The Language of Teaching Coordination: Suzuki Training Meets the Alexander Technique

The room resounds with the recorded beat of Japanese drummers as line after line of actors moves rapidly across the floor. They are "walking" in a stylized way--hips, knees, and ankles bent in parallel position--and stomping at each step. Many of them show signs of strain: their faces and necks tight, their breathing restricted. I can see that their limbs aren't moving in the ways they intend because their movements do not correspond with the exercise. Some of them have even stopped blinking. Even though the Suzuki instructor has demonstrated the "walking" movement with all the leg joints bent and moving, many of the actors barely bend their hips and knees. As an Alexander Technique teacher, responsible for teaching students how to move with their best possible coordination, I was faced with a challenge. I had been asked to co-teach this class expressly to help eliminate the excessive tension from the exercises that comprise Suzuki training.

In this context, coordination is the ability of mind and body to work together efficiently to reach a goal. Good coordination is the quality we recognize when dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov enters a stage or when an elite level athlete completes a play. Baryshnikov's coordination allows him to move his little finger and compels us to watch that one movement; we are in awe when Ichiro Suzuki sees a fly ball and makes the movements required to get his glove and the ball to the same place at the exact same time; or we marvel at Venus Williams's ability to slam a tennis ball exactly where she wants it to go on the court. When thinking and moving processes are not functioning together optimally, one of the results is excessive tension, which leads to diminished coordination. Although Suzuki training is physically demanding and requires great mental focus, I saw nothing in the Suzuki exercises that would inherently cause excessive tension. My many years of experience teaching the Alexander Technique to performers have taught me that misconceptions about coordination and/or about the task of the exercise are often the cause of diminished performance. Performers often lack information about how the body works, and they often misinterpret abstract or metaphoric language. A common example, not directly related to Suzuki: Many people think their lungs are literally in their stomachs from breathing instructions that say, "Breathe into your belly," rather than, "Let your belly move as you breathe." This particular misconception about breathing often results in a very stiff rib cage, limiting air and reducing resonance. My experience with this and other misconceptions compelled me to investigate the language of Suzuki instruction and the students' interpretation of that language.

The investigation has been fruitful and provocative--fruitful because it offers ways to make the Suzuki training more effective and more beautiful to watch; and provocative because it questions language choices commonly used in teaching Suzuki and other disciplines. While the interaction between language and coordination is necessarily individual to each student, three generalities have emerged from my classroom experience. First, anatomically accurate description of movement is more effective than using non-anatomical images and creates less interference in the coordination. Second, when performers confuse thought processes with muscular contraction, their coordination deteriorates. Finally, the "electronic language" with which most of our students have grown up affects and interferes with their understanding of psychophysical processes.

In this essay I first describe the Alexander Technique and Suzuki training, and then provide specific examples illustrating the interaction of language and coordination in this context. I present these in the order in which they were discovered pedagogically--first, more physically oriented processes; then, more mentally oriented processes; and finally, the new "electronic language." Although the examples will be Suzuki-specific, I would suggest that the implications extend beyond this particular example. My premise is that anyone who teaches movement, voice, or acting can benefit from these ideas in selecting language to...