There isn’t anything either right or wrong when dealing with co-ordination. There are degrees of movement. Life is really moving from one position to another. We never stop and say, “This is right – this is my posture, this is the way I ought to be.” If we do that, we’re stiff trying to hold that posture. It isn’t natural for our bodies to be held in positions.
– Marjorie Barstow, quoted in Practical Marj
Marj Barstow’s home – built by her father in 1901 – at the corner of South 20th and Washington Streets in Lincoln. Marj lived there for 94 years.
Marjorie Barstow, from Lincoln, Nebraska, was the first person to graduate from F. M. Alexander’s first training course in 1933. After working as A. R. Alexander’s assistant in Boston and New York in the 1930’s, she returned to Lincoln.
She continued teaching until shortly before her death in 1995 at age 95. During the last 2 decades of her teaching, she attracted thousands of students to her workshops in Lincoln, and around the world, with her unique approach to teaching Alexander’s discoveries.
NOW AVAILABLE! – About 35 hours of raw footage from 2 workshops Marj taught in the early 1990s, her final years of teaching. To learn more about these DVDs, and how you can purchase them, click here: marjoriebarstow.com/videoavailability
You can purchase Marjorie Barstow – Her Teaching and Training, a collection of her students’ accounts of her work, originally published in 1990.
More biographical information can be found at Pracctical Marj
Robert and Marj getting ready to party at her favorite steakhouse – Parker’s in Denton, NE, in 1990
My name is Robert Rickover and I am the creator of this site. I am an Alexander Technique teacher living in Omaha, Nebraska and I also teach regularly in Toronto, Canada. I first met Marj (that’s what everybody called her) in 1979 while I was training to become an Alexander Technique teacher in London.
I attended a great many of her workshops (and was often one of her assistants) until she stopped teaching, about two years before she died. For a few years, in the early 1990s, I organized her workshops in Lincoln.
Marj’s unique approach to the Alexander Technique has had a profound influence on my own teaching. This site is dedicated to her, and to her legacy. If you have any material you’d like to contribute – pictures, articles, recollections or anything else related to her life and work – please contact me here
I can’t teach anything that I haven’t done myself. I may not always do it, you know we don’t always do what we should (life would be very dull if we did). But I know when I want to have more freedom, I know what I can do and what I must do, then I make the choice of whether or not to do it.
– Marjorie Barstow, quoted in Practical Marj
.