The Art of Everyday Movement
Pablo Picasso
It's impossible to learn the Alexander Technique without increasing awareness of how you, and others, move in everyday life. You start to realize that there's so much expression in everyday movement that it may as well be it's own art form.
Making Art with Everyday Movement and Posture
Here's an experiment: Think about your everyday movement as if you're making art. Regardless of the extent to which you're aware of your own movement, one could say your making art as you move and posture yourself throughout your day. For instance, it's often the case that your friends know the art of your movements better than you do; they can pick you out of a crowd from 100 meters away just by the way you walk.
Here's another question along those same lines: If you were a character in a novel how would you describe your movement? Smooth...stiff...light...heavy? Dancers use entire systems to embody words to make art¹, thought it's rare for any of us (perhaps dancers included) to place this level of attention on our everyday actions, movements, and body-language.
Marsha Barsky³, a professional dancer and student of the Alexander Technique stated, " I move all the time, in all activities, and to cordon dance off from my other movements during the day was creating an artificial boundary between me as a dancer and me as a person outside of the studio...(Once I made that discovery) I ceased to think of myself as a 'dancer' or a 'mover' in the studio, and someone else outside of it"²
Picture from Monocle.com
Sure you might not aspire to be a dancer (or maybe you do?), but building deep awareness of your everyday movement can provide a foundation for making real and lasting change in your movement and postures. It's a simple, challenging, yet essential step towards accessing a fuller expression of your movement and self in everything you do.
In the art of posture and movement in everyday life what kind of art are you making?
Resources/ People/ Ideas related to the Alexander Technique in this post
2. Barsky, M. D. (2010). The Alexander Technique and Contemporary Dance: An Interview between Marsha and Robert Barsky. AmeriQuests, 7(2).