Alexander Technique Center for Performance and Development
Tom Vasiliades, Director
330 West 38th Street, Suite 805, New York, NY 10018 - 212 564-5472
What is the Alexander Technique?
The Alexander Technique is an innovative method that helps us become aware of and transform our harmful habits - how we misuse ourselves. Consciously or not, we are always using ourselves. Over time, we develop habitual muscular coordination and patterns that can be damaging. Through a process of directive thinking that improves our kinesthetic sense, the Alexander Technique promotes better use and functioning as we perform daily activities. The results are often dramatic: relief from chronic pain, improved breathing and vocal production, enhanced performance, movement with ease and stress reduction. The Alexander Technique is recommended by medical professionals and taught at universities and performance schools around the world.
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Who benefits from the Alexander Technique?
You work at a computer and by midday your back is hurting and you are uncomfortable. You are a performer on stage and you feel tightness in your throat and you’re losing your voice. You play golf every week and your game doesn’t improve. You are dancing or getting up from a chair or walking and your back goes into spasm. These are just a few ways ingrained habits impact our daily lives. We are so accustomed to the habitual tension we carry with us throughout our day that unless we are feeling discomfort or pain, we rarely notice it. Yet our habits have an enormous impact on everything we do. Everyone can benefit from the Alexander Technique.
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How does Tom teach the Alexander Technique?
Tom teaches individual and group sessions. With gentle touch and verbal direction, his approach to the Alexander Technique helps change habitual ways of living - to create new, developmental life performances. Tom - with the Alexander Technique as a foundation - blends understanding and skill from a variety of disciplines to benefit and best address the unique health, well-being and developmental issues of each client. He focuses on the whole person in the context of living her or his life to help create long-term qualitative changes. In the sessions, students wear comfortable clothing. One part of the session may take place lying down on a table or floor as he helps you to let go of excessive habitual tension without the demand of being upright. In another part of the session he helps you practice the work as you’re doing everyday activities such as sitting, standing, walking, talking, etc.
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About Tom
Tom was trained and certified by the American Center for the Alexander Technique in New York City. He is certified by the American Society for the Alexander Technique and is a member of Alexander Technique International. Tom is the Chair of the Alexander Technique Department at The New school for Drama (formerly the Actors Studio Drama School at New School University) and is on the faculty at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and The Juilliard School. He has served as the Chair of the Board of Directors and President of the American Center for the Alexander Technique. He completed a two-year psychotherapy training program in Social Therapy — a psychotherapeutic approach that helps people, through performance, to reinitiate human development — at the East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy. He also studied with Carl Stough, the developer of ‘Breathing Coordination,’ an approach that creates a more organic breathing process. Tom works with performers, business people, athletes and people suffering with chronic pain, asthma, emphysema and other respiratory ailments.
