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David Young

I’m David Young, moving between Berlin, Andros and Melbourne, living a life of Alexander Technique, meditation and art. This is one version of how my life came to be this way.

I first remember playing the piano at the age of four. I had a piece I called ‘Butterfly,’ and would play it over and over again, delighting and infuriating my family and neighbours. Around the same age I began climbing trees to alarming heights, swinging from bars and ropes. My parents called me ‘Monkey,’ which I kind of liked and kind of didn’t. What I did know was that I loved exploring what my body could do.

I also loved exploring the world. At age five my parents took us in a campervan around the UK and Europe. It was a vivid and powerful expansion of my reality which has influenced me to this day.

Upon returning to Melbourne, I trained to an elite level as a gymnast, and my first career began as an apprentice gymnastics coach to the former Chinese national coach Yu Ting. Plato said that too much sport makes you violent, and too much music makes you neurotic. I attempted to steer a course somewhere between these extremes.

But music was my true passion, and for 25 years I made art between Australia, Asia and Europe, composing, directing chamber opera and running arts companies. In 1994 I co-founded Aphids with Cynthia Troup, Sarah Pirrie and Kath Banger. Aphids was a cross-artform collaboration that became a chosen family, committed to seeking the unfamiliar. Rosemary Joy joined in 1996, and we ran the company together for eleven years.

In 2002 I directed the Next Wave Festival, where I met poet and theatre maker Margaret Cameron, with whom I shared a ten-year artistic partnership. Later as artistic director of Chamber Made Opera, Margaret and I created The Minotaur Trilogy, which felt like the culmination of my entire arts practice. We called it ‘the art of everything.’ Margaret died in 2014.

At one stage I lived in Java for three months with Indonesia’s foremost poet and activist playwright, W. S. Rendra. His Bengkel Teater Rendra taught me how to be on standby, and that shamans do exist. These stories and more live in the art archive.

In parallel with art, I worked for many years in psychosocial rehabilitation and employment support for people with serious mental illness and disabilities. Guided by my colleague Caroline Crosse, we went on to found Social Firms Australia, based on an Italian model: businesses that employ people with and without disabilities. Our first social firm was a wholesale bonsai nursery in Melbourne which is still operating today.

Gradually and circuitously, the artist-self, the body-self, the Buddhist-gay-nomadic self settled into more coherence. After all those years of generating and pushing, something had to give. Alexander Technique offered me a way out, a way of cracking apart the rigid habits which had given me enormous drive and discipline, but little self-care or self-kindness. The work would have killed me. I can see this now with a clarity I didn’t have before.

Once I had retrained as an Alexander Technician — as an architect friend likes to say — it was a smaller leap to meditation. With more calm and concentration I could begin undoing ingrained patterns of mind and body, revealing more lightness, freedom and equanimity. My first ten-day silent retreat with my teacher Panyasara felt like meditating for the first time. Three months living as a monk in a Sri Lankan forest monastery was one of the toughest and most rewarding experiences of my life (running a marathon in Iceland came a close second). I now have a daily practice which is my anchor.

There are separate pages here on Alexander Technique, meditation, and my life in art to explore. May they also be an invitation to slow down.