I teach in order to keep learning. And learning is my passion.

I believe that our role as educators is to midwife the inherent intelligence and creativity of every student. I appreciate that people possess multiple intelligences; that intuitive, embodied knowledge is as profound and valuable as cognitive, literary knowledge; and I attempt to create a learning environment that engages them both. As a choreographer, I know that movement has the capacity to reveal profound truths, and that the body is the site of wisdom, knowledge, and imagination. Therefore, I encourage artistic, danced, painted, and written responses to material alongside the more traditional forms.

Education is a political, personal, and psycho-physical-spiritual act.

I practice transparency in my teaching, openly interrogating sources of authority both internally and externally. As an artist whose work has been devoted to social justice, heart, spirit, and beauty, these values shape and inform my choices in the classroom.

While I have aspired to fluency in the language of the academy, I also insist on speaking and writing more accessibly. I am interested in bridging the gap between academic theory and street theory. I am personally committed to theory that emerges organically from practice.

My classrooms are sacred spaces where individuals come together, creating a community of learners. Here we are able to take risks, reflect, and build relationships between our lived experiences, our dreams, and the wealth of knowledge and experience others have refined before us. My classes are interactive and collaborative laboratories of learning. I feel I am acting most skillfully when the substance I am teaching is actually discovered by the students, when our collaboration is so seamless that my offering of material and their discovery is barely distinguishable.

Teaching allows me the opportunity to learn in community.

My pedagogy has been influenced by the work of Paolo Friere, bell hookes, and Jack Mezirow. I am mindful of my own choices, often sharing my intentions and methods with learners, as well as the principles that underlie my choices. I often answer questions by engaging the class in an investigation, encouraging students to honor their own creativity and insight, offering my own experience as an option. I am, however, not afraid of asserting boundaries, standards, and opinions. I believe it is helpful for students to know where I stand, what constitutes a respectful environment for me, and what other types of standards they may be held to outside my classroom. They interact with my particular information while being encouraged to define themselves on their own terms. I am interested in rigor and integrity as companions. I want to challenge students with work that is extrinsic to them as well as that which arises from within. I hope that through experiential learning, they will gain a deeper understanding of where they wish to be situated in their lives, communities and society at large.

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn". Alvin Toffler

THE F.M. ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE

The Alexander Technique is an educational method that helps people recognize and prevent habitual harmful tension patterns from interfering with their daily activities, reducing the pain, suffering, and injury that accompany these patterns. The Alexander Technique doesn't fix, assign exercises, or prescribe how to think. It teaches us to bring more practical intelligence to what we are already doing, encouraging us as individuals to choose our own goals, giving us a better use of ourselves while working toward them. The Alexander Technique penetrates to the center of what it means to be human. Through the Technique, we come to know ourselves at deeper and subtler levels. Once we learn to observe our habitual responses, we begin to have some choice in these responses or patterns of behavior, and we are able to access a more conscious, ease-ful, and fluid way of being in the world.

LESSONS
Individual lessons are the best way to learn the Alexander Technique. The American Society for the Alexander Technique recommends that students take 10 to 30 one-on-one lessons with a certified teacher over a period of several months. Anne Bluethenthal teaches private lessons in San Francisco. Contact her to inquire about lessons, dates, and cost.

For more information please contact Anne Bluethenthal. info@abdproductions.org

IN BLUETHENTHAL'S WORDS
The Alexander work forms the basis of my approach to movement, the body, teaching, and my understanding of the nature of habit and thought. The Technique is in essence training in wakeful doing. That is, we learn to observe ourselves in stillness and carry that attention into activity. From that base of stillness and attention, we learn to consciously direct our actions or movements by holding an intention in mind. Attention with intention is the cornerstone of Alexander's work.

We, human beings, are not static entities or set of conditions to be positioned, corrected,tamed, polished and remedied. Instead, we are a continually changing process of events, responses, and choices that may be observed, quieted, redirected, or left alone. Our integrity is not something that is cultivated so much as it is revealed when we refrain from interfering with our inherent equanimity. Our work is to observe how we interfere with ourselves, our balance, and our ability to consciously direct our lives and selves.

"In a culture that values doing over observation and thought, increasing growth over reflection or caretaking, production over replenishing the earth, this work offers a deeply needed radical ecology of the human mind-body-spirit".

ANNE BLUETHENTHAL A senior teacher of the F.M. Alexander Technique, is certified by both American and English Societies of Alexander Teachers (AmSAT and STAT). She has been practicing and teaching this work since her certification in 1985, working with students of all ages, cultures, and professions, from performing artists to administrators, from activists to restaurant workers, from children to the elderly. She brings her long history and experience as a performer and Artistic Director of her dance company, Anne Bluethenthal and Dancers to her Alexander practice, offering a deep understanding of the issues facing artists, athletes, and performers.

More Information on the Alexander Technique:
American Society for the Alexander Technique

Links to other teachers in the Bay Area:
Jerry Sontag
Constance Clare
Laura Klein
David Liebendorfer
Seth Ambrose

Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts (MFA) at California Institute of Integral Studies

Adjunct Faculty, Acting Program, Department of Motion Picture and Television
Academy of Art University.