NEWS
DILYS CARRINGTON (1915-2009)
Dily’s long life came to an end on 22 September. It was celebrated at the Constructive Teaching Centre on 8 October.
Advanced for her time, she studied mathematics and psychology in Bedford College in the mid-1930s. She had her first lessons with Alexander in 1939 and joined her husband Walter in setting up the Constructive Teaching Centre in 1960.
Over more than forty years at the school she showed herself to be one of the great teacher-trainers. Most of those who trained with her remember her with a kind of awe-stricken affection. There is something about going back to school which makes us all regress and Dilys could be quite terrifying, in a twinkling-eyed way.
It was in her winding down years, after she had her stroke, that I got to know her best. As her physical powers waned she substituted pure intellect. She liked Alexander’s quote from Sir Charles Sherrington: “…to refrain from an act is no less an act than to commit one, because inhibition is co-equally with excitation a nervous activity.” For Dilys, doing less was a way of achieving more, never more so than in those last years.
Although she was somewhat in the shadow of her illustrious husband, those who knew her were aware of her steely toughness and integrity. She was always her own person and confident in her work. Towards the end, to feel her frail hands upon you, infused with little beyond the strength of her thought, was as deep a lesson in the Technique as anyone has ever given me. It was a privilege to know her and I am just one of a large number of grateful teachers and pupils who miss her deeply.
Another tribute
Kri Ackers was trained by Dilys in the 1960s and has gone on to set up the Alexander teachers' organisation, Alexander Technique Education, in Australia. She pays Dilys a warmly affectionate tribute at www.ate.org.auMemorial donations
As Dilys’ eyesight failed and she was deprived of her life-long pleasure in reading, she was greatly consoled by the talking-books provided by the RNIB. Her family have suggested that a donation to this service is an apt way of remembering her. The internet link for such donations is http://www.justgiving.com/Victoria-Carrington/BOOK REVIEWS
My friend and neighbour Phil Evans has been having AT lessons with me for the past seven years. He found Judith Leibowitz’s book inspiring and wrote this review of it. In addition to his views on the book, it reveals a great deal about Phil’s cheerfulness and fortitude. I think it is of interest to anyone learning, teaching, or thinking of having lessons in the AT.
THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE
Judth Leibowitz and Bill Connington
First published by Harper and Row 1990. Paperback edition by Souvenir Press 1999
This book has a sub-title "THE WORLD-FAMOUS METHOD FOR ENHANCING POSTURE, STAMINA, HEALTH AND WELL-BEING, AND FOR RELIEVING PAIN AND TENSION", while the fact that the name of Kevin Kline is mentioned as providing a Foreword suggests that its precepts are much admired by members of the acting world (Bill Connington trained as an actor at LAMDA).
F. Mathias Alexaner was himself an actor. His own particular quest for improvement started when he begun to suffer from chronic hoarseness, and discovered that this was caused by his pressing his head back and down, so compressing his spine. Over a period of nine years of self-study he realised that all the bad habits he had garnered had helped him to lose his voice (pulling your head back, compressing your spine, shortening your torso).
Judith did, however, starting with metal braces, but the great break-through came when a cousin suggested that she try the Alexander Technique - after which her improvement came speedily. Her limp lessened, her body began to straighten out its distortions, and she started to move more easily. Soon after her coach suggested that she become an Alexander teacher. While aspiring actor Bill Connington realised that if his body was tense, particularly in his neck and shoulders, his voice would be restricted.There follows a list of many cases of people from both sexes and all ages, from those recovering after having experienced strokes or accidents to those suffering from accruing bad habits while becoming elderly. A very intelligent editor exercises often but not correctly, causing immense discomfort to her back, while another person who suffered from performing injurious exercises to his spine pushed two vertebrae out of place.
There are also clues as to the manner in which we might ask ourselves important questions: Where is my head in relation to my neck? How does my head sit on top of my spine? What are my shoulders doing? What is happening to my chest and to my rib cage?
The defining moment in my own life came on Friday 14 February 1975 when on the way home from work as a publishing editor for a company near St. Paul's, I had a near-fatal accident. Taking a corner near St. Pancras on a treacherously wet road, my car skidded into a lamppost. Fortune smiled on me, however, in those successive sombre weeks.I was most fortunate to be taken soon after to University College Hospital; and although the first four months locked me in a coma, I've been so blessed that my sight, my hearing and above all my brain remained little affected. (Daily my wife and some friends used to visit, and read to, me.)
When out of the coma, over the next two years I made a slow but gradual recovery, first in U.C.H. and later at a Rehabilitation Unit in Chessington. And while there I was asked to write a book before the 1978 World Cup: a great inspiration on the road to recovery. This happily has led to my writing further books, as well as short stories and articles.
THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE by JUDITH LEIBOWITZ is a hugely uplifting book which throughout is massively positive. It is a most useful guide which provides advice and reminds a person not to slouch/the manner in which to climb stairs/drive cars, etcetera. By some degrees, however, the most productive way to make use of the Alexander Technique to improve one's health is by one-to-one teaching with an expert.
I have been receiving lessons for several years now, anticipate them with a vast degree of relish, and afterwards feel immeasureably improved - much more loose, much more agile (both mentally as well as physically), and much more focussed - and in control of myself.The lessons are also a huge incitement to think positively about what might be possible, and how I might make the most of my life - although a person confined to a wheelchair.
Indeed someone who suffered from back pain, and was recovering after having a disc removed, offers: Would you like twelve thousand dollars' of advice? Try the Alexander Technique.
Philip Evans
July 2010
Forward and Away: memoirs
Elisabeth Walker
Published by Gavin R Walker 2008
Elizabeth Walker was born in 1914 and is still an active Alexander Teacher. As she says: “ It is more difficult to be balanced and co-ordinated in one’s nineties; aged bones, muscles, the whole functioning system slows down, one takes less exercise so it is even more essential to give thoughts to applying Alexander’s principles.” This book is a charming and copiously illustrated memoir of a dauntingly active life.
Growing up as a girl in the 1920s and 1930s was very different from today; she was apprenticed as a Court dressmaker and had a horrible but mercifully short period as an unpaid seamstress to a Madame Calista in Wigmore Street. But she also became an excellent golfer. In 1937 she met Dick Walker who introduced her to mountaineering and rock-climbing – as well as to FM Alexander with whom he had been having lessons. They decided they wanted to train as teachers with Alexander and got married in 1938 as the war loomed closer.
After the war the boundlessly busy pattern of their lives was established. Interested in art, they met Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth in Cornwall and never willingly passed an art gallery without a visit. They later became friendly with Lee Miller the war photographer and Roland Penrose the surrealist. In 1947, they both qualified as Alexander teachers and Dick became one of Alexander’s assistants while Elisabeth looked after their two young children. Tragedy came with the death of one of their boys at the age of five following a tonsillectomy – a doctor callously remarked to her “I see you have another on the way.” She went on to have another four children.
The following decades were filled with travel – they went everywhere, including South Africa, in trucks or camper vans; climbing whenever they were near a mountain; teaching and promoting the Alexander Technique. They lived in South Africa from 1949 till 1960 becoming increasingly disturbed by the development of apartheid and active in opposing it. Helen Suzman was among their friends and they met Nelson Mandela and found him “a very special man.” They returned to England in 1960 after the Sharpeville massacre.
This is an unpretentiously written memoir by a truly remarkable woman. There are references to Alexander himself and to the big figures of the Alexander Technique, Walter and Dilys Carrington, Bill and Marjory Barlow, Margaret Goldie and others. Her final chapter, “Reflections” repays careful reading by anyone seriously interested in the Technique. But above all this is a celebration of travel, friendship, family, art, and the joy of living life to the full.
It also cleared up a particular point for me. Nikolaas Tinbergen received the 1973 Nobel Prize for his role in developing ethology, the science of animal behaviour. Somewhat to the scandal of the assembled scientific dignitaries, he devoted half his acceptance speech to praising the Alexander Technique which he had recently discovered. His biographer, Hans Kruuk, a scientist and former student of Tinbergen’s, was keen to denigrate this, claiming it was an interest that quickly faded.
His Alexander teacher was, in fact, Elizabeth. She mentions that Tinbergen continued to have lessons from her for a further nine years, that they shared a continuing interest in photography, and that she and her family spent a particularly happy holiday with him in his holiday cottage in Westmoreland in 1980.