This is a companion workshop to Robert Fripp’s Keynote Address. Orchestral Maneuvers (OM) offer Guitar Craft (GC) forms for everybody: musicians, non-musicians, audience members, AT teachers, AT trainees, and the general public, even (older) children. The workshop will be led collaboratively by AT teachers who have worked with Robert in the Guitar Circle during the last 40 years.

Orchestral Maneuvers (OM) blends Guitar Circle (GC) forms: Circulations, directed attention, sitting practices, division of attention, work with polyrhythms with the Five Relations, which entered the GC scene in 2009. Robert’s input to developing this workshop and his words about OM:

“What initially struck me about OM is that it was a response in the moment to a need for AT in a large group of people, where there was not a corresponding number of AT Teachers.

Your / the response was to develop a technique/s that multiplied the effectiveness of AT.

. . . Orchestral Maneuvers:

How does one Alexander Teacher do the work of 3-5-7?”

The Five Relations are: head-neck balance—in stillness (#0) and in locomotion (#5), leg-torso counter balance (#1), head-pelvis counterbalance (#2), breathing coordination (#3) and arms as they relate to and are supported by the total pattern of coordination (#4).

In the workshop we will work with Games and Circulations, patterns of dynamic interaction that invoke—and invite!—mirror neuron patterning AND startle patterns.

OM workshops support inclusive, supportive, joyful experience. In OM, the leadership role passes so ‘right and wrong’ in relation to the expert in the room no longer influences our experience. The ‘leader’ quickly dissolves into becoming a member of the group, who grapple with challenges that gradually increase in difficulty.

Robert Fripp has supported and promoted Orchestral Maneuvers since 2009 as a living branch of the Guitar Craft current.