The Dance of the String Quartets:
An Interview with Jane Kosminsky

by Nancy K. Ford and Alberta Moraine

[Jane Kosminsky, a renowned teacher of the Alexander Technique, spoke with Nancy K. Ford in a lengthy telephone interview, and then invited Alberta Moraine to visit two Alexander classes at The Juilliard School in Manhattan. Ford and Moraine collaborated on the resulting article, presented here. AMC]

A practice room at Juilliard.
Photo by Alberta Moraine. Used with permission .

Jane Kosminsky considers the Alexander Technique the "performer's secret weapon." As an Alexander student, you incorporate the technique gradually into your daily behavior, and, gradually, your habits get better. You are learning use. And if you use yourself better, you perform better. As Kosminsky says, "You even take a bow better!"

The Alexander Technique is no stranger to the performing arts. F. Matthias Alexander (1869 - 1955) developed the technique to help himself, a Shakespearean actor in Nineteenth Century Australia. Having lost his voice at a crucial moment in his acting career, he retreated for nine years to experiment with his own voice and body. He found that he could learn to "inhibit" - to undo habits. Kosminsky supposes that Alexander had been imitating other monologists of the time, in their declamatory, blustery style - outthrust chest, shallow breathing, booming voice. On his own, Alexander learned to free his neck, release his head, and then speak - a re-sequencing of events that made all the difference. He was asked to teach, and eventually established an international following. Beyond the world of the stage, Alexander's work gained recognition. His experimentation was so rigorous and thorough that, years after his death, Alexander's empiricism was singled out for praise by Nicolas Tinbergen, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, in his Nobel acceptance speech. The famous educator John Dewey, himself an Alexander pupil, wrote several introductions to books by Alexander, lauding the Technique.

While clearly intended to help performers with their instruments (their bodies, their voices, their violins, etc.), there is something evanescent at work as well. Asked if this was a kind of poetry as much as exercise, Kosminsky replied, "It is poetry - you are moving your mind." She talks to her students in metaphors. One example: "Your head is in an elevator, and it's going up." She lives quite comfortably among the mixtures of tangible and symbolic elements of the Technique. For example: "When you think the image, you change how the muscles fire and you change the brain chemistry. But the first thing that happens is in your imagination."

On the telephone, Kosminsky walked me through the following exercise (first determining which direction I was facing [North], and making sure I was not holding the telephone receiver awkwardly [I was using an earpiece]): "Your shoulders are widening. Your right elbow extends out, as if to follow a ball rolling down the street. Your forearm is made of stretchy saltwater taffy - the kind they used to sell at the beaches. Your hand is open, with kabuki fingernails that extend so far to the East they are in the next town. From your shoulder all the way to your fingertips you give up excess tension." After a silence, she asked if I could feel a difference between my right side (the ball-taffy-kabuki side) and my left. I considered for a moment, and said yes - the left side was jealous. It had only been words, passed from Kosminsky to me, but distinct physical - and, perhaps, emotional and spiritual - effects had resulted.

Observing Kosminsky's classes at Juilliard was a real pleasure. The students (all about twenty years old) brought an obvious intensity to class and, one assumes, to their professional lives generally. They seemed to "get it" that this is a world-class institution, that they are a part of it, and that this education is theirs for the taking, if they supply the time, determination, and hard work.

First, I sat in on a small group of string players who meet Kosminsky once a week for Alexander training. Only two were present that day - Rebecca Browne, violin, and Nancy Johnson, viola - and they were able to focus intently with their teacher. To begin, Kosminsky distributed masonite squares to place over each molded plastic seat, in an effort to improve the seating. Each student then worked on standing up, walking, standing up while holding their instrument, playing from memory, and - new to me - playing while lying on a wooden table, head and neck supported by a low stack of paperback books. While lying on the table and bowing her instrument, for example, the student was to see in her mind's eye the torso lengthening and fanning out - with no need to envelope the body forward, around the instrument and the bow. In each situation, there were small things to notice, identify, discuss, repeat, and understand. During the hour, I could detect subtle changes, a sense the students were somehow elevated, less plugged in to the earth.

Over time, they will incorporate those small changes into small improvements in technique, enhancing their musical lives. It was clear that this was a learning experience of many incremental small stages. Kosminsky asked them during the coming week to see what it feels like to stand and play using what they had learned, but on fast, tricky, music. She explained the need for relaxation, especially when playing fast, by comparing it to talking fast, which is much harder to do with a tensed-up mouth.

Kosminsky also pointed out many other ways the Alexander Technique can help these musicians when they are not playing. She suggested that, as Nancy practices for her student recital this spring, she practice the moments before she begins to play: while she is sitting, holding the instrument; breathing; arranging the sheet music on the stand; tuning up; consulting with the other musicians; standing up; raising her instrument; etc. Kosminsky explained that those bustling moments of preparation - what she calls "The Dance of The String Quartets" - involve many small movements, which can be fine-tuned with the help of the Alexander Technique to release and stabilize the musician before a note is played.

At the end of class, Nancy and Rebecca stood facing each other, a few feet apart, and played extemporaneously from Pachelbel's Canon. Playing very casually, their focus less on music than on neck and head and shoulders and balance, they reminded me, if I had needed reminding, that they are talented and accomplished musicians. I felt a surge of excitement, sharing vicariously for a moment the rush I imagined it must be for them, to have achieved so much by the age of twenty and to be preparing with such determination and joy for decades of better and freer musicianship.

Later in the afternoon, Kosminsky taught a group of dancers - men and women, eleven in all. She announced that this was their first class of "Two Weeks to a Better Extension." The dancers, an exuberant, lively group, maintained a playful tone throughout most of the class, each student dipping down occasionally to intense, wordless concentration when a physical challenge arose. (For those of us not trained as dancers, "extension" is that thing dancers do by raising one leg and extending it outstretched, to the front or to the side, in one fluid line from the hip all the way to the toes, so that the altitude of the toes is ear-level or higher.) Or, in that Kosminsky-Alexander poetry that cropped up frequently in these classes, "It's extension, not holding-up-the-leg." A few minutes later, she told a student that if you are using your joints well in these extensions, there's not much feeling - not only is there little if any pain, but "it's pretty empty."

A few words of encouragement here ("it will work if you don't tuck your pelvis"), of caution there ("don't try this with an arabesque"), of detailed analysis there ("release your torso up as the leg comes down"), and Kosminsky had worked with each student in some way, as their extensions got longer, more powerful, and more graceful in turn. As with the string players, the dancers seemed not only to be learning these small, important technical adjustments, but also to be loving that they were here, in this class with Kosminsky, building their professional lives.

After visiting Kosminsky's two classes, several things impressed me: the focus and involvement of the students was remarkable; Alexander Technique applied equally to the specific - and quite different - needs of string players and dancers; and their teacher was in her element, enjoying herself, self-assured and generous with her students. Kosminsky has also taught acting students for years at Juilliard. She has even taught acting students how to dance. She says performers from all the arts have been able to benefit, and that differences among art forms and individual personalities are all embraced within the Alexander Technique.

I asked the viola student, Nancy Johnson, if the Alexander Technique was changing her life, and she replied, quite seriously, yes it is, because she can play without pain. Playing with less pain can obviously translate to a longer and more rewarding career. Besides, all performing artists share an awareness that physical injury can end a career abruptly. Kosminsky herself says she would be dancing still, if injury had not made her stop. She works a lot with dancers, in part to keep in touch with their world of faith, hope, and dedication. Asked if she missed the stage, she replied at once: "Miss performing? I loved it. Who are we kidding - just put me on a stage with my false eyelashes...." She speaks fondly of the moment in Paris, as a young dancer, when she went into the theater by way of the "artist's entrance" for the first time. We noticed in her bio that she danced as Nureyev's partner in Paris, London, and Madrid, which suggests she passed through many artists' entrances during a remarkable and successful career.

Asked why dancing engenders such passionate loyalty when it seems to involve so much pain, even when there is no injury, she pauses and tries to explain: "You are called to do it. Nothing is more challenging, or exciting. You must work hard, and deal with injuries if they come." Why is it all worth it? "Because the physical doing is so much fun." A bit of a paradox emerges: For dancers, tantalized by the physicality of their art, the Alexander Technique - a thinking process - provides valuable, sometimes crucial, support. "They will not be completely free of pain, but they will learn how to be efficient," Kosminsky explains. In fact, the Alexander Technique shows up worldwide in programs in hospitals and other organizations with injury-prevention programs.

In her own work, Kosminsky tells of a recent Alexander student: A young American dancer, on an important audition in Europe, had seriously injured her knee. She came to Kosminsky for lessons, not to improve her knee - she had surgery and physical therapy for that - but to prevent the rest of her body from compensating. In other words, she would heal overall more quickly, if the knee were the only thing damaged. Kosminsky stresses that Alexander teaches use, helping musicians, dancers, and actors to use themselves well as performing artists. A happier anecdote tells of the student in the Chicago production of Fosse who credits Kosminsky's teaching with allowing him to remain in such a demanding show for as long as he has.

Kosminsky explains that, at core, the Alexander Technique is an educational tool. "It's all about thinking," she says. When you learn Alexander, you practice thinking, and you learn "inhibition" (which, in Alexander, is a good thing). By learning to inhibit habitual responses, you free your head, neck, spine, hips, shoulders, so you can use your body effectively. A certain understanding of anatomy is needed, but the science is neither difficult nor subtle. "It's ninth grade science," she says. Neither is it about manipulation, as with chiropractic or therapeutic massage. Instead, Alexander students learn to choose to say no to the habitual response that harms them and limits their artistic expression. Over time, the student adopts an alternative movement, stance, bowing or breathing technique, displacing the old habit. For example, if you find that you always tense your neck, Alexander would teach you how to undo that habitual posture - how to inhibit it, calling on metaphor and repetition to reconfigure yourself.

FM Alexander's years of solitary research are summarized in four principal directives, called the concepts of good use. Here they are, in Kosminsky's words:

1. Let the neck be free - so the head can move forward and up, away from the top of the spine.

2. Allow the torso to lengthen upward, and widen - fanning to its full width.

3. Allow the legs to release away from the hip joint.

4. Allow the shoulders to release out to the side, and float on the ribcage.

The directives share images of opening and relaxation - in fact, nowhere is the student instructed to make a muscle do something. The first of these - neck free, head released, to rise and move - is the most important. Kosminsky always begins new students with head and neck awareness (part of what we have begun to call the anti-gravity policy). While it might seem reasonable to begin at the ground and work up, the power of metaphor trumps reason here. New students find themselves walking, standing, and sitting higher, more freely, because of exhortations to release the neck and let the head move up. She can make sitting in a chair sound interesting: It is a study in how you use your joints - how free your head feels, how your lower back is involved, how much energy you feel balanced through your legs, releasing through to the ground.

Before starting out with all this imagining, it is important to be well-informed: For example, Kosminsky points out that the top of the spine, at the neck, is much higher than we might assume - it ends where the two horseshoe-shape hollows in the back of your head end, which is at about the height of your eyes, or the top of your nose. The neck, extending all the way up to eye level, is holding, or balancing, the head, which pivots above. An important term to understand is "head forward." To someone unfamiliar with Alexander terminology, "head forward" might mean jutting the neck and head out to the front, so that your chin is far forward, as on the prow of a sailing ship. Not with Alexander. It is more a sense of pivoting your head up and down while it balances on the top of the spine - located inches higher inside the head than we may have imagined it to be. Through Alexander Technique, Kosminsky says her students learn to "re-balance" the head, in order to have "more head ahead" (translation: so there is more head in front of the spine than behind it).

To her string players, she suggests they recall how long the clavicle really is - how far outward from center they can extend their shoulders, their shoulder blades up and out, freeing the bowing arm, loosening their thumbs, softening their grips on the bow. She reminds them to bring up their instruments only after they have stood in one surge, up diagonally and out of their seats, the head forward and up, the neck free, with no compression on the spine. The hip joint, she reminds her dancers, is actually in front of the tailbone. And, on a related point, she stresses to all her students, quoting a colleague, "The waist, like the unicorn, is a mythical creature." In other words, "It doesn't matter what your bones are doing, as long as you stop using this (the waist) as a joint." Her dancers can eliminate excess movement and effort, doing only what is necessary, by remembering "the leg muscles begin at the torso."

Kosminsky clearly loves teaching her students - at Juilliard and elsewhere - many but not all of them performing artists. She finds the work gratifying, and delights in the power it can transfer to the student - free of any special costume, equipment, or other paraphernalia, able to be practiced in any situation, with or without other people. Alexander Technique as she teaches it rewards the truest kind of self-interest: Students find the practice so gratifying that they continue to work with it not because they ought to but because they want to - because life is better when they do.

She enjoys being able to reassure fiddle players: "You can not injure your neck and shoulders. This message comes as news to some - the potential for strain on neck, shoulders, arms, elbows, wrists, and hands is great, and resultant physical problems are common knowledge among violinists and violists. "Then," Kosminsky says, "they go and practice Alexander because they want to play better."

A bass-playing student of hers shuttled between his bass teacher and Kosminsky. The bass teacher told the student to "play more from his back," a directive the student did not know how to interpret. With Kosminsky, the same instruction became, in translation, "as you hold your instrument and bow it, think to yourself that your torso is lengthening and widening, and your ribs are fanning outward, and stay there, comfortably." This seemed to do the trick - at the next bass lesson, his teacher found noticeable improvement.

As much as she still misses the stage, she has identified something in common with the heightened awareness of live performing. As an Alexander teacher, she remains alert, assessing from moment to moment the student, the class, and her agenda. The work is unpredictable, which keeps it interesting. Rising to the challenge in each class resembles performing, in that way. At any suggestion of her mastery of Alexander, Kosminsky demurs, saying "the tool is profoundly simple," and "I do nothing - it's the students who work," and "I've been doing this fifteen years - maybe in another fifteen years I'll be pretty good."

An attempt at a close, hard look at the Alexander Technique reveals the fugitive nature of the practice - it can seem difficult to pin down. Luckily for its students, however, the practice can be beneficial, regardless. The idea seems to be to put supports in place, so you can relax and focus on what you do best. The way to put those supports in place is to practice imagining. Then physiological changes result from repeated imaginings. When asked, "How do you describe that process?" Kosminsky replies enigmatically, "How do you describe dancing?"

Her private students include dancers, actors, and musicians, as well as older adults from the worlds of business and culture. She recommends that new students try Alexander for at least ten lessons - time enough to practice and to begin internalizing the subtle shifts and metaphors encountered each week.

Her final words of advice? "Divest yourself of all that interferes with the music (or dance) - in a strange way, it gets very personal in front of all those people [in the audience]." "Be patient with yourselves." And, perhaps our favorite: "Breathing is permissible."

A practice room at Juilliard.
Photo by Alberta Moraine. Used with permission

Postscript from the Authors:

After we compared notes and assembled this article, we recognized paradoxes, or oppositions, populating the landscape of Kosminsky's Alexander Technique: In order to be practical, use your imagination. For physiological results, focus on what you are thinking. For thoroughgoing physical change, do nothing but concentrate on imagery. To be at your best in public performance, engage in very private and personal, subtle exercises. In order to relax, pay very close attention to small shifts and realignments. Asking for more out of your performance means asking for less, or: "You want more less." Not initially intuitive, perhaps, these oppositions, we have found, can grow on you. NKF and AM.

About the Authors:

Nancy K. Ford is a freelance writer and poet who makes her home in Madison, Wisconsin. For the October 1999 Newsletter, she interviewed Rita Wissinger about distance learning in public schools.

Alberta Moraine writes frequently for the Newsletter.

The authors wish to thank Jane Kosminsky, the Juilliard School, and the string players and dance students who generously provided us access to their learning experiences.