Alexander Technique Review 8.23.25
Reviews

Kelly McEvenue*

The Alexander Technique For Actors
(US title: The Actor and the Alexander Technique)
2001 pb, 148 + xx pages, pb, ill., 215 x 135 mm, UK, Methuen. 0413710106.

In print: general.
1. Review by Christine Stevens
2. Review by Andrea Matthews
1. Review by Christine Stevens
First published in AmSAT News, no. 58, 2002. Kelly McEvenue is an Alexander teacher with the Stratford Festival Theatre in Stratford, Canada. For the past eighteen years she has been part of a coaching team that provides ongoing classes to the actors in the company. Trained by Marjorie Barstow and Frank Ottiwell, McEvenue has credentials ranging from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama to the Interlochen School for Performing Arts to a long running production of The Lion King.

Written for both the actor and the Alexander Technique teacher, The Actor and the Alexander Technique offers exercises, anecdotes from actors and examples of how she teaches actors to integrate the Technique into their craft. From the very practical side of things – dealing with the physical demands of performance, voice work, injuries, etc. – to the more intangible but very useful and powerful aspects of character development, McEvenue offers a thorough look at how the Alexander Technique benefits the actor. She takes great pains to make it clear that one cannot learn the Technique from a book and should seek out a certified teacher. For this reason, I think her book will be more useful to teachers who are interested in working with actors than to the general public. While a teacher will be thoroughly familiar with her descriptions of the history and principles of the Alexander Technique, her exercises, examples of the actors’ challenges and anecdotes make up the majority of the book.

It is these anecdotes from the actors themselves that are the most compelling evidence of the importance of the Alexander Technique to the actor. While McEvenue mostly concentrates on the application of the work to the physical realm of acting, she leaves it to the actors to describe how the Alexander Technique influences the art of acting. As one actor discovers, “. . . when I free myself from tension and anxiety, I am able to connect with the subtext more easily so that when I start the rehearsal process I have a whole bunch of stuff there. I have not locked myself into a concept which does not allow something to happen or something to change in the work.”

Teaching the principles of non-doing challenges the actor to have, as McEvenue writes, “a willingness to explore the unfamiliar and let go of preconceived notions of how the experience should manifest itself.” Or, as another actor puts it, “By taking my time and not forgetting to breathe, the emotions came, as opposed to trying to put the emotions on; they were coming out on the breath. Alexander helps me to get out of my way.”

The Actor and the Alexander Technique should prove useful to any teacher interested in learning more about using the Technique to improve and enhance the acting process.

© Christine Stevens. Reproduced with permission.

 This edition © Mouritz 2005. All rights reserved.
2. Review by Andrea Matthews
First published in ExChange, vol. 11 no. 3. Acting, like singing and athletics, is a wonderful “laboratory” for exploring the potential of the Alexander Technique to enhance performance. In this compact but thorough “introduction to how and why we are using the Technique in the theatre world today,” as Ms. McEvenue characterizes her book, we are treated to insights of a teacher with two-plus decades’ experience in assisting actors to embody their craft more joyfully, efficiently, and expressively. The enthusiastic foreword by her renowned colleague Patsy Rodenburg (author, voice and acting coach, and Director of Voice at London’s National Theatre and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama) underscores the reader’s impression of Ms. McEvenue as a gifted teacher and communicator of the Technique.

Along with “the Australian story” which opens her book, the author offers her personal history with the work, including her training with Frank Ottiwell in San Francisco; a description of the role of an Alexander teacher in a theatrical production (based on her work with the Stratford Festival Theatre in Canada, as well as numerous other companies and schools); a concise discussion of the principles of the Technique; an anatomy lesson (illustrated with David Gorman’s drawings); and a sequence of warm-up and exploratory exercises based in the Technique as applied to general challenges of acting. Relating stories from her own teaching, she touches briefly on the relevance of tablework for actors, and on issues in voice work and even singing in opera and music theater. This excellent book closes with a fascinating look at coping with some of the more specific psychophysical challenges for actors, such physical fitness, character work, playing another gender, kissing (!), nudity, period costume and movement, fainting, falling, playing drunk, injuries, and playing on a raked stage or theater-in-the-round. These discussions, while brief, are thought-provoking for teachers as well as students. It would behoove directors as well to read this book, to bring mindfulness and support for the well-being and effortless fluency of their actors into their approach to direction.

This coming January I’ll be leading my first opera workshop with college-age singers, and this book will definitely be on my assigned reading list. As an introduction for Alexander teachers working with actors and for actors (and singer-actors, especially) new to the Technique, I think it would be hard to find a peer for this slim volume.

© Andrea Matthews. Reproduced with permission.

 This edition © Mouritz 2005. All rights reserved.

Copyright 2001-2007 © Mouritz Ltd. All Rights reserved.