Welcome to the first lecture. In this lecture, I'm going to talk about unexplained Alexander story and his discovery. I will also demonstrate what happened to Alexander when he had his problem of voice loss. So you'll be able to see what was happening. And this will help you understand the technique and how you can apply it to your lifestyle. So here's a picture of Alexander when he was younger.
And here's a picture of Alexander when he was older towards the end of his life. Alexander was born in Tasmania in 1869. He was the oldest of eight children. And as a young boy growing up he had two passions. He was He enjoyed acting, performing Shakespeare plays and reciting, and horses. When he was older and he left home, he started his career as a performer and reciter in Hobart in Tasmania.
And later a year or two later, he moved to Melbourne in Australia. And there. After a year or two of performing and acting, he ran into a problem. He used to lose his voice on stage during the performance. So this bothered him a lot, and he went to doctors and experts trying to find a solution for his voice loss. After while nothing seemed to work that the doctors gave him and all the advice he took nothing seemed to work so he decided to investigate him.
As to why he was losing his voice on stage. So the first thing he did was he got two mirrors, he got one mirror, then he got a second mirror. And then he added a third mirror to watch himself while he was reciting to see why he was losing his voice and why he was going horse. So the only thing that he could see in the mirror was that when he went to recite and project his voice that he would throw his head back like this. So hopefully you can see that when I'm trying to project my voice, my head is gone back onto my spine. So when he saw this, the only thing he could try was to stop throwing the head back like this.
Also, you can hear when my when I throw my head back, you can hear there's more stress on the voice box. Okay. So when he stopped when he when he looked in the mirror and he stopped throwing Head back, or he stopped the tendency of throwing the head back. He didn't tend to lose his voice. So he tried this on stage, the next time he performed, and he found that when he stopped throwing the head back, he didn't lose his voice join the performance. So he solved this problem himself.
So he was very happy that he discovered this. And he started to help other actors and performers with with the same thing. He started to show them that if they stopped throwing head back and tensing their neck, that their voice would improve, their performance would improve, everything else would improve. He also went to the doctors and show them this and they were very impressed by what he discovered and how he developed his technique. So they told him to, they told him that he should go to law And this was back in the 19, early 1900s. And they told him that he should go to London to get more recognition for his technique.
So that's what he did. In 1904. He went to London, and he set up a practice there and he saw a lot of actors performers. He helped people with breathing problems, back pain, all types of physical and mental problems. The technique helps them. So this is how the technique started.
In 1910, he wrote his first book called man's supreme inheritance. He wrote this book to get more publicity for his technique and also to protect it from copyright. In 1923, he wrote his second book called constructive conscious control of the individual in 19 14, he went to America to escape from World War One. And he taught in Boston and New York. Then in 1932, he wrote his third book, which is called the use of the self, which is an excellent, which is a story of how he how he established his technique. And then in 1941, he wrote his fourth and final book called The Universal constant and living.
He then died in 1955. In 1931, he started to train teachers in London. And since then he's trained generations of teachers. So, that's the basic story of Alexander and how he established the technique and how he developed it. In the next lecture, I'm going to go into To what he calls primary control, one of his principles called primary control. And what that is, is that how the head bounces on your spine in an activity affects total functioning.
So just like when Alexander was reciting and throwing his head back and he started to lose his voice, he found that when he stopped interfering with the primary control of the head to the spine, that his voice wasn't lost. So in the next lecture, we're going to talk about primary control. I'll show you what it is and explain about what it is and you can practice this for yourself.