The Dart Procedures Website is intended primarily for Alexander Technique teachers, teacher-trainees, and students. The site is comprised largely of material generously provided to me by my teachers, Joan and Alexander Murray. This site is a work in progress, as more material will be added. –Marian Goldberg

The Dart Procedures Contents:

Home Page

Origins and Explanation

Illustrated History

A Fascinating and Stimulating Exchange

Just let it all wash over you

The Double Spiral

Beginning from the Beginning

Links

 

Origins and Explanation

Raymond A. Dart was a renowned anthropologist and anatomist. Professor Dart and his family had Alexander Technique lessons in South Africa during 1943-1944 with Irene Tasker, a teacher trained by F. M. Alexander. After Ms. Tasker left the country in 1944, Dart wanted to continue with the kind of help that he and his family, especially his brain-injured son, had received from their Alexander Technique lessons. Dart proceeded to use his vast science background in evolution and human development to develop new ways to work with his son and with himself.

"Unfortunately, Miss Tasker had to return to England shortly after our first meeting, but I continued studying the righful and wrongful performance of muscular acts so intensively that to a certain extent it bacame habitual. In the absence of my teacher I, too, has been forced to pursue a "do-it-yourself" technique. Within the next four years I had written three papers about what I had learned already therefrom—one for my anatomy students, one for my dental students, and one for our fellow members of the medical profession."
–Raymond Dart
An Anatomist's Tribute to F. Matthias Alexander

Through a later collaboration in the 1960s and 1970s with Alexander Technique teachers Joan and Alexander Murray this inital work by Dart was developed into the Alexander Technique “Dart Procedures.” The Dart (Dart-Murray) Procedures are based on the observation of the natural coordination of infants, young children, and animals from an evolutionary perspective.

 

Illustrated History

The Dart (Dart-Murray) Procedures 1960s

Introduction by Alexander Murray

These Procedures will not teach one the Alexander Technique, but patient and intelligent investigation by one with no Alexander experience may reveal inefficient patterns of movement and help to discard them. Undertaken with the guidance of a skilled Alexander teacher, they are a constant source of insight and a point of reference in one’s patterns of behaviour. One can continually return to these as to Alexander’s “positions of mechanical advantage” in which category they certainly belong.

The Procedures are not exercises. Though muscular work is being done response to gravity, this is a process of self-examination.

Professor Dart’s name came to my attention during a visit to Walter Carrington [a leading figure in teaching the Alexander Technique, trained by F. M. Alexander] in London in the summer of 1967. My wife and I had returned from our first year at Michigan State University where I was a professor of music and she was teaching the Alexander Technique to students and colleagues.

I had been considering the dynamic role of the jaw in head balance. My comments to Walter elicited the question: “Have you been reading Dart” I had not, but shortly after was at home with Dart's paper “The Postural Aspects of Malocclusion” [written in the 1940s].

Dart's paper described the procedures through which he had worked with his spastic son. This led to a fascinating series of experiments on myself, initially on my own, and later with help from my wife. These experiences gave us both an insight into human movement quite new to us and completely in line with what we had understood of Alexander’s work with which we had been familiar for 12 years.

As luck would have it, Professor Dart was passing through London on his way from South Africa to Philadelphia at the start of his long connection with the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. We made out telephone contact which led to an invitation to visit him in Philadelphia on our return to the U.S.

This was an exciting time for all of us. After our initial visit at which we demonstrated the connection we had made between his work and Alexander’s, we said goodbye and watched Dart running down a hill to his headquarters, as he told us the following day, to read what he had written 25 years earlier!

 

The Procedures with Alex Murray in 1968, as the Murrays showed them initially to Raymond Dart.

 

The 'Procedures' as we presented them ot Professor Dart in 1967 were done in the following sequence:

1. Start on the toes. When this is done with the assistance of a skilled teacher, the primary control is activated and the whole system is tonified.

2. Shallow monkey position: hands on the back of the chair [developed by F. M. Alexander].

3. Knuckles on the back of the chair: This relates to what Dart call 'anthropoid' progression in 'The Postural Aspects of Malocclusion.'

4. Knuckles on the seat of the chair. The limbs are gradually folding, approximating more nearly to a creeping position.

The continuation until the final 'foetal crouch' is a reversal of the developmental sequence.

Each change should be guided by the Alexander Technique teacher, maintaining the activity of the primary control. These are all 'positions of mechanical advantage' for improving the conditions present. As Alexander says in Man's Supreme Inheritance:

The position of mechanical advantage, which may or may not be a normal position, is the position which gives the teacher the opportunity to bring about, with his own hands, a co-ordinated condition of the subject.

The Procedures are informative to anyone who does them patiently and openly. With the guidance of a skilled teacher, they are an invaluable addition to the repertoire of natural movements, the facilitation of which is the Alexander teacher's responsibility.

 

The Dart (Dart-Murray) Procedures 1970s

In 1967, when the Murrays showed Dart the initial connections they had made between his work and Alexander's, Dart told the Murrays that they had not included the most important one, "fetal."

"Fetal"

 

The following 1970s guides to the Procedures, created by Alex Murray and illustrator Pam Hartman, with the encouragement and approval of Raymond Dart, include fetal. The guides were also expanded to include other developmental movements and "positions of mechanical advantage."

The guide and illustrations are referred to in Dart's correspondence with the Murrays. See A Fascinating and Stimulating Exchange.

The Procedures 1970s 1

 

The Procedures 1970s 2