The Alexander Technique

Judith Leibowitz (1920-1990) was an American author and teacher of the Alexander Technique. Judith Leibowitz was 14 when she was paralysed from the waist down with polio. After many months of immobilization she undertook an intensive regime of physical therapy and could then walk again with braces and crutches. She graduated from Brooklyn College with a major in biology. She started having lessons first with Alma Frank and later with Lulie Westfeldt. She then trained as a teacher with Lulie Westfeldt and qualified in 1949. She began teaching in 1952. In the early 1950s she went to London and had six weeks of daily lessons with F. M. Alexander; she returned two years later for another course of lessons. In 1964 Leibowitz co-founded the American Center for the Alexander Technique (ACAT) with Debborah Caplan, Frank Ottiwell, Joyce Ringdohl and Babara Callen. They started a teachers training programme of which Leibowitz was Director until 1981. Leibowitz started teaching the Alexander Technique at the drama department of the Julliard School in 1968 and continued this work until a few weeks before her death in 1990. She also taught the Alexander Technique at other theatre schools, including The American Conservatory Theatre, Arena Stage, and the Guthrie Theatre. Bill Connington is an actor, writer and Alexander Technique teacher. He has devoted his career to helping performers, including Broadway actors, Metropolitan Opera singers, and renowned instrumentalists, manage their art through managing themselves. The former chairman of the board of the American Center for the Alexander Technique, Bill is a lecturer in acting at the Yale School of Drama and has taught performers at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, the Juilliard School, and the Actors Studio MFA Program.