BY CHLOE CHUNG AS TOLD TO JESSIE WANG, LEAD WRITER (COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL AWARENESS)
We recently published an interview with Alexander Technique teacher-trainee Chloe Chung, exploring the practice of this management and healing strategy for those using their bodies to make music. You can read it here for a refresher if you like, before learning how Chloe came to build her life around the practice. The Alexander Technique is used to identify and replace inefficient physical movements in performers.
A story I would like to share is about my personal journey of learning to occupy my full dimensions in the world, which I guess is another way of saying ‘cooperating with your design’ — a definition I’ve used to explain the Alexander Technique.
One night in 2015, I attended a performance workshop; one week before I was to play in the semi-finals of the National Classical Music Competition. Cathy Madden, a Seattle-based Alexander Technique teacher as well as acting coach and director, talked in this workshop about how ‘your body does what you tell it to do perfectly’ — and how she had ‘banished’ the words ‘concentration’, ‘focus’, ‘trying’, and ‘relax’ from her teaching studio.
Whenever she had seen students try to do any of the above, they either had too much or too little muscle tone in their system to do their desired task efficiently. It’s a common thing to say before someone goes onstage and they feel the butterflies in their tummy, but the instruction ‘relax’ can sometimes be dangerous, because it is exactly this energy they need to transfer into their full expression.
I thought this concept was intriguing. When it came my turn to play in the workshop, I asked to perform the opening of my piece. I experimented with a new plan Cathy gave me – ‘to invite the audience to be with me as I lead them through the sonic journey of this piece’.
Suddenly, my sound came out exactly how I wanted it to – and I found that the colours I wanted to create were just happening with much less effort on my part.
It was a really weird experience. I wasn’t doing my old thing of alternating between telling myself to ‘focus’ and ‘relax’. As a result, there was this sense of timelessness and flow, and being fully present in the moment.
That night, I realised much of the tension I’d often experienced came because I was literally ‘squishing’ my muscles in response to trying to play ‘expressively’, and then telling myself to ‘relax’– two pretty opposing messages! Because I really wanted to express, musically, I was tightening my muscles between my head and spine.
When Cathy noticed this occurring more in performance than my individual practice, she pointed out that expression didn’t equate to tension. This began to unravel a knot of unhelpful messages that I had been telling myself with good intention.
Shortly after this, I burst into tears. Not because it was hard to do, but because I had released a lot of pent-up stress from that realisation – I had been muscularly ‘holding myself together!’.
Another perfect message from my body!
One week later, I prepared to go on stage to perform in the National Classical Music Competition, and experimented with her advice. Suddenly – in this moment before going on stage — I caught myself midway through my old routine, telling myself to ‘focus’ and then to ‘relax’.
I quickly remembered I had a new warm-up, which allowed me to acknowledge my feelings of excitement and energy as being welcome; not things to be shut down by my muscles.
Every part of my body felt electrified and ready to go, and as I stepped on stage, I welcomed the presence of the audience as an extension of my spatial dimensions. As I started playing, I felt my intentions turn into sounds and into the journey of the piece, which became elevated to a place that it had simply not reached in rehearsal – it was as Cathy had described, ‘the moment of performance as being transformative’.
The audience charged the space with their energy – and I was also charged by their presence, which culminated in what felt like the most rewarding musical experience. I had personally never felt such a high in a solo performance, though I have had it many times in orchestra and chamber groups arising from the collective group energy.
To know that this ready, energetic performance state was one that I could cultivate on my own — as a skill, like any other skill you could learn such as cooking or playing tennis — was one of the most important lessons I have ever learnt. The Alexander Technique became like a newfound muscle allowing me to be my full self in everyday moments, where I’d otherwise find myself tensing because I was trying too hard to be expressive, or simply to be right.
I realise now that this is something I had unconsciously learnt from watching well-known ‘expressive musicians’, but it wasn’t really suitable for my own body structure. I was trying to be someone else in the moment of performance, instead of feeling safe to occupy my own spatial dimensions and express the music in the ways I had practised at home.
This has improved my relationship with music so much, but more fundamentally improved the relationship I have with myself. I’ve always assumed it was my physical and mental limitations or my lack of practice that caused me to not play as well; that performance would always be slightly more painful for me. But the gradual unravelling of those patterns has resulted in an overall improvement in my performance practice, which is still continuing today.
Find out more about Chloe and her training in Alexander Technique on chloechung.net. Chloe will perform with her Sidere Trio at the Neutral Bay Uniting Church, 20 July.
Read more about how the Alexander Technique works in this interview about the practice.
Images supplied. Courtesy Katrina Choi.
