Fabio Tavares

Tell me about your journey as a teacher. When did you start teaching and what’s that process been like for you? 

I feel very fortunate that I do what I love for work. I was taking private lessons with a woman named June Ekman. And June was a very sought after Alexander teacher in the dance community. I started seeing June and she was very interested in how I survived STREB and that world. She said to me, “you have really nice hands, you should train to become an Alexander Technique teacher.”

She saw potential in me as a teacher and as a movement person. So it was almost as if she was like giving me her blessing. I was like, dammit, now there’s no way to turn back from that calling. I was at the height of my career with STREB. 

Training to be an Alexander teacher is usually a three year program but it took me a little longer because I was working professionally as a dancer. I graduated and in my mind people were going to just line up, you know, at my door, begging me to have Alexander lessons. And of course that didn’t happen. I ended up staying with STREB for another three years and figuring out how to be a teacher, what my voice would be, what did I want to teach, you know, because everybody’s got their own personality and style when they teach. And I wanted to find my truth. 

I felt a little different than everybody else. I was more muscular and I had tattoos. It just felt a bit too formal at times during my training. I was doing a lot of work of undoing that kind of stuff in myself, and also within the Alexander community. 

I’m still learning how to be a teacher, learning how to be a student. Learning to not know, not have all the answers, figuring out what is the Alexander Technique, you know? What is head forward and up? It’s been an incredible journey. 

Working with the company this past week, you spoke about the interconnectedness of everything—of working with the whole body. You can’t completely isolate anything.

That’s precisely it. The body works as a whole. Like, nature doesn’t work in parts, right? We have four seasons. The roots go down for the plant to grow up. There’s an ecosystem. Everything really affects everything. 

A lot of times we tend to treat just the troubled parts. ”Oh, I have tendonitis in my elbow.” So I go to look for a solution for that and it requires stretching or strengthening the elbow or applying things. But a lot of the time that’s just a symptom of a deeper cause. Maybe it’s stemming from the shoulder, stemming from the jaw, or the opposite diagonal. If we don’t look at the whole body, how the whole body is an organism, how the cells are communicating with each other and the fascia is connecting everything together, then we’re just putting a band-aid on the thing. I think that’s a very Western approach. 

The beauty about the Alexander Technique—and you know I’m also a Klein technique teacher and a Zero Balancing practitioner—all these modalities borrowed or saw themselves in some of the Eastern approaches that look at the root of the problem and treat body, mind, and spirit as one, and look at conditions more holistically. The more I learn and the more I teach that way the more it makes sense to me. When I observe babies or animals, it’s like, everything is connected to everything—the eyes, the head, the spine, the limbs, the tail, you know, it’s all evolved.

As humans and adults, we tend to sort of separate all these things and put them in different boxes—strengthen the core, then strengthen the pecs, then stretch the lats, then, you know, go get a massage to release the calves, then go get acupuncture because you have plantar fasciitis. And of course, it’s important to go to a doctor, of course sometimes we need surgical interventions, and sometimes we need drugs, and PT can be awesome. But I think we’re lacking this idea that it’s all connected, it all works together. I’m fascinated with that kind of stuff. 

You also spoke about the paradox of lengthening—in that you can’t always lengthen, but you can stop compressing. Can you talk a little more about that?

So that’s a very Alexandrian thing, which a lot of the time is true. And sometimes you need a little push toward the right direction of lengthening. But essentially, what’s happening is that Alexander discovered something that is already part of the human experience. It’s like we’re unlocking our own power.

For people with a relatively healthy system, the spine wants to link them. It functions better as a lengthening device, you know, from head to tail. The head is looking for the vertical plane. The balancing organs are looking for the up. The musculature is working in service of that to make sure that the head doesn’t hit the ground. The legs are free to move, because if we’re compressing down into the legs, it’s harder for the locomotive system to work properly.

We’re designed for movement. We’re designed for efficiency in locomotion and efficiency to bend and to move. In a way, when we can tap into that source of efficiency that’s already there, then we are ready for action and movement. It’s not so much about building something on top, it’s more about uncovering and touching that energy, that quality, that is already inside us. You know, the deep postural muscles are there already, the muscles that don’t get tired. Maybe they’ve lost tone because we lost access, but it’s just a matter of retraining ourselves: how to stay more back in the spine, how to think more three dimensionally, how to pause more and stop and connect to the support of the ground, connect to the senses of vision, seeing, smelling, and to really allow the whole body to lengthen and widen before we go into action. 

The Alexander Technique is historically a very white field. What’s been your own experience with inclusion and belonging, being an immigrant, and not speaking English when you started out?

When I decided to train to become a teacher, I had to jump over a few hurdles. One of them was that I did not have a college degree. I had dropped out of college three times in my early 20s, because I wanted to be an actor and I was making money working in TV and theater. When I applied to one of the Alexander training schools, at first they would not accept me. I said, well I’m a professional dancer, I’m a professional acrobat, this is my professional resume. They went to the board and decided that this was an old rule and to change it for me and accept me in the program. But I joined already feeling othered, you know, like kind of less than. 

And then I walked into this room—there’s a lot of white people—and I looked at this picture on the wall with like 50 people and they were all white and older. I’m here committing to this three-year program, a lot of money, and to train sixteen hundred hours to join this community? They don’t look like me, I don’t look like them. That was the beginning of understanding that I was going to have to do something about it, you know?

I went on Instagram and decided that I was gonna make the Alexander Technique known to the whole world. I was going to post, not looking like one of those people. I was gonna look like myself. You know, me and my tattoos and my queerness and my being Brazilian-ness and if they don’t like it, that’s their problem. 

In 2018, I sat on this panel at the International Alexander Technique Congress in Chicago and I talked about being openly gay and being in recovery. I realized that a lot of these teachers, nobody knew who they were. I didn’t know other queer teachers. Like, if I wanted to go to a queer teacher, I would have to, you know, do a little digging. And I realized how much that impacted me. I would feel a lot more comfortable if I knew a teacher was queer, or if I knew that they spoke another language.

It was at that point that I realized there’s a reason why it’s all white. There’s a reason why, you know, this is not very accessible to a lot of people. It’s a systemic problem. And that’s when I became very interested in the subject. 

I started hearing from other people: “I got sober because of my Alexander Technique teacher,” or ”I’m gay and I didn’t feel comfortable, but then I found this other gay teacher that I felt very comfortable with.” I started thinking how important it is to be able to make this accessible to all communities. 

That’s also when I started to pay attention to my language. I would use this thing about ‘being natural’ a lot, but now I talk less about that, because we don’t really know what natural is. I started connecting with people of color, people who are queer, people who also didn’t look like the people in that picture, and I joined a committee focused on raising money for a scholarship fund for people of color to train to become Alexander Technique teachers. 

I even stopped calling it the Alexander Technique at some point, but I’ve kind of relaxed a little. I’m just gonna be myself. I’m gonna study with people that have something interesting to offer and people who are doing important work.

I know a lot of great people in our community that are really concerned with the survival of the profession. We’re really concerned with inclusivity, equity, and belonging. It feels like the community has finally woken up to the needs of reaching out and opening up. I still don’t look like other Alexander Technique teachers, but that’s okay.

You’ve written that you came to New York for your dancing, but you stayed for your healing.

It has to do with my spiritual journey. I’ve been sober for a long time. When I was young, I said yes to a lot of things that weren’t helpful. They helped me get to where I’m at today, but at that moment I made a lot of unhealthy choices. New York is wild and crazy, but there’s also a lot of healing here and people who are on the spiritual journey. I connected with a really special community.

One last question. What kind of artistic or creative work is exciting you right now?

When I see an incredible dancer who can use their voice, who can sing, or act, or speak with such presence. Not like ”Oh the dancer is now going to speak,” or “the actor now is going to dance.” But when there’s seamless integration between the body, the mind, and the breath, and it’s all happening in front of you as one. I think that that’s very touching, you know, and it’s very bold, because then the boundaries all dissolve. 

I’m also interested in people who are 50 and beyond. In a way, it’s kind of a cruel field, you know, especially as a dancer. The Alexander Technique and Klein and things that I’ve been studying all my life, I want to believe that they are kind of my secret power to stay mobile and fresh. I kept trying to retire from dancing, and I remember thinking, “I’m feeling freer and freer in my body. I don’t want to retire now that I can finally move my arms and move my body. That’s not the time to retire!”

I’m interested in folks who are on that path—who are not afraid of, you know, getting old or being silly, or trying to conform to some kind of norm. The body, the mind, and the breath, when it’s present in space, it’s really shocking and beautiful.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.