Alexander Technique for Actors: Stop Stage Fright & Act Better

WE ARE CELEBRATING OUR 1000TH VIDEO TODAY!!!!!!!!!!!! THANK YOU for supporting us!
Are you struggling with stage fright or feeling disconnected from your body during performances? Join host Lydia Nicole as she interviews world-renowned Master Alexander Technique teacher Michael Frederick to discover how to free your body, voice, and creativity. This deep-dive masterclass explores how to move from a state of fear into a state of presence and poise.

In this episode, Michael Frederick shares over 40 years of wisdom on how actors can navigate the high-pressure world of self-tapes, social media, and live performance. You will learn why the Alexander Technique is not about adding more information, but rather a process of subtraction and deconstruction of harmful habits. Michael explains the science of the nervous system, the difference between the sympathetic and parasympathetic states, and how to stay in the zone even under the pressure of a live audience.

The conversation also dives into Michael's personal journey, including a fascinating story about how a series of unexpected events and a connection between two former prisoners of war helped him secure a spot at the prestigious Old Vic Theatre School. Whether you are a seasoned professional or just starting out, this episode provides practical tools for applying mindfulness to your daily routine. Learn how to manage the stress of modern technology, the importance of staying hungry for your craft, and why walking through the door of the unknown is the secret to electric acting.

Chapters

0:00 Intro to Michael Frederick and the Alexander Technique
3:15 How technology and stress affect modern actors
7:42 Defining the Alexander Technique and the nervous system
11:20 The process of subtraction and deconstruction
15:10 Returning to a childlike state of play
19:45 Managing the fight or flight response on stage
23:30 Bringing the technique into your daily life
27:15 The illusion of multitasking and the danger of end-gaining
32:00 Connecting the physical, psychological, and emotional
36:40 Lessons from the cockpit: Staying on path without criticism
41:15 Paul Scofield and the power of not knowing
46:30 Michael’s early years and getting kicked out of university
52:10 How a red convertible and the blues changed his path
57:45 Discovering the technique in Minneapolis and the Guthrie Theater
1:03:00 The incredible connection between Michael Langham and Nat Brenner
1:09:20 Why staying hungry and vulnerable is essential
1:14:15 The history of the International Alexander Technique Congress
1:19:30 Finding your own style: Daniel Day-Lewis and Rudy Shelley
1:23:05 Final thoughts and how to study with Michael

If this conversation inspired you, please subscribe to Acting Smarter Now and share this video with a fellow creative. You can support our work by buying us a coffee or leaving a comment below about your biggest takeaway from today's masterclass.

#acting #alexandertechnique #stagefright #actingtips #michaelfrederick

Get the Acting Smarter Digital Planner and Course bundle for free until Oct 15, 2025

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:57

I said, Oh, what's that? And she says, Well, Michael, it's an approach to movement where the actor learns to deal with fear and stage riot.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Welcome to Acting Smarter Now. I'm Lydia Nicole, actor, producer, and your career coach, dedicated to helping you break through the noise, own your craft, and take your career from undiscovered to unstoppable. My question for you today is do you know what the Alexander Technique is and how it helps actors' performances? Well, you are in for a treat, whether you know, think you know, or don't, because today I am interviewing Master Alexander Technique teacher. He is world-renowned, Mr. Michael Frederick. And he has taught actors how to free their bodies, their voices, and their creativity for over 40 years. And today he is blessing us with a hybrid interview/slash masterclass. So without further ado, let's go to that interview. So today, most actors are from self-taped to brand deals to social media, spending hours hunched over their laptops and phones. And for actors who feel constantly on, digitally overstimulated and are afraid to slow down, how can the Alexander technique help them become more practical in their body and in what they're doing on a daily uh on a day-to-day uh routine?

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Well, the most important thing is the Alexander technique isn't based on information. It's not like you learn something and then that's it. It's experiential. And that is really important because if you're stressed out, whether it's with technology today and self-taping or whether you're, you know in a play at a theater or uh on a film set, it's all the same reaction. What occurs is people get stressed, and that stress is always based in some type of fear reaction, because what's happening isn't what they want to be happening, and then that triggers the fight or flight response. And that's what I'm a specialist in, dealing with people uh who are sort of locked into that stage fright moment. So it doesn't make any difference the technology. The difficulty, though, is in this day and age, because of technology, people are overstimulated with the negative. And because of the overwhelm that can't exist because it's there all the time, you know, times aren't as good as they used to be in one respect. Things have speeded up, people are pushing, going for end results, they're not really taking time to learn. They want, you know, they think one Alexander lesson is gotta cure them. That's pure rubbish. It doesn't work like that. So my job is to get people to slow down into the present moment, actually, to be here now. And then what happens is that they start to wake up a little bit. I tell them eat at least one meal a day and put all your technology away, put your cell phone away, you know, be there with the food. Multitasking is an illusion. We're species, we can only do one thing at a time. Now we might do it very quickly, so it gives the impression of you know many things simultaneously, but it's not true. It's always, there's always this and then this and then that. Um, but you it's imperative for people, for actors, to see that they don't want the technology, the tail to wag the dog, as the phrase goes. They need to use it. Uh, self-taping is so convenient in one respect because you don't have to travel in traffic crossed LA, which is stressful in and of itself for an audition, you know, or fly to New York or something like that. But so that's a good side. The downside is you lose the uh personal connection when you walk into a room with a casting agent or you know, the whomever it might be, the director, whoever's calling the shots. You know, there's a personal interaction that goes on. And the difficulty with self-taping is you know, it's like you know, you're just there with the tape itself, but you're not really there with another human being.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

So tell us what exactly is the Alexander technique.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Well, I've been asked that question probably a thousand times, and I could explain it differently. Sometimes I say simply it can teach you to do whatever you do easier. And that's the truth. It can teach you to observe habit patterns of stress and tension that you bring to whatever the activity is and learning how to let go of those. Sometimes I'll talk about how our nervous system works. And there's really two sides to our nervous system. Without getting too technical, one side is called the sympathetic, and that's where the fight or flight resides. Uh, and then the other side is called parasympathetic, and that's rest and relax. And when you watch the Olympic people that's going on right now, you can see the ones who have really learned to let go of the sympathetic side, the fearful reaction, and allow themselves to experience the present moment where they're, you know, maybe they're downhill skiing or whatever they might be doing, but they're they're more in the zone, might be a way of putting it. So the Alexander technique teaches you to observe when you're caught up in that fear reaction, teaches you how to let go so that you organically move into rest and relax and more in the zone. And it's very applicable to acting because sometimes I'll be working with actors and they'll do a scene and it really clicked. And I'll I'll say something positive and they'll say, but I didn't feel like it did anything. They comment, I said, Well, that's the point, because you're doing is the very problem that's causing you to move out of the present moment. So the Alexander technique brings you into that present moment. But the interesting thing for people to understand, it is not a process of accumulation. It's a process of negation, subtraction, and deconstruction. It's all about observing your habits of what are unnecessary and learning how to let them go so that what is left over is good poise and balance.

SPEAKER_00 7:50

Give me an example of that.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

Well, I was just thinking of have to tell me the name of the actor, uh Home Alone gentleman, who's the star of Home Alone, Macaulay.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

Oh, yeah, Macaulay Colkin.

SPEAKER_01 8:01

Okay, so he's a good example of someone when he was a young child, he's in the present moment. He's simply there playing, and he happens to have a demeanor that's appealing, and he and he can do the acting. But the moment puberty hits, the moment he changes, he moves into worrying about whether he's right, and he loses the charm. And if you see him today as an adult, you know, that's you know, it's it's missing that quality that the child has. It's oversimplification for me to say to you, I want my actors to move back to childlike state. That's not it. You've got to, though, realize that what Shakespeare called the actors in his troupe, he called them players. He didn't call them actors. And that's a subtle difference because players are playing. And, you know, whenever you see really the great actors, you know, in one respect, they're still playing. There's a playfulness about it. Anyway, so that's that's one way of talking about it.

SPEAKER_00 10:38

I love that. I love that. So you mentioned the fight and flight that's in us as actors, and a lot of times we are in that state because we don't feel confident in what we're doing, right? And so how does the Alexander, what because I I want for people who've never heard of the Alexander Technique to understand the not just the benefit, but the power of being in an Alexander Technique class on a regular basis. What does it do for the actor, not just in performance, but in life?

SPEAKER_01 11:19

Well, of course, because you can't really separate you. I mean, you are what you are, and whether you're acting or whether you're doing a podcast or whether you're teaching, I mean, it's it's still you. But the the thing about it is that the Alexander work is called Psychophysical Reeducation, Mind Body Learning. That's the original title, way back to 1900. And what you learn to do is to observe without criticism how your mind works. And it's actually very normal for any person to get a little scared if the camera's on them, or if they walk out on stage and there's a thousand people there, because we're not designed as a species to be in that type of environment. We're designed to be in our little tribe of extended family and that sort of thing. But the moment we get the other tribe coming in, you know, the thousands of people coming into the room at a theater, it activates a certain fear reaction. If you understand that that's normal, you're not wrong. You don't label yourself as bad, but you see the process occurring and you say to yourself, okay, I'm choosing to be here. No one's making me to be on this stage or in front of this camera. It's my decision. So I'm just going to work on myself a little bit. I'm going to observe my body uh posture, as it were. Because when I'm fearful, I contract down. And again, that's a natural process. Because if we're really afraid, we coil down so that if we're discovered, we can spring into action fighting or running. You see? So there's a useful aspect of that. But whenever whenever it happens because of an audience, we contract in ourselves and it tends to jam the mechanism. You know, the breath gets compressed, that cuts off our emotional life, and it affects our thinking. We don't, you know, we get caught up in negative, am I right? Get caught up in comparison. Oh, I did a good show last night, is it going to be any good tonight? Or that take I did a moment ago was better. Comparison is a waste of your time. So I teach people how to observe how they think, the habits of their thinking, and the habits of their body, and learning how to not be critical. Self-criticism is the lowest level of completely useless. So what you do is you go, hey, okay, I'm scared. You know, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to change it up. I'm making a conscious choice to come back to a bit of length and width, to free up my breath, to allow myself to be here in the moment. I can sense myself sitting here talking to you, with my feet on the floor, my sitting bones on the chair, my back against the chair. I bring myself into I am here now.

SPEAKER_00 14:15

And you can straighten myself up so I can sit properly in my chair.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

But the thing is that, again, explaining this is relatively easy. Implementation is a different thing. That's why there's no quick fix. Anything I say to my actors, anything worth their while is not going to be beneficial quickly. If you want a good voice, you really have to study it. If you want the Alexander technique to be there as a tool, you have to embrace it and go into it deeply. It's like learning a foreign language. If you want to learn French or German or Spanish, something you don't know, you know, very quickly you can figure out right and left, and maybe, you know, waiter, give me the check or where's the bathroom. I mean, that's pretty basic. But my daughter, my oldest daughter, majored in French at Smith and did a year at the Sorbonne in Paris and speaks fluent French. And she really understands it, even on a philosophical level, speaking text, you know, the French, setting it. That takes a bit of doing. And it's the same way here. So I say to my any actor listening, if you want to really up your game, you've got to jump into it completely, take time, and really embrace what you wish to learn. If you want to improve your voice, find the best voice teacher you can find, and just be in that for as long as it takes. You see, probably the greatest voice of male actors in the last hundred years is Richard Burton. Richard Burton was gifted. He was Welsh. I'm going Welsh-Irish then. He was Welsh, but what happened was his stepdad was a voice teacher. No one really knows that. So what happened is that he was immersed in how the voice worked from a very young age. So he ends up with this amazing vocal instrument. I'm not saying to people listening that they're all going to end up with a voice like Richard Burton or a female equivalent. What I am saying is that if you want to improve, you have to immerse yourself into it.

SPEAKER_00 16:28

It almost seems to me in listening to you that Alexander Technique is really a gym for actors, that you go to the gym regularly, just like you would go to strengthen your body, you would go to get your body in the now moment to understand as an actor that you have to be present. And that's where the Alexander Technique really does do a service to actors because we are always in our heads, we are always in our uh uh in a panic mode, and we let that inner critic just dictate to us. Whereas if you are taking the Alexander Technique uh workshop regularly, at least once a week, then you have the tools in your toolbox to help you get out of it quicker.

SPEAKER_01 17:22

No, this is true. You know, and but I I also emphasize that that fear reaction or that uh fragmentation in their thinking happens to everyone. I have a great example. I had a close friend in England, an Alexander teacher, she was also an actress, but her boyfriend was in the National Theater when Laurence Olivier was running it.

SPEAKER_02 17:46

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 17:46

Now, for those of you who don't know who Lawrence Olivier is, you need to know who he is. He's one of the greatest actors. Period. But anyway, here Laurence Olivier is in a play with this young actor, it's some Shakespeare, I can't, I forgot what it was. But what occurred is that this young actor is acting on stage, and then he gets off, and um he happens to look across to the wing on the other side, and there's someone in the shadow shaking, and he's concerned, you know, obviously shaking with nerves. So what he did, he said, Well, I don't have to go on for a long time. I can go down underneath and go and see if I can be of help. So he does that. He goes down and goes underneath the stage and comes up the other side and goes to where this person's shaking, and to his amazement, it's Sir Lawrence or Lord Lawrence Olivier shaking. And the young actor goes up to Olivier and says, Lord Olivier, are you okay? And Olivier pauses and says, Yes, my young man. It's just stage fright. Isn't acting a hell of a profession for a grown man to be in? Now that's the quote, exactly. But the thing from Olivier, but the point being is Olivier also knew how to let that go. Otherwise, he wouldn't be who he was. So that is an example of someone who is at the pinnacle of his profession, but still deals with things that we all do on an ordinary way. I don't think he ever studied Alexander technique, but you know, he had obviously learned how to manage his own fear reaction. But you said something earlier that I want to highlight, and it's the idea of bringing this work into your daily life. Because no matter how successful you are on film or on stage, only a small proportion of your life will actually be on film or on stage. Most of your life is going to be like, you know, you and I out and about, dealing with family, dealing with friends, dealing with shopping, trafficking, you know, if you live in LA, all of that stuff. So it makes sense that if you want to be really good in your profession in front of a camera on stage, you better clean up your life in the ordinary way. And that's the thing I love about the technique. It's making the ordinary extraordinary. It's really how you carry the groceries so you're not pulling yourself down. It's really knowing how to deal with rush hour without getting an upset over it. Learning how to read your own book so that you learn how to let go of one of the phrases in the Alexander technique is learning not to end gain. End gaining means you're pushing for end results. And actors do this all the time. They push for an end result. Don't confuse end gaining with the end game. That's a political concept. So we're going to put that to a side. But end gaining means you need to really stop and be here now and let yourself, if you're carrying groceries, carry the groceries. If you're uh talking to a friend on the phone, don't have your mind on the next activity really be there. You know, if you're cooking a meal, cook the meal. Don't cook the meal to rush off.

SPEAKER_00 21:19

Well, that goes back to what you said earlier about multitasking. And that is a habit I I know I have, and I try not to do it, but sometimes, you know, you go into that, oh, I only have a half an hour and I got to get all of this stuff done, and I can do this and this and this while I'm doing this.

SPEAKER_01 21:40

I'm not saying that you have to do that's true. And you can learn to do this and this and this, but every every time you go to a this, it is that action. You know, if you use acting lingo, there's an action. I'm doing that. I'm cooking. Now I need to make some phone calls because they're important. I make sure the fire isn't going to burn the food, then I make my phone calls. And then, oh, by the way, I need to double check if one of the people coming for dinner is vegan, or if can they eat the food I'm making? I better make a quick call. You know, all of that. You know, you do it. Boom, ta-de-bi. Well, you know, just like that. So you think of it as a series of actions that happen quickly, might be a way of putting it. But what you don't do is you don't, because you have a lot to do, start to pull your head back and down and rush around like that. Because then you will start dropping things, you'll trip over things, you will forget some important point. You know, so you have to say, okay, how can I come back to a sense of myself? So there's a certain inner quietness and poise as I'm, you know, engaging in life. So it really, it's all about the inner work.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

In doing my research, because I've done I've I've taken Alexander Technique classes, but in doing my research for this interview and listening to stuff that you had to say, I never knew how Alexander Technique really brought everything together. You you mentioned the physical, the psychological, and the emotional.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

Right.

SPEAKER_00 23:23

And I've I've I've taken a few of the classes, but I never heard it put that way.

SPEAKER_01 23:28

The reason you heard it from me is that I was trained in England with people, all my teachers knew F. M. Alexander. You know, I was close to the source. And my makeup was I always tried to go as deep as I could into actually what were the discoveries of F. M. Alexander. So I was lucky. It was timing. I happened to live in England a decade. It all worked out. But that's what he was interested in. It was all about self-observing without criticism, knowing how to allow yourself to come back to the moment a little easier, a little freer, not being obsessed with easier and freer either. You know, just sort of getting on with it. And then if you get that little tap on the shoulder in your consciousness that you need to tune into this or that, you do. I mean, the the thing, I'm sure my students all have heard this, but a long time ago, back from about 84 to 94, I taught at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego in their MFA program. They used to fly me down from LAX on the United Shuttle flights back in the day. That was before 9-11. So all that was hanging between me and the pilot and the co-pilot was a curtain. One time I'm in the plane, little plane, not many people in it. The curtain was wide open, and I was up front. I could do this and actually see where the plane's flying. But the interesting thing is this. Every time the plane started drifting to the right, you would hear a sound. Beep, beep, beep, and then they would steer it back to the center. Then after a while it'd start drifting to the left. Beep, beep, beep, a different tone. But then they would bring it back to center. And going to San Diego was going off path all the time. And that's how we are. There's nothing wrong with drifting this way or drifting that way. That's part of learning. But what we have to do is in our consciousness have that little signal that you can bring it back to a centered balance without any criticism. The pilots, I know for a fact, which you know, they were just doing their job and they weren't, oh my God, the plane drifted to the right, I better bring it back, you know. But that's what actors do. They sort of panic. Oh my god, I want, you know, come on, have some fun. Stop wrapping, you know. Don't be perfect because it's an impossibility being perfect. And thank God for that, because if we were perfect, it would be so boring. Because we would know exactly the result of everything. Learning is all about not knowing.

SPEAKER_00 26:12

And that takes me to Marjorie Barlow. I watched a um a video where she was doing some work on you, and she was talking about not knowing, to be comfortable. I'm paraphrasing, but be comfortable with not knowing. Um and I and I found that to be so enlightening because as actors, we want to know, okay, what's the next step, you know.

SPEAKER_01 26:37

Yeah, but you can't know. Right. You you can panic that you think you know, you can write on assumptions. When I lived in England for that decade, I saw all the great actors live. You know, I I saw, you know, Lawrence Olivier we talked about. I saw Paul Schofield, um, Alan Bates, I mean, on and on and on. Maggie Smith, I mean, all of them live on stage. The most exciting of them all for me was hands-down Paul Schofield. Now, people who don't know who he is, they've got to Google him because he was one of the great actors of all time. He won an Oscar, but that wasn't the point. He was dangerous. Every time he was on stage, there was something unknown happening, and it was mesmerizing. I would go back to two or three times to the same performance, and it was still there. And you knew he knew his lines perfectly, you knew he was a skilled actor, but there was something fresh each moment that had that razor's edge to it. So I met an actor at a party who knew Schofield. He was in a play, Osborough, in uh Shakespeare play. I'll think about it in a moment. But the thing is that he was playing this main character, and I asked this young actor, what was it about Paul Schofield that had this electricity? And he said, it's interesting. He said, in front of Paul Schofield are three doors. The door on the right is the door where if he walks through it, everyone pats him on the back and says, What a great actor he is. He doesn't go through that door. The door in the middle maybe is one where he's not going to do it. He sort of backs away, but the door on the left is the important door. He walks through that door, and that door is where all of his fear is, his insecurities. He tends to step away from decades of experience and walks into that feeling of not knowing. And that's where the electricity and danger comes from. Very few actors do that. You know, they avoid that door on the left, they go through the door on the right where they get praised, or they take the middle door and they run away. But the door on the left, that's a different story. And that's what the Alexander technique teaches you to do because you can actually be aware when you avoid, you know, and so um Marjorie Barlow wanted me to understand that from an Alexander viewpoint.

SPEAKER_00 29:25

I'm gonna jump around for a bit. Sure. You started as an actor, and then you discovered Alexander technique.

SPEAKER_01 29:32

When I was 17, I started university at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb outside of Chicago. I mean, I didn't know anything, you know, 17-year-old. I mean, I was so inexperienced about everything. I ended up visiting an acting class and I looked around, and you know, the women were all attractive. That's sort of my 17-year-old. Oh, this is good. And then I looked around and I observed that half the guys were gay and half the guys were straight, so I figured I had at least 50% better shot. That's exactly true. And so I became, I went into the acting class because I was I socially wanted to be accepted. I thought I had a certain cool factor to it. You know, I wanted to meet the women. You know, I made a lot of friends, and that's how it started. Then what occurred is that I I'm not going to go into all the detail getting kicked out of this university and social probation there. It's sort of a good story. But anyway, I go, I ended up at the University of Wisconsin.

SPEAKER_00 30:40

Tell us that story. I want that story.

SPEAKER_01 30:45

I'm at Northern Illinois University, and I maybe it must have been springtime, so I just turned 18 in November. But I had an acquaintance whose father owned the Chevry dealership. And this friend of mine, quasi-friend of mine, had a red Impala convertible. That was a cool car in those years. So one day, it happened to be, I think, either a Thursday evening or a Friday. I'm outside the dorm, and he's got the car there, and there's these three beautiful girls in the car, and he says to me, Hey, Michael, do you want to go to Chicago for the weekend? And it was right at the moment when I was supposed to be studying for my finals in the springtime. But I looked at the car, I looked at the beautiful women and my friend, and then I thought about studying, and I made the choice that any red-blooded American boy would make at that time. I went to Chicago. And so I had a great time in Chicago. I went to Old Town, but I also went to the South Side, which is interesting, and it fired my interest in blues, the Chicago blues. Muddy Waters is as good as it ever gets. So anyway, I discovered that. But of course, I come back to university and I sort of don't do too well in my exams, and so I get kicked out. My father, who is a principal of three elementary schools simultaneously in Harvard, Illinois, did a great thing. He didn't shame me. He just said, Well, Michael, you're going to get a job. So he puts me in a factory with 3,000 people. I mean, it was an admiral television plant and it was hard work. I mean, you know, I'm 18 and you're in this place. I mean, it just, you see how people live in the world, and you sort of woke up. I woke up. So then I got back in the university. But the interesting thing is that this prolonged my time in university by about a year. So instead of graduating in June 1966, I graduated in January 68. Right at the beginning of the year, they had a ceremony at my university in Wisconsin. But I'm even mentioning this because it kept me out of the Vietnam War. So I'm saying to all the actors, you never know what may seem like a dire circumstance, getting kicked out of this or not getting the role in the big film, you don't know, you don't have a clue how that's going to come through in years to come. It could be the best thing that ever happened to you. And I my brother ended up in Vietnam. Now he ended up okay, but you know, I remember looking at a Time magazine with all the pictures of the guys who were killed the last week in Vietnam. They all look like they could be my buddies. I mean, you know, so anyway, so that's the story. You know, so that's you know, sometimes I've learned that you never know how the story ends in your life. And it's so hard on actors. They go for audition, their heart is set on it, and then they don't get it. Or they get shortlisted, and they don't get it, but they consider it an almost win because they were shortlisted. You just have to keep moving forward. That's that's it. You don't compare it to what could have been something.

SPEAKER_00 34:24

Was it at the second university that you discovered Alexander Technique?

SPEAKER_01 34:29

That's right. Well, what happened is at the second university, you're you're lucky at any university you go to if you happen to have one good professor. And in my theater department, there was one good professor, a wonderful man, Dr. Frederick Sederholm, who put me in all the plays, and there was summer stock and put me in all those plays. Two things happen. I'm in summer stock, it's my senior year, I'll be graduating uh you know, that January. But that summer, previously, I'm in summer stock, I'm in Tartuffe by Molière, and I'm playing the young son Denise. And it's in the round, and it's in a tent in southern Wisconsin. It is hot, it is muggy, there's little bugs, you know, and I'm in this particular moment in the play, I have to sneak across stage and hide in a cupboard because I hear Tartuffe coming who's going to talk to my mother, and I'm going to find out because I think he's mistreating my mother. So I hide in this cupboard, and there's slats in the cupboard, and the audience is just this far away from me. They're right there. And I have always felt insecure with my lines because I am dyslexic, and I thought, oh God, do I know my lines? And I'm trying to hear the cue through there, and at the right moment I burst out and I confront Tartu, something like, no, Banam, no, this news must be reported. I was concealed there. I could hear everything. And then I forgot my lines. And in front of the whole audience, God and the director, I go, Oh shit, I forgot my lines. I mean, it was terrifying, actually. And then I sort of got my act together. I remembered the end of my long speech. So I blurted out the end of the speech, and the poor actor who had to make an entrance, rapple to make an entrance, but I got off and I went off to do Tartuffe more. I, you know, it was a run with other plays. But that was a real, that's the first time I ever had that experience in acting, was that deep fear reaction. And luckily, my director, you know, like my father when I flunked out of university, the director just looked at me and shook his head. But he didn't shame me. Bless these people. Teachers should never shame their students. That's a law. But the thing about it is that uh he didn't shame me. I got my act together, I graduated. He gave me the best advice. He said, Michael, I know you want to be an actor, but don't go to LA or New York. There's a thousand guys who look just like you. If you're lucky, you'll do a Coke commercial. And so he said, Go to Minneapolis, St. Paul, which I did. I had never been there, but I saved out$3,000 that summer after graduating, working in the same factory I worked on, worked at a few years earlier. Drove up to sight unseen to Minneapolis, and Dr. Cederholm said, there's great theater there. You have the Trone Guthrie Theater, one of the great repertory theaters in North America. You have a very good theater in the department at the University of Minnesota, and then there's great uh community theater that's professional quality. And then there was a dinner theater called Chan Hassan. He said, You have all of this, and you're in a city that's really a nice city, and you can go there and learn something about acting. I believed him. So I went there. He was absolutely right. I got into the Guthrie Theater, low man on the totem pole, sort of created an apprenticeship thing for me. And I was befriended by the voice movement teacher, a great lady named Fran Bennett, a black lady who just loved me to pieces and let me come to all of her classes. I was so grateful. And one day I walk into her little studio at the Guthrie, and you know, I little push, I go, Hey Fran, what are you doing? She said, Well, I'm walking, I'm riding away to Foyle's bookstore in London for books on the Alexander Technique. And that perked my interest immediately. I said, Oh, what's that? And she says, Well, Michael, it's an approach to movement where the actor learns to deal with fear and stage fright. My gut visceral reaction was, oh my God, Fran, I didn't know anything like that existed. How do I study this? I'm the most freaked-out actor that ever walked the stage, or you know. Well, she said to me something very important. She said, There were no teachers in Minneapolis at the time. Now there are. A hand one or two in Chicago, a handful in New York. But she knew I wanted to go to England to train to be an actor. And she said, just trust. When you get to England, you will find an Alexander teacher. There are a lot of them there. That sense of just trust was so important because I trusted her. And she gave me the confidence to trust what I was doing. And she was 100% right. And and um I mean through the uh through the Guthrie Theater, there was this amazing thing that happened. And I was able to get a place at the at the uh Old Vic Theater School in Bristol. I beat out 2,000 people, but I can tell you I was absolutely um not the best actor whatsoever. But the gods moved the chess pieces around. And what Fran did for me, I I mean, she died about two years ago, but bless her heart. She she said to me when I was there at the Guthrie doing all the Schlepp stuff and carrying Spears and Julius Caesar and the Sprite and Tempest and things like that. She said, I know you don't have enough money to go to England to um audition. Why don't you ask Michael Langham, the artistic director here at the Guthrie Theatre, to watch your audition and if he would write a letter for you. Well, he was a big impressive guy. I mean, I was like literally down here and he was up here. But he knew who I was because I showed up. I didn't mind doing sweeping the stage, as it were. So I asked him, I said, Mr. Langham, Fran Bennett suggests I asked you. I'm so scared even asking him, but would you watch my audition if I apply to an acting school in England? He's British, by the way, and he went on to be head of the acting program at Juilliard. He looked at me and then he said, Yes, Michael, I'll do that. But you have to get permission from the uh head of the theater school. And so I said, Okay. So it turned out there was a Canadian actor named Brian Petchy at the Guthrie. And these actors at the Guthrie are really good. They had trained, many of them Canadian, British, and American who had trained at uh the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts or Central School or, you know, the major drama schools in England. And Brian Petchy had gone to the old Vic in Bristol. And so I'm picking all their brains because I got to know these people. And he said, now you should really go here. And he showed me a picture of this beautiful Edwardian building on the downs on a park. And he said, you know, Bristol's a user-friendly city. It's not like you've never been out of America. Don't go, don't go to London. Go to Bristol. Because you can take a train into London anytime you want. So I trusted again him. I said, okay, so I wrote away to the principal of the Bristol Old Vic named Nat Brenner. And he wrote back, yes, I'll accept a letter from Michael Langham, and I showed Michael Langham that. So I do an audition for Michael Langham, scared to every cell of my body. You know, but I think about the audition, and I realize that at a theater, the most important people are the stage managers, because the uh directors would job in and direct the play and then they would leave, but it's the stage managers that would keep it going. And the stage managers were also many times the ones who organized the auditions at the beginning. So I picked their brains about doing an audition. So I needed a classical and a contemporary and a song. So I thought I need a theme. A theme would be good. I don't know why I thought that, but I picked war. And so um for my classical was Henry Forbes uh with uh part one of Hotspur, this very fiery young military guy, soldier. And so that was good. And then I picked the song When Johnny Comes Marching Home because the real version is quite horrific. It's not a light-hearted song. It's you know, you haven't an arm, you haven't a leg, hurrah, hurrah. You know, it's the real plight of soldiers coming back. So I thought that's got some grit to it, I'll use it. And then I picked uh uh one of the sons in Long Day's Journey in the Night by Eugene O'Neill. So anyway, I did this, and I auditioned for Michael Langham, and I have no idea how I didn't forget my lines, and but I had no, I did no idea really how I did it. I just sort of did it. And he wrote away, and in about three or four weeks later, I get a letter from the old VEC from Nat Brenner saying you have a place. I was ecstatic. It was like winning the lottery. The only reason I'm telling you this long story for the actors who may be listening is I did not know that in World War II, Michael Langham, artistic director of the Trone Guthrie Theater, was a prisoner of the Germans and in a prisoner of war camp. And he was an officer, and they separate officers from enlisted men, and he was in this prisoner of war camp for officers, and he would put on little plays to try to keep everyone sane and halfway happy there, you know, because he was a theater director before the war. But he needed someone to do the rudimentary tech work at these little plays in the prisoner of war camp. And the person who did it was named Nat Brenner, the principal of the business.

SPEAKER_00 45:40

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_01 45:41

Exactly. You had two people who had been in the same prison of war camp. Um I got goosebumps. Yeah, exactly correct. And you're writing about this young kid wanting to go to the school. I jokingly say, I would have had to fall on my face and break my nose in front of Michael Langham, my little audition, to flunk out. You know, but but this is what the message I wanted to give to actors. You never know the condition. You never know that you're someplace and you help someone, and and the lady or the man you help is you know the grandson of a famous film director, and the word gets back. So the thing to do is the main thing is just do the good work and what unfolds unfolds. Don't write the story or the script, because you have no idea of your story and your script. So and again, I that was maybe a bit long story, but at the point I think it's made. And so what I teach with the Alexander technique is I maybe I tell those stories, but I say, what you do is you learn how to come back to presence within yourself in length and width, but you don't look for results. In other words, you want results, but you don't panic and look for them. You know, you you sow the seeds like in a garden, you water them, you hope they grow. Some do and some don't. Some actions we do flower and others don't. That's just how it is.

SPEAKER_00 47:22

You were talking about your your enthusiasm in uh Minnesota and at the Guthrie and your eagerness. And I heard the hunger. And for actors, it is so important to stay hungry because when you're hungry, you you go farther.

SPEAKER_01 47:45

It's essential. I don't know what it is. I always had that in me, you see. And today, when I teach and I've taught thousands of young actors over the decades, some of them have that quality and others don't. You know, they're in you don't go into the idea of being an actress or being an actor for the wrong reasons. You know, to be famous, to make a lot of money, to have people pat you on the back, to get invited to the in parties, that is a waste of your thinking. The only reason to go into it is because you love the craft, the uniqueness of being an actor. That is the reason. Now, if you're good at it, you know, then you know, people will discover that and you will get roles. So you have to be hungry. And uh to be hungry, you have to know what type of food you need to eat to stay healthy. I mean, to use that metaphor. And you need to know what are the best tools to learn so you can keep yourself open. Whether it's meditation or yoga class or you know, having a great collection of solid friends you can be with and talk about all your secrets that you are afraid because you don't you know you're not perfect. I mean, whatever it might be, you have to have things that nourish you, that listen to you, and that allow you to be that vulnerable. Because to be hungry, you have to be vulnerable. You have to say, I don't have enough food. You see. And uh and I need help. You know, I I never had a problem with that. That's a reason. I don't know why. I mean, it's I mean, I I as I mentioned this to you, I just flash back on Fran Bennett, and there was no reason for her to be nice to me. She I didn't have anything to offer, I was just I was an eager student, is what I was.

SPEAKER_00 49:42

I think that is what you offer when we see people who are hungry for the craft or hungry to learn about the business, it's always lovely to be able to share and to assist or to mentor, you know. Um and so I think every every actor, whether they're young or older, need to understand that we go back to I don't know everything. So if I don't know everything and I can stay hungry, I'm gonna learn stuff. You know, you you get to learn because you're asking, you're asking people. Sometimes you may ask the wrong people, but it doesn't mean you stop asking.

SPEAKER_01 50:24

Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. I remember uh I mean we don't have to go into this, but there was one time when I was living in England, I went off to Turkey a few times because I was interested in Sufism, which is the uh sort of I don't know how to put it, sort of the esoteric side of Islam, but not quite. It's more like Zinn that piggybacked on top of uh the Islamic faith. But I I get a lot of trouble with people who study things saying that. But the the thing about it is one of the images that the stories they would talk about, to teaching stories, is the idea that if you have a glass that's full of water, it's pretty useless. You can drink that glass, drink the water, but you have to empty the empty the the empty the glass for anything new to come into it. You know, that's you have to learn how to empty to allow anything new to come in. And so if you're holding on to your habits and the way you think, feel, and move, you're not emptying. You're holding on to the familiar. The familiar will never bring anything new. You have to walk to that door on the left, you have to take the chance. I mean, that's one thing I was pretty good at at those young ages, even though I didn't know that story about Paul Schofield at that time. I was thinking about my Alexander training. After I trained in London with a man named Walter Carrington and his wife Dillis Carrington, fabulous teachers. But I knew it was just the beginning. I it wasn't. Some people train, it was a three-year training Monday through Friday. And I stuck around for a fourth year because I knew this wouldn't be there forever. I better take advantage of it. So four years training in London. But then I got to know this Marjorie Barlow that you brought up, and there was another lady named Marge Barstow, very similar, but they were friends. They all trained with the founder F. M. Alexander in the 1930s in England. But Marge Barstow lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Marjorie Barlow lived in London. I knew these ladies well. They were quite wise ladies. I don't know. I just was curious. Oh, I I always assumed I didn't know. I always assumed maybe I knew something. I know I wasn't stupid.

SPEAKER_00 52:45

I think that that has to do with your dyslexia, because being dyslexic, I have the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 52:52

Right.

SPEAKER_00 52:52

Is like you always feel because of the dyslexia, you always feel like, well, I need to know more. I don't know this. I don't know. And that's that's really a superpower.

SPEAKER_01 53:01

I just want to say when you're young, no one tells you what you're saying. You know, I just reverse letters and reverse, you know, words and so on. But the thing about it is that I found out in hindsight, observing what have happened, that people worked with me because they wanted to teach. And I showed up and said, Hey, I want to learn. And you know, Marjorie Barstow, Marge Barstow, the one in Lincoln, would have both these ladies are long gone. But back in the day, Marge would have sort of a month-long of June in Lincoln, Nebraska at the university. She'd take over one of the frat houses and have classes. She could come and go, and I would show up for at least a couple weeks. But the thing is, there'd be like 70 people in the room. And she would come in and she would, she was, I mean now, you know, she'd be like 80 something, and she would go, Oh, what are we going to do today? I'm so excited to be here. And my job is to wake you people up, she would say. And I would go, yeah, I'm ready. But the thing was is that she'd say, now who has something they want to do? She would want an activity that they would apply the Alexander technique to. So some people may juggle, some people may recite a poem, some people may act a monologue, other people may have all the things for cooking and stirring and this and that. I mean, it could be anything, brushing teeth. But I noticed that people, when she would say that, okay, who has something? People sort of would step back. They wouldn't step into it. So I thought, well, I want a lot of work from her. So if I show up with something, you know, and I say, Hey, Marge, I've got something, she'll say, Well, good, Mike, come on. And that's what I would do. I learned that if you show up and you've got something in your hip pocket that you can apply the work towards.

SPEAKER_00 55:00

And you actually do that now in your classes.

SPEAKER_01 55:03

Oh, yeah, I do. So, you know, I get all my students to bring things. I nudge them. Some people are very good actors or actresses, but they're a little shy. I say it's okay to be shy, that's vulnerable, but you need to step forward into that shyness. You see, I try to do it in a way that I'm not pushy. Marge was never pushy with me, neither or Marjorie, the other lady in London. There's a phrase learning how to learn, which is a phrase I never heard, but I thought, oh, that's an interesting phrase, learning how to learn. I learned that the first step in learning how to learn is learning you don't know. You have to empty the glass. You have to enter into the learning space with a sense of openness. And this dovetails with one of my big influences is Peter Brook. Now, people who don't know who Peter Brook is, he's probably the most important theater director in the last 75 years, if not a hundred years, an extraordinary human being. So anyway, I wanted to work with Peter Brook in Paris because he went after the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he is head of, he went off to Paris and started the International Center for Theater Research. And I did everything to try to do that. It was one of those things that almost came to be but didn't. I mean, I spent time with him one weekend, my first wife, uh who is a theater director, trained at Yale. But the thing was that it just didn't gel. And then I thought, oh, there must be something wrong with me. You know, that sort of thing. I didn't get the role in the movie or the play, something must be wrong. There was nothing wrong. In hindsight, I can say it just wasn't the right timing or the right moment. You see. I mean, I got to know him, I got to talk to him, I uh his lead actor I ran workshops with named Yoshi Oida at his International Center for Theatre Research. He's still a friend, he lives in Paris. But the thing was sometimes what you think is the brass ring or the gold ring isn't. You have to be able to let go of even that dream. And that was a big dream of mine. But the thing about it is what was important is in that timing when I discovered Peter Brook, it had to do with what made him interesting to me. What made him interesting to me is the way he thought about theater. The Seminole book he wrote in 1968 called The Empty Space is required reading for everyone who's interested in acting or theater or film. It's applicable. You know, this idea of the empty space. The empty space isn't just the empty theater space where the story is created, but it's in your mind. You have to have that emptiness to allow that to occur. So I think that you know, all of this stuff leads to the same thing. So the Alexander technique, if I'm in a fear reaction and I go, oh, like this, and I feel a little tight and a little foggy, the moment I illustrate it, my brain goes slightly foggy. I go, okay, well, why don't I just I can have my feelings. There's nothing wrong with my, I don't have to like everything. I can have my feelings, but why not just ease up? I don't have to add that downward drag in my body to be able to know I don't know or know that I disagree. I can come back to length and width, let the breath be there, my mind clears up, I'm here. And that brings up the other thing that you had talked about, the emotions and acting. The emotional life of an actor is directly related to the freedom of their breath. And in the Meisner work, which I'm very familiar with, I've taught for the last oh 40 years at a Meisner school, they have this idea of emotional preparation. Now it's different with Lee Strasberg and Meisner, they had difference of opinions on that. That's not the point. The issue is, is if you're trying to connect up to an emotional moment in a script, movie, or stage, I would go out and I would go out into the hallway of the conservatory, and you'd have people out there trying to juice up the emotion in their system. And they were just creating a lot of tension. And then they made the mistake that that tension they were creating to create this emotion at some point in the play, they thought that tension was part of that emotion. See, that was a trap. And so I would I would point this out. I say, Hey, you guys, why you why do you create all this intention trying to do your emotional preparation? Why don't you create some ease within yourself and just let your breath be free and use your dramatic imagination to get the emotion going, not physical tension in your body. That's a revelation to actors, and that the freedom of the breath is a direct link to that emotional connection. Now, the catch 22 is that as an actor, you're always playing dysfunction. You know, Meisner called it impediments. You know, it can be a physical impediment, a limp or a lisp, an accent. It could be an emotional impediment of trauma of some sort. It can be an intellectual impediment of maybe so dyslexic you can hardly put two words together. But the point about it is that you have to learn to act the dysfunction, but you don't have to become it. In other words, the skill level is giving the impression of what you wish to give. See, the catch-22 for me is my acting teacher at the Old Vic was a renowned acting teacher named Rudy Shelley. If you go to the Old Vic school, you know, he's been long dead, but he's there in his spirit. I'm almost positive he was Daniel Day Lewis's acting teacher because Daniel Day Lewis was at the Old Vic probably about five or six years after I was there. So that meant Rudy was his teacher. So I watched Daniel Day Lewis act, and I can see Rudy, because what Daniel Day Lewis does is he takes his character to the extreme that would almost be overacting for film, but he pulls it back just enough that it fits within the film. What was it, There Will Be Blood or that film that he did? The guy is just big or gangs of New York. I mean, big. But what Daniel Day Lewis does is he holds on to the character when he's off uh you know off the set or uh you know in his dressing room. He, you know, he's playing Lincoln. I thought that was, in my own mind, a conflict because Rudy didn't teach that to hold on to it whenever you know you're having lunch at lunch break. And at the Guthrie Theater, I'd watch great actors burn the set up on stage, and the Guthrie was a thrust stage, so you had two entrances away from underneath the audience, and I would be down in there, and the actors would come off stage and I mean just really dynamic acting, not overacting, just connected and everything. And then they would see me there and say, Boy, I really, I really lit that one up, didn't I? You know, there would be but that wasn't Daniel Day Lewis's style. So then I'm trying to reconcile this. So recently he's been interviewed a lot because of this film he did with his son, and he's quite open. I mean, I like I've never met him, but I like the man. And, you know, he talks about people ask him once in a while. It basically comes down to whatever works for you. That's the key thing. There's no judgment. For some way, Daniel Day Lewis, probably the greatest male actor today, living actor, has figured out something that works. Fair enough. And other actors do a different thing. So I'm what I say to all my actors, find what's real for you. Don't copy some else, someone else's style. Because the moment you copy, you're basically in a fear reaction in yourself. Because you think, well, what I'm doing isn't good enough, but what they're doing is good enough, so I'm going to try to emulate that. And that's where the Alexander technique comes in. I'll say, okay, I want you to back away from that thinking, come back to some length and width, free up your breath, and approach it afresh. The discovery is in the moment, unfolding now.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:20

Trusting. You talked a lot about trusting, trusting what's in front of you, trusting that it's gonna, you you've done the preparation, it's all gonna come out beautifully. You don't have to overthink it, just trust it. And I think that is real key, going back to Alexander technique is you're trusting to release it to let what's supposed to come up.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:47

That's exactly right. You're trusting that you can subtract the patterns of interference. Many of them are security blankets that you hold on to. You can trust that you can let that go and then activate physical intelligence through expanding, lengthening to widen, freedom of your breath, peripheral vision, spatial awareness, all of the stuff, kinesthetic aliveness, and see what happens. You know, I mean, you remember, I'm sure if you and I were little and we were about five years old and we'd lived next to each other, and I said, Let's go out and play, you know, we'd get permission and we would go play. But it would be discovery. That was what was exciting about let's go play because you sort of knew, but you didn't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:29

It reminds me of Schofield in that as you're as you were talking about him, that he was all about going through that third door to discover. You know, it's like I'm discovering something new in this moment.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:45

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:46

And taking, you know, and and and if we if we look at it from his fear was, oh my god, this is something I don't know, but I'm gonna do it. It is that push, right? It's that push, it pushes you. It's like, I don't know what it is, but I'm going forward. Let the fear push you forward as opposed to holding you back.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:10

Well, maybe that answers the question about this idea of enacting the essence of the present moment is really walking through that veil of fear. You have to be curious, you have to be interested, you have to be hungry for what's on the other side of fear. And if you're hungry for that, you'll walk through it. Now, you know, when I was young and at the Guthrie and auditioning for Michael Langham, I didn't have those concepts in my mind, but I had a feeling that if I don't take this step, nothing new is gonna happen, even though I was petrified. So you have to have that feeling.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:45

But the curiosity and the willingness was greater than the fear, right? It was greater because you went in the zone and you know you trusted the instinct to say, my theme is gonna be war. I'm gonna do, and you didn't you didn't know consciously that the universe was saying to you, you this is what's gonna get you in. These two men are connected because of war, and this is this is what you need.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:18

That's right. I mean, I used to joke with my male buddies, you know, back in the day, a long time. But I'd say, you know, what I love more than food, great alcohol, sex, beautiful women, walks, I love learning. Learning to me is the big turn-on. Now the other things are good, but there's something about learning that has always, I have no idea why that's there. The only thing that comes to me is my father's mother grew up in southern Illinois, and my family on both sides, or at least on that side, has been in America since pre-Revolutionary War for a long time. But they were farmers in southern Illinois, my great-grandparents, and they had about six, five or six kids. If you can believe it, every one of them they sent to university or college. We're talking turn of the century. And my grandmother had two years of college, and for a woman, that was a big deal. And in those years, that gave you a teaching certificate. So my grandmother had been a teacher, and I'm this little boy that shows up, her first grandchild. And to this day, I mean, to right now, she's my North Star. If I ever have confusion, I just stop inside and I just tune into her because she loved me unconditionally. You know, it wasn't she was a wuss or passive. If she could say no and don't do that, but I never argued. I listened. I I she had this quality. And so maybe that sustained me in my life. And one of the reasons I love teaching, I never wanted to be a teacher. Both my parents are teachers, were teachers, but you end up, you know, you end up doing it.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:07

So you find the Alexander technique and you start teaching it, and then in 86, you decide you're going to have this incredible Alexander technique. Well, I just think it is it is extraordinary what you've done.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:26

When I lived in England. In the uh 70s, I got I had a knack of getting to know people. You see, I so I knew all the different little factions, the little cliques all the way around London and the Alexander technique world. And many of them didn't agree with the other group, the other tribe, as it were. You see, so you basically had three main tribes. One with the the head uh Alexander teacher trainer was a name named Patrick McDonald. And then you had the other tribe, which was Marjorie Barlow, who happened to be FM Alexander's niece, and her husband, Dr. Bill Barlow. And then you had Walter and Dillis Carrington, who I trained with. But I got to know people in all the groups. Soon after I started training at the Carrington School in Holland Park, my wife at the time, she's no longer living, named Lena Frederick, but a wonderful Alexander teacher and theater director. But anyway, we were young, and uh someone decided they're going to have a party with all the trainees from all the groups. And the people who were organizing the party were trainees from even a fourth group, Peter Scott's group. They were sort of second tier. They weren't first tiered like the others. So what happened was that we went to this party. We were excited. We wanted to meet other trainees. We thought, oh, you know, just bond with people who are going through the same learning process. We show up, and the McDonald people are sitting in that corner of the room, and the Barlow people were sitting in that corner, and the Carrington people, where Lena and I were, that was my wife's name, were there. And then the Peter Scott people were scurrying around to the different groups trying to get people to mix. And I thought this is really sad. You know? Then years later, we graduate. Years later, I moved back to America with Lena. We become great friends with Marge Barstow in Lincoln, Nebraska, because she was the oldest living Alexander teacher in the world. And we studied with her all the time. I mean, she was a tough cookie, to put it bluntly. But anyway, so that meant we knew all these people. And someone gave me$20,000, so in 1982, money, that was a lot of money, to make a basic film. We wanted to do it for Nova on public television, a science program on the Alexander Technique. And I hired this film director to go around in England. I flew him to England and see all the people uh who uh were still alive who knew FM Alexander and so on and so on to see if it warranted a film. And he also knew Marge Barstow in Lincoln, Nebraska because he had already made a short 30-minute film on her. So he comes back from his trip, and Lena and I are visiting him in Lincoln, Nebraska. We're having dinner, and Marge Barstow sitting to my left, and Lena is next to her, and then I'm next to the director and his wife and some friends. And the director turns to me and he said, I I hate to say this, but there's not enough hard science to warrant a film for Nova. And I got, oh God, you know, that$20,000 didn't bear fruit. But then he said, but what you need to do is start an international congress, because everything is so fragmented in the community of Alexander Technique that you need to bring them together. And I tell you, the penny dropped. It's like that. And I immediately turned to Marge Barstow, the oldest living teacher in the world, and I said, if I organize an international congress, would you come? She said yes. And then I used my experience of living in England for a decade with all the other three primary factions, branches of the tree, and eventually they all said yes. So I had all the four primary people coming to this international congress at Stonebrook University on Long Island.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:35

Is that where you were working at the time?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:38

No, I was here in Ojai at that time. Uh because I we uh Lane and I had two little killed kids and we put them in a school here. Anyway, the thing was is that I wanted a place on East Coast because I had to fly off these people fly all these people over from England and they're getting older. So I found a great venue.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:58

And where did you get the money to bring everybody together?

SPEAKER_01 1:13:02

Oh God, I got in trouble with my wife. I put a mortgage on my house to get enough money to do it. But it all worked. I figured sometimes you just have to gamble. It all worked. It came together. When these people, when the Barlows, the Carringtons, McDonald, and um Marge Barstow all walked on stage, in our little Alexander world, it was a bit like having Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Zoriaster, and the Buddha, and you know, all coming on stage simultaneously. People were flabbergasted. Wow. And then they've grown, and we just did the 13th one at the university in Dublin, Ireland.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:44

And you do it every four years, is that something like that, every three or four years.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:49

But I'm I'm bowing out of it. I've been doing it because sometimes you quit. Yes, it's always good to quit while you're ahead. Yes. And the Congress we had in Dublin um was fabulous. And uh and the main purpose of an international congress, it's not an in-house affair like a conference or a you know a yearly event of an organization. You know, it's an opportunity to bring in international people from all over the world who are Alexander teachers or trainees, but then have influences that come in from the outside. You don't you want to have keynote people who pierce the bubble of people's belief systems. They have to come in with the ability to wake people up. So we pick people like that. One of the people I brought in this time was a man named Robert Fripp. He's British. In 1968, he founded a group called King Crimson, and in Hyde Park, London, he played with his newly found group, opening, I believe, for the Rolling Stones with thousands of people. And that launched them. And today he doesn't like the description, Robert Fripp, but it's he probably King Crimson is the most progressive rock band of all time, period. But he came. And I've known him since 1974 or five. And he loves the Alexander technique, and he's and he's a smart guy, and he knows about piercing the bubble and bringing in, you know, so so I bring in people like that. That's the purpose of a Congress. You if you get insular, and that's one of the things about acting training, you know. I mean, you had the the group theater, 1931 to 1941, with Lee Strasberg and Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler and Bobby Lewis and Harold Clerk.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:43

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:43

Yeah, all of them. I mean, how did you get such a talented group? They're young kids, you know, in their twenty early, you know, late teens, early twenties, and a few in their 30s. Franchette Tone was the only successful actor of the lot in Hollywood who helped fund it. But the thing about it is that they had fresh thinking, but then they go tribal on you. You know, World War II happens, and then after World War II, they all come to New York and set up their little fiefdoms. You know, it's absolute the way it was. Lee Strasberg was really the odd man out because the way Stella Adler and Sanford Miser and Bobby Lewis taught were similar as far as emotional preparation. I'm not dishing on Lee Strasberg. He was very talented. You know, but the point about it is that they didn't have it, but they needed someone. If I would have been young and at the right time, maybe I could have gotten all of them to come on stage and to be able to go beyond their own bubble.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:41

So let me ask you a question because with the with the uh Congress, you also have created retreats.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:51

Yeah, I have, yes. When my wife Lane and I moved to Oi to put our kids in the Oak Grove school here, we left England after living almost a decade there. Not quite, but close.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:00

And what brought you to OHI? Why OHI?

SPEAKER_01 1:17:03

Well, it's a topic that maybe we need to do part two or three. It has to do with Peter Brook and a man named Jay Krishnamurti. And Peter Brook knew Jay Krishnamurti and was interested in putting his at that time his daughter in the Krishnamurti school in England, and we were teaching there a little bit. Okay. And that's how we met Peter Brook. Anyway, the long and short is that we were introduced to the teachings of Krishnamurti. And if you think about the anti-guru, the anti-teacher who doesn't want any followers, but it's basically challenging every assumption that you have about anything. And I love that. That was something that I got so excited about. Because you would go in there and he and he would there'd be like 3,000 people in a big marquee tent in England or here in Ojai, and he would say, I look around here and I see so many people, and you look all so happy, you know, and it's such a nice day outside, you know, the blue skies and the sun and the dapple lighting. I wonder why you were here. Are all of you here to let an old man solve your problems? Have you forgotten how to solve your own problems? I mean, just like that. I love that type of teaching. I get excited. I mean, I've had that type of teaching in other realms, in yoga and in other things. So we moved here because of that, to put our kids in a school because the Oak Grove School only had two guidelines, high academic standards. So you got the best faculty you could for reading, writing, arithmetic, and so on. My wife, graduate of Yale School of Drama, taught drama there for 17 years. And then you have equal time with nature, being in nature. That was it. Balance between high academic standards and high quality time in nature. Boom. And that made a lot of sense to us.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:08

And so we moved to put our kids there, but we got sidetracked. You asked me that question.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:13

Where we're uh about the retreat. Um, you had a retreat, you do Alexander Technique and yoga, right? Is that it?

SPEAKER_01 1:19:21

It's initially it was just straight Alexander. What it was was 79 when we moved here. Uh we moved here at Easter time in 79, and we missed all of our friends in England. You know, we had a great group of friends, Alexander teachers, all. And so I remember contacting them and saying, if I organized a retreat in OHI, California in December for the week between Christmas and New Year's, would you come? To a person, they all came. You know, they, I mean, of course, if you know anything about England in Jan in December, January, it's sort of pissy rain all the time and cold. Um, it's sort of dreary. So, you know, they all wanted to come to sunny Southern California, but that was the beginning. Bringing in this whole group of really well-trained Alexander teachers. I must have had seven or so of them fly over, I don't remember exactly, but it was a big success. You know, people showed up from all over uh North America, and even some people from Europe came in. So I said, Well, this is good. I think I'll do this every year. So I would do it every year. Elena and I would do it. And uh at that time, it was always December 27th to January 1st. And then I thought, this is a good thing. Maybe we should do it in the summer, you know. And so we so I rented eventually uh found a venue, Sweetbriar College in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sweetbrier, it's a beautiful campus. It's like a little enclosed campus. It just so I rented that place in the summer for a week, and then it got so popular for two weeks. So that's what happened. But then, and then I started doing them in Europe. You see, I do them now in Tuscany, and I've done them various places in Europe, and I like doing it because it's an intensive, and I like to use the word an immersion because if you really want to learn this work, you want to immerse yourself in it. And that's a way to learn a foreign language, to immerse yourself in it. Go live with a family that speaks French or whatever language you're learning. So I figured bring people together, immerse themselves in the Alexander Technique for a week, and it worked beautifully. So that's how it happened. But I'm sort of changing it now. You're at I'm a very cuss with changing it. I did the last one at Sarah Retreat Center in Malibu, fantastic Franciscan retreat center, after 20 plus years. We did one in December. It was a big hit, but I'm not doing them anymore. And then, dear friend of mine who I love dearly, named Carol Prentiss, who's an Alexander teacher and a yoga teacher. We're going to uh do something different here in OHI. And we're just thinking about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:05

So this year you don't have any plans yet?

SPEAKER_01 1:22:08

No, no, I do. I'm going to be in Tuscany.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:10

Oh, okay. When?

SPEAKER_01 1:22:12

Tell us the end of uh June, and I'm looking up the dates, and I think I sent you a flyer, maybe Yes, and I will put it in the description below for people. It starts on the 29th of June till the 4th of July. 29th of June. Okay. The 4th of July. And I have a fabulous group of teachers. One of them I was talking to this morning, Sylvia Sferlazzo. Everything you could dream about an Italian Alexander teacher, perfect English, speaks about five languages, but has an accent that just I could just hear her talk all day. And um but really a good she's also a yoga teacher. So we sort of married breath-centered yoga with the Alexander work just to add an activity.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:59

So you have the retreat. Now you also teach for uh actors who are watching. Uh, and I'm asking for because we have an international group of actors who watch our podcast. Um you you do the classes Friday on Zoom and then Saturday live.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:18

Friday on Zoom, and people come in from overseas because in a in American time it's 9.30 in the morning. So European time that's 6.30 in Europe and 5.30 in England. And um I've been doing that with Carol Prentice for a long, long time. Um and the in-person is for the actors in Greater LA, uh, is at uh this studio, this acting conservatory on Lincoln Boulevard, uh between right near Lincoln and Wilshire.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:57

In Santa Monica, at the Baron Brown Studios. Yes. It's also at 9 30 on Saturdays.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:03

No, that's different. That's nine, starts at 9 a.m. to 10 30.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:07

Yes, so they could do it via Zoom if they're out of the country and if they're in Los Angeles or anywhere near Los Angeles, they could come Saturday mornings at nine o'clock. Well, I am so grateful to you. I'm grateful for you. I'm grateful that my daughter has taken your class because she's raved about you so much. Um, and she's the one that brought us together. So I am grateful for that. But this has been such an eye-opener, and I love I love what you teach, I love how you teach. Um, I I've gotten to have some of your teaching because I I've been studying through Lexi with Julie, um, who we love. We love Julie.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:54

Julie teaches with me, teaches with me out of the days.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:58

Yes, and she's amazing. She is.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:00

I call Julie just a good-hearted person. She's just a straight shooter. I just adore her.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:07

And she has the best hands ever. Right. The best hand. I love Julie.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:13

Yeah, I do too. She's uh great to teach with in person. Carol Prentice is fabulous to teach with on Zoom.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:21

Oh, good. Okay, okay. This is good to know. I'm gonna have to get the information so we can put that in the description as well. So I just want to say thank you so much. And I I want to hear more stories. I know we were gonna talk about Stella, but you had so many other great stories that I think I think we're good. We'll have to do a part two. Oh my goodness, Michael Frederick is amazing. 40 years of teaching and still going strong. For those of you actors in Los Angeles who want to study with Michael, I've put the information in the description below. And for those of you that aren't in Los Angeles and have something to say, please let me know your thoughts in the comments. And if this show uh helps you in any way, support us by buying me a coffee. And if you can't buy me a coffee, at least share the videos with some friends because it really helps keep these powerful conversations going. Don't go anywhere because coming up, we have another great episode to give you tools that will take your career from undiscovered to unstoppable.