In the beginning of 2004, Karen Wentworth, head of the Alexander Technique Studio in Wandsworth (ATS), asked me to give a series of talks which we christened Easy Engineering. A year later I was invited by Walter Carrington and John Brown to develop these talks for the Constructive Teaching Centre where I work as a teacher. John was particularly interested in the neuroscience underlying the Technique; what exactly we AT people mean by “directing” was something we often discussed.
Over the following seven years, these talks have expanded and diversified. As they have been delivered, and repeated over a two-year cycle, new facts, subjects, and insights have been incorporated into the series. Dilys Carrington encouraged and contributed to their development during the times I sat and talked with her after the end of the school teaching day.
Dilys could be particularly enlightening about the famous people she had met. Having some doubts about Aldous Huxley’s reliability at one stage, I asked her what she thought of him. “An awful show-off” was her forthright comment.
The purpose of the talks has been three-fold:
- To look at the life and work of the famous people, especially scientists, who had connections with the AT. We have a rich heritage here and it is important to have a sense of how we are rooted in it;
- To provide some simple engineering and physics background on topics such as force, stress, pressure, centre of gravity, mechanical advantage which are relevant to the Alexander Technique. Some knowledge of these concepts helps us understand what is happening to the body as it goes through its various activities;
- To examine current scientific topics where they contribute to our developing understanding of the AT.
The titles of the talks are in the sidebar. Clicking on the title takes you my notes for the talk, with the date on which they were revised or the talk was given.
In some cases, the accumulated revisions mean the talk or topic has expanded well beyond its allotted time slot of and has never been fully heard by a student’s ear. References to my sources are provided at the end of each talk so that anyone who is curious about the topic can check me out or look further into the topic for themselves.