ARTICLES

Interview with Frank Ottiwell: the Early Years

Printed in AmSAT News, Issue No. 67, Spring 2005
By Pamela Blanc

PB:   When did you first hear of the Alexander Technique?

FO:   It was 1954 - fifty years ago.   I had just come back to New York after spending seven months in England.   Almost the minute I stepped off the boat, I ran into an actress I had been in acting school with who was now studying at the Actor's Studio. She started talking to me about the Alexander Technique and told me that many people at the Studio were studying it.   That meant a lot because the Actor's Studio was very prestigious place to study acting.   My friend Pat told me about Judy Leibowitz and I went almost immediately for lessons, having no real idea of what the Alexander Technique was about,

When I look back at those days, it seems like a minor miracle that I threw myself into the work the way I did. I had just spent all my money living in England for seven months, studying voice and doing some physical things (but not discovering the Technique while I was there.)   I was almost penniless by the time I got back to New York, but I went ahead with lessons.

The lessons were $5.   And that was a lot of money then.    I remember even 3 years later when I was just starting teaching, a woman came to me for lessons and when I said that I charged $5 (Judy then was $7.50), she said, "Oh, I couldn't possibly afford $5."   So I started her at $2.50. But, you know we're talking a long time ago when money was different.

PB: Why did you want to take lessons?

FO:   I started for vague, but inspired, reasons.   There must have been something about the way my friend Pat spoke about it -- a kind of excitement mixed with inspiration.   I just knew I wanted to do it.

I suppose I must have been looking for something in my life. I think I went to try something new that seemed to have promise.   I didn't go out of a felt need or because I wanted to improve my piano technique or anything.   It was just one person's "word of mouth".  

I studied with Judy, varying between one, two or three lessons a week, for probably a year and a half.

PB:   Why did you stop?

FO:   I don't think there was a specific reason.   I had been studying for a while.   Perhaps I wanted to see how I would do on my own. Maybe it had something to do with money, which I was perpetually short of.

Then I ran into Judy at Bloomingdales one day and we chatted. I said, "Oh, my gosh, I probably have forgotten everything."    And she said, "No, no, you haven't forgotten.   You'll be back, and you'll see."   She was right.   I went back, and I did see.   Thank goodness.

PB:   When did you decide you wanted to train to be a teacher?

FO:   I got the idea I would like to train while I was having lessons.   However, there were no training courses in America. So, I wrote to Alexander to enquire about training.   While I was waiting for a reply, Judy, who did not know I had written to Alexander, said she was going to start a training course. She thought I might be interested.   I was, and I started with her when she began.

I did eventually have a response from F.M. with the details of the course at Ashley Place.   Years later I thought it would probably have been wonderful if I had gone to train with Alexander but the reality was I had no way to pay for the training or to live in England for three years.   It seemed a great blessing that Judy chose that moment to start training teachers.

Alexander died while I was in training. We got the cable and were more or less in a state of shock. I was selfishly very disappointed.   I had thought I would go and do some work with him after I finished with Judy.   Now even that would not be possible.

I certainly don't regret having done that initial basic training with Judy.   She was a wonderful teacher and she gave me something only she could have given to me. She had a great heart and a generosity that helped me to begin to believe in my possibilities.

This was Judy's first training and it was exciting for all of us to be exploring this new territory.

PB:    How was it set up?

FO:   We went in the afternoons to her studio and worked for two or three hours.   I don't remember precisely. And I don't remember how soon we worked with each other.   Perhaps we worked with her individually in turn and listened while she talked to each of us.   It was all very, very interesting. Very compelling.

There were many more people who started than finished.   There were 13 at first -- twelve women and me.

By the time we finished training there were just the five of us.   Lee Firestone, Joyce Ringdahl, Debbie Caplan, Barbara Callen and me and we were the ones who, with Judy, later formed ACAT.

PB:   What year do you think the course started?

FO:   I think it was 1955.   We didn't get certificates at the time. That didn't enter anyone's mind.   Later, when ACAT was formed and the first ACAT graduates qualified, Judy sent out certificates to people like me who had trained before we formed ACAT.    Mine was dated 1960; but I know that I finished before that   -- some time in 1959.

PB:   Judy had spent summers going to London, right?

FO: Yes. That was before I had lessons with her.   She and Gladys Lee used to go.   They went and had lessons with FM for at least three summers, maybe more.   Gladys may have met FM when he came to America. During and after the war, she regularly sent him food packages and cigars and various things.   There was a whole rack of letters from him that I used to have that were mainly thanking Gladys and talking about the weather and ordering more food, although in one of the letters he did, somewhat indirectly, acknowledge Judy's teaching.    So it was probably during the late forties and early fifties that Judy worked with F.M.

PB:   What did you do in those first years as a young teacher?   Did you start teaching right away?

FO:   Yes, I did.   Gladys Lee was a singing teacher and had a big apartment on East 50th Street. Judy was teaching in one of the rooms there. It was where we had our training course.   Gladys and I had become close and when I qualified she offered me a room to teach in, too.    It was a small room but it was right next door to Judy's room. So Judy and I taught out of that apartment on East 50th Street for several years.

Gladys used to send all her singing students for Alexander lessons.   Judy's practice was pretty full by then, so Gladys started sending them to me.   That was how I got a reasonable practice going quite quickly.

PB:   Is that how you met Barbara Kent?

FO:   Barbara Kent! Yes!   Barbara was a student of Gladys.

PB:   So were you Barbara's first Alexander Teacher?

FO:   I was, yes.   She had lessons with me until I left for California.

PB:   Let's back up a moment here.   What else do you remember about your early days as a teacher in New York?   When did you first meet teachers who were trained with FM?   Weren't Lulie Westfeld and Alma Frank living in New York?

FO: Alma Frank, Debbie Caplan's mother, had died, I think really not long before I started to have lessons, sometime in the early fifties. Lulie Westfeld was alive and teaching then, but I never met her.   You know Judy was training with her privately (Lulie did not run a training course but agreed to train Judy), and then they had some terrible falling out.   I've never known the details, exactly.   I suspect that it was that Judy wanted to teach people and Lulie thought that she wasn't ready. We really didn't know Lulie existed when we were in the training.

After the five of us had graduated, Judy said she thought that we would be more effective reaching the public as an organized group, instead of just being five people teaching in our separate apartments.    The group didn't have a name at that point, but it developed quickly into ACAT (The American Center for the Alexander Technique.)   The name was my idea, by the way!

Judy was very ambitious for the work.   She saw this as a beginning of something that could lead eventually to the work being taught in a university degree program.    That, of course, is happening widely now, though her bigger dream that the work itself could lead to a degree hasn't happened yet that I know of.   Judy's drive combined with her ability was very good for the Technique.

After we formed, we needed a place to be the Center.   We found a big apartment on Central Park West and 83rd.   It is hard to believe now, but it was a seven-room apartment on Central Park West and the rent was $285 a month.

PB:   Amazing.

FO:   Which we didn't have.   I mean that was a lot of money in those days.    So the five of us paid $60 a month each, which covered the rent, and I guess maybe the electric bill or something.   I paid a little more because I moved in and lived there. There were four more rooms where people taught.   Judy never taught there. She paid her $60, but she lived nearby and continued teaching in her own space.   She was very much a guiding force in the organization. We became a non-profit corporation, got a brass plate for the outside of the building, and generally went the whole way.

Of course, ACAT itself didn't make any money.   After I moved away and Judith Stransky, (who had helped in the formation of ACAT and become the seventh member as soon as she graduated from her training with Judy,) came out to California we continued to send our $60 a month for a long time to support the burgeoning ACAT.

It was shortly after we moved in and had that center that Patrick Macdonald first came to visit us in New York.   I don't remember how was arranged for him to come.    But, come, he did.   It was during that period also, between the founding of the center and before I left for California that Walter and Dilys Carrington came over and gave us all lessons.

PB:   When did you first meet Patrick Macdonald?

FO:   In 1961 I wrote to the Alexander Foundation at Ashley Place -- the only Alexander address I knew -- and made arrangements to visit and have lessons.      Patrick was teaching in F.M.'s old teaching room, and that is how and where we met.

PB:   That must have left a big impression.   I've only heard tell and seen a few limited photos of that room.   What was it like?

FO:   It was an elegant room.   There was nothing peculiar or startling about it. The big painting of voluptuous ladies was gone, and I suppose the room itself had been painted a more neutral color.   It was just a nicely proportioned Edwardian room. Of course there was also the famous waiting room.   And there was Peter Scott's room, which I guess used to be AR's room.   I'm not sure about that, but probably.   There were two biggish rooms and Peter Scott, at that time, was in the other one.

PB:   How long was that trip?   Did you have very many lessons with Patrick?

FO:   I'm trying to remember.   I think it was a month.   On that occasion I'm sure I had a lesson every day for as long as I was there. What I do remember is how different Patrick's teaching style was from Judy's.   The only other person I had ever had lessons with was Judy.   Patrick just sort of swept you off your feet, so to speak. He could just put his hands on you and take you up and down and turn you side ways and turn you around non-stop.   After that first lesson, I went to a little tearoom in the Army Navy Stores and I wrote in my notebook, which I still have ... "I've just used myself well for half an hour."    There was no room for mistakes or anything because he had you, you know?   So I experienced 30 minutes of good use -- whether I liked it or not!

PB:   That's fabulous.   When did you move to San Francisco?

FO:   That was in 1967 -- the "summer of love."   Judith Stransky came along after a few years and established herself in Southern California.   She was very much a part of Patrick's visits to California. He came and taught in Los Angeles and then he'd come up to San Francisco and teach. That became an annual visit for many years.

PB: Yes, I wondered when the first year was that he came out to California?    Did he come out before you had the school?

FO:   Yes, but after Giora Pinkas and I opened the training course in San Francisco in 1974 Patrick came very regularly every year to teach on the course. The thing is that we had several students, who wanted to train, and Judy encouraged me to open a course, but at that time I had worked quite a lot with Patrick and I really wanted his approval, too.   I suppose the approval of two senior training teachers was the equivalent in those days to the Training Course Approval process we have now.   I asked Patrick what he thought, and said I wanted to continue the association with him.   He said he thought we should go ahead and promised to visit.

PB:   When did you first meet Walter and Dilys Carrington?

FO:   Well, they came to New York on a teaching visit in the 60's just after ACAT was formed and gave us all lessons. Walter's lessons were always a revelation to me. He made me feel so substantial -- a very valuable addition to my sense of self.   And then, of course, Walter's astonishing writings over the years have been like having a teacher in my back pocket.   Without those writings I know my whole experience as pupil and teacher would have been very different and, I think, much diminished.   Later when I visited them at Lansdowne Road I had some astonishing work with Dilys.   She had such an ability to guide hands on work.

PB:   Can you say something about your impression of their different styles:   Judy, Patrick, and Walter?   Not so much about their styles but about how they influenced what and how you taught in those early days.

FO:   Looking back, what it taught me is that the Technique, the principle, is always the same --as it really was with the three of them.   It wasn't a mystery to go to one or another of them, because basically it was not different -- at its heart.   But, the approaches, and the personalities, were very different.

When I was in London in the sixties Patrick encouraged me to have some lessons with Peter Scott.   I had been astonished at how light and subtle Patrick's touch was, but Scott's...!   The astonishing thing to me about Scott was that his hands seemed twice or three times as light as Patrick's.   It was as though, he was touching you, and you knew he was touching you and the direction was crystal clear, but his hands were weightless.

So, in meeting and working with all of these people, the work seemed the same but each person was different.   And I think that was a relief to me because I began gradually to stop trying to be Judy and then eventually, I stopped trying to be Patrick.

Of course, I hadn't met Marjorie Barstow yet.

End of part one

Pamela trained with Frank Ottiwell and Giora Pinkas at ACAT San Francisco, graduating in 1979.   She was an assistant at ATI-San Francisco 1983-1986 and is one of the founding members of ATI-Los Angeles, where she was a Director from 1987-1998.   Pamela has a private practice in West Los Angeles and teaches in music and theater departments at local universities.

Frank Ottiwell had his first Alexander lessons in 1954, trained to teach between 1956 and 1959 and was a Director of Training between 1974 and 2003.   He maintains a small private practice in San Francisco where he continues the work he began in 1967 as the American Conservatory Theater's Alexander Teacher in Residence.

2005 Pamela.   All rights reserved.

An Experience to Remember
By Pamela Blanc
Published in the AmSAT News, Spring 2004

You never know who might contact you when you are attending the AmSAT AGM.
Last June while attending the Annual General Meeting of the American Society for the Alexander Technique I phoned home to my answering service. There was a message from a David Roan, a musician I had met in October 2001. He said he was putting together a classical guitar cruise. Yes, that's right, classical guitarists playing music while floating on the Pacific Ocean on a Carnival Cruise Line Ship.

You never know whom you are going to meet when you present the Alexander Technique.
Now, when I say I met David Roan two years ago, understand that we met because I had been invited to participate in the MusiCares Health Fair, an educational service-oriented health fair dedicated to meeting the needs of Los Angeles-area music professionals. This Health Fair provided attendees free access to a wide range of health and human services. Attendees had the opportunity to view demonstrations, interactive presentations, and pick up information on services such as repetitive stress injuries, artist addiction/recovery, hearing tests, Alexander Technique, Music Therapy, and HIV. I invited a then recent ATI-LA graduate, Geordie MacMinn, to assist me and together we "manned" a table and informed attendees about the benefits of AT. I was given a 30-minute time slot on the main stage for my Alexander Technique demonstration. When I asked for a volunteer from the audience, David Roan raised his hand. It was October 21, 2001.

You never know when you are going to be remembered.
So, in June 2003, David remembers meeting me at the MusiCares Health Fair in 2001 and phones me while I am at the AGM to say that he is tired of reading what is dominating the newspaper headlines and he wants to do something positive in the world. He loves classical guitar music and is a classical guitarist. He decides to bring a community of classical guitarists together on board a cruise. Although he has not followed up with having Alexander Technique lessons for himself, he knows it is "good stuff" and wants me to join his cruise.

You never know where the word to the wise comes from.
Since I was at the AGM when I received this invitation, I confided in my dear friend and colleague, Bob Britton, saying, "I don't know if this thing will fly (sail) or not. I met this guy once. Yes, I remember him as being a nice guy, but at this point in my career should I be saying yes to something with questionable success and little? Bob's reply, "Pamela, are you kidding? Of course you should do it! This is when we CAN say yes to these opportunities."

You know the Alexander Technique is going to come in handy.
So, I said yes to the Classical Guitar Cruise. We sailed December 7th for seven days leaving Long Beach, California, for Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and returning with stops in Mazatlan and Cabo San Lucas. The first night on board I was asked to give a little introduction to the Alexander Technique. The second day at sea I gave a Master Class. During the rest of the cruise I scheduled individual Alexander lessons as time allowed, met guitar makers and players, attended the concerts presented by four incredible classical guitarists and went to their Master classes, wined and dined, danced in the disco, played in the Casino and frequented the spa on board. In port I enjoyed margaritas with my feet in the sand, bought blankets and silver on the beach, snorkeled in the Sea of Cortez, all the while freeing my neck!

You never know where the truth will be found. It's everywhere.
One last thing I want to share with you about this experience is the phenomenal Master Class I gave! Now, I'm not one to brag (!) but this class spoke of the principles of the Alexander Technique so clearly even I was impressed. The reason it was so phenomenal is because I taught the class after watching a very gifted guitar teacher teach a Master Class. The guitar teacher was Adam Holzman, founder of the Guitar Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Adam was working with a student in front of the group. He empathetically guided the student's awareness to the excessive tension in the student's right hand. He asked the student to take his hand off the guitar and to relax his hand. The student had difficulty letting go of the tension, but Adam was patient and gently picked up the student's hand and guided it back to the strings, at which point the student began to tense up his had again. Adam said, "No, relax your hand." Again he gently picked up the student's hand and guided it back to the strings saying, "Don't think of playing the guitar. Just put your hand there without even playing. That's it. Now play one note. No, don't tense the hand. Yes, play one note." The note was played and it had a ring and vibration to it that previously wasn't there. The student said in disbelief, "One note!?" Adam said, "Yes, there's where we begin."

It was a beautiful lesson. I loved watching a great teacher and artist at work with another artist. Two hours later when I was standing in front of the same group I simply stated that Adam had introduced the Alexander Technique for me. I explained that the Alexander Technique is based on certain principles and that Adam spoke to those principles without ever naming them. First, he helped the student become aware of unnecessary tension that was interfering with his playing the guitar. Second, he asked him to inhibit playing the guitar and to direct his attention to leaving his hand alone as he strummed a note. He prevented the student from end gaining and asked him to focus on one note, the means whereby, at a time. Music was made.

Of course, I went on to explain the concept of the primary control and demonstrated how the "chair work" in an Alexander lesson is an opportunity to explore these same principles. Once these principles are understood and embodied, they can be applied readily to any activity. I worked with individuals in the chair and at their instruments, identifying the principles as we went.

I am grateful to be a teacher of this consciousness-raising technique we call Alexander and I am grateful for this community. Many thanks to Patricia Gallup for designing a promotional bookmark advertising the cruise, AmSAT, and me. Thanks to Indrani and the AmSAT staff for filling my order and sending me brochures, teachers lists, and book directories on time to take with me; and thanks to Jerry Sontag for sending me promotion packets for Mornum Time Press. All the materials were appreciated and put to good use.

Classicalguitarcruise.com