ensembles and holding ‘virtual’ instruments. This kind of attentional flexibility is a core Alexandrian skill, and you might like to read more on this topic here.
