If you want to learn about what it takes to have happy, healthy feet or the importance of happy, healthy, strong feet, there's pretty much no one better to talk to than a dancer. I mean, ballet dancer, that's one thing, modernist, that's all that thing. But we're going to talk to some about some dancers with a former dancer that you are going to love. And I say that only because I'm projecting because I love the person we're going to talk to and the people that she works with and have for a long time.
But more about that in a sec on today's episode of the movement movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting. The first, you know, those things that are your foundation. I just realize that my video is off. And if I don't have the self view on when I record this, I disappear.
But hey, you've been looking at Emily Kent who we're going to talk to in a second, but I'm going to keep going. So on this podcast, we break down the mythology and sometimes just a propaganda and flat out lies that you've been told about what it takes to run or walk or hide or play or to yoghurt or cross or dance or do whatever you enjoy doing to do that efficiently and effectively and enjoy ably and enjoyably and enjoy at least the key one because you're not having fun. You're not going to keep it up anyway. So find something you like and do that.
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Like us thumbs up, bell icon on YouTube, you know, the Gerald if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. So Emily Kent is a pleasure having you here. Would you do me a favor and tell people who you are and what you do? Sure.
I'm so happy to be here. I'm excited. I'm Emily Kent. I'm the education director for Pilobellis.
What the hell is Pilobellis, right? And how do you say that? Pilobellis is a dance company. It's also a little phototropic mushroom.
But right now we'll focus on the dance company that's been around for more than 50 years. We do modern dance. We perform all over the world. And at the same time, my job is teaching other people how we do what we do, whether that be kids, dancers, people who've never danced at all, all the way up to older adults.
Now let me, before anyone tunes out because you said the phrase modern dance. So I have been a Pilobellis fan for about 47 years since I was like 13, 14. And anytime I'd send someone to a Pilobellis show, when it's their first time, they basically come back saying the same thing, which is that is not what I expected. And that's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.
So what I love about what Pilobellis does, and this is just a sales page for you to check them out. And I'll say it now at PilobellisPILO-L-U-S dot org. Yeah, you're done. Yeah, you're done.
Just go like watch any of the videos. Get on YouTube. Just watch anything. And if you're not amazed, there's something wrong with you.
My favorite thing about what they do is there's two. One is just, well, more than two. One is just these are amazing, amazing dancers, amazing performers. The other is that in any given show, you will find yourself thinking, laughing, crying, and everything in between.
They have an amazing sense of humor and lightness that they bring to certain pieces and real depth and feeling that comes to others. And I don't mean like airy-fairy, you know, like, ooh, looking at art and I don't know what it means. I mean, literally the kind of thing that just makes you think about reality in your life in a whole new way. And then let's cut to the chase.
These are people with amazing bodies. So... True. And anyway, you want to come to it.
We're here for you. I always call it we're kind of like the gateway drug for dance, I think, because it's something you can bring your... We used to say husband, but maybe that's not PC anymore. Bring your feeling the black person that doesn't like dance to see Plablavulus and they will leave going, oh, I didn't know it could be like that because like you're saying, we don't take ourselves too seriously.
We don't want people to leave going like, I think it must be good because I don't know what was happening or what I was supposed to think. Like we want people to enjoy themselves. And I mean, my dad, when he first saw the show and he had been forced, you know, for his whole life with a little child going to see those awful, awful recitals and sleeping through them. And so the first Plablavola show he saw, he saw him afterwards and he goes, that was good.
Like with that surprise voice. And it was funny, you know, and I think the thought that modern dance could be funny, that things can be slapstick, that we can be just real. I think we're always looking for real exchanges on stage, both with the performers, but also performers to audience, you know. And I'll tell you one of my favorite things that you guys do is when everyone's just filing into whatever theater you happen to be in or whatever weird venue you happen to be in, the dancers are just on stage, lights up, warming up.
I mean, and it creates this environment of like, oh, we're part of this. This is not okay. It's not far off in the distance and we're hands off. Right.
That feeling. Yeah. And then we started doing that maybe eight or ten years ago. And it was that we didn't love that feeling of like, you're because you're back there anyway.
I mean, even if the curtains close, the dancers are out there, they're warming up, they're getting ready. And then it's like, now the show starts. No, like we're there. It helps us get the feeling for who's there.
You know that your performer. So you know the feeling of like, you want to peek out and see who's out in the audience or peek through the curtain. You don't have to. You can just stand out there and do your warm up and see who's coming, get the vibe for like how the people feel as they're coming in and set that stage for that exchange of a relationship between the dancers and the audience.
Yeah. And again, just to give people a reason to check out what you're doing. After the last performance that I saw, I came up and I said, I don't know which I like more. When I can see the physics of what you're doing and when you're hiding the physics of what you're doing.
And what I mean after people who haven't seen Pilate's, if they do these things that just frankly look impossible. And if you go try them, and I will say something about that in a second, you will find that they probably are for mere mortals. But there's literally, you know, you guys have mastered the art of sort of hiding the things that make something work in a way that a lot of it just looks, you know, literally impossible or practically magic. And that's really fun when you can see when in the middle of something, you can just hear the whole audience going, what the hell.
Which that's a blast. Yeah. Now you tried some of these though and you didn't. Well, so yeah, so that's the thing is so when I was through high school and actually through college, I was a gymnast and what would happen in high school, we'd all go and see a plot of the show and then we come back and we would try to do the things that we saw.
And you know, we were really fit and we were pretty savvy about movement and we could not figure out most of the things we saw. Now that said, there's one thing and I'll tell this, I'll repeat a story that I was one of the first things I asked you when we connected. I had a memory of something that happened and anyway, I had a memory of something that I saw and I wasn't sure it was true because a lot of times we had memories of things that are, you know, don't naturally alley. And if you haven't done that with, I mean, like when I went to my high school or college reunions, it was very entertaining hearing things that I remembered that other people didn't end vice versa.
I find that fascinating. Anyway, so here's the bit and I'm probably exaggerating certain parts so you can correct me, but the gist will be the same. Guy walks out of the stage turns perpendicular to the audience lifts up one leg parallel to the ground and just stands there and for about 10 seconds everyone's going, okay, that's cool. And they're waiting for someone else to come on and do something else or waiting for him to do something else and nothing.
So about 30 seconds everyone's like, something going wrong. I mean, what's this is, I mean, that's pretty impressive. But I mean, where are the other things or the other and after about a minute people are like, you have got to be fucking kidding me. What is happening here?
Like three minutes people are like jumping out of their chairs freaking out. And that was and so I asked you if my memory was in any way accurate or not. And you said, yeah, I said, yes. You know, this, the piece that you're talking about is from one of our founders, Moses Pendleton, who now has the dance company, Mo Mix also awesome.
Go check them out as well. But he, he made this piece, I believe called Mo Mix before there was a dance company called Mo Mix. And you know, the story about that, and this ties into really who Plobless is because we weren't dancers, like the original guys at Dartmouth in 1971 hadn't in no way dancers. The reason they got started is because there was a woman who came to Dartmouth to start teaching dance classes.
She, these guys signed up probably because she was way more attractive than any of the other options. It was all mail at the time, Dartmouth. And she said, I took one look at them and went, I can't teach them five, six, seven, eight steps and point your toes. Like I just need to get them making something, get them creative and just see what they do.
And Moses had a knee injury. He was like a ski jumper or something crazy like that. And he had heard his head hurt his knee. So that one leg that wasn't hurt was really strong because he had, you know, been around on crutches and done all these things basically on one leg.
And so that solo really came out of that like, well, look at all this shit I can do on one leg because I had to for a long time. And that's very Palobless. It's like, it's what's really happening at this moment and how can you turn that into a dance? And it makes it easy for me as a teacher to go in any space, whether it's a corporate education or a school for the blind or a group of senior adults at a senior center and teach a class that's Palobless because it's about how does your body move?
How can we push the limits of that? How do you make things with other people and perform them? That's really at the heart. All you have to do.
You don't have to be able to push somebody over your head and all those amazing things our dancers can do. But because they can do those things when we're improvising and making a new piece, those are the things that come out of the improvisation. And then that's what ends up on stage. Well, it's funny.
Lane and I got to see two shows recently and we made a comment that a couple of pieces looked different and we said, is it our memory or were they different? It's like, oh no, they were different because we had different dancers. And it's basically the structure was the same, but some different things because different people doing it. And I thought that was cool.
Yeah. Yeah. And it is, you know, whenever somebody new comes in, there's, you know, pieces that already exist that they have to learn, but also they do make them their own. I mean, we encourage them because, you know, as a comedian, something one person says, another person can't say it and be funny.
Like you have to find your own way to say the punchline, to deliver whatever it is. And it's the same with movement. Like it could be purely physics, right? Like this person has longer legs.
So their base of weight is going to be higher than another person who's shorter. It could also be like a more of an acting thing. Like I want you to look like this for this person. They did these three things where you might do something different to make that come across because that's who you are.
And it's like that when it's great for me as a teacher because I'm encouraging people to really just be who they are in the class. And that's valuable. So lots of other dance, and believe me, I've taken lots of other dance. It's about being the person who's teaching you, you know, copying their body movements, doing the things that they're saying.
That's fine. That's a great way to do things. It's a great way to learn. This is just a different angle on that, which is like, okay, how do you move low to the ground?
Yeah. Okay. How do you move? I love to play a game with the kids because a lot of times, and especially dancers who've had it beaten into their head that like, there are certain ways you move.
Like, okay, you can't use your feet on the floor. So now what do you do? And then they do some things. And I say, okay, awesome.
So you're like, I'm going to use your feet on the floor, but now you can't use your hands. Oh, oh, well now what do I do? And then you figure it out. Hold on, let's pause on that one.
I want people to think about this. Okay. So it's funny you were saying, I was about to think, is there any movement that we could do with people or invite people to do what we're doing? So imagine, so I want people to think about this, like you're asked to move across the floor, and you can have your feet touching.
So what are you going to do? Now, the most common thing that I can imagine is people are going to be on all fours, you know, with their hands and knees. Yeah. But I can also think of like, there's some other things that you could have touching the ground.
So now we're saying, okay, let's get rid of your hands. So I want people to ponder for a second, because now I'm already, I'm imagining a couple things that involve knees and head or knees and shoulders or knees and or I mean, there's, you know, We're on your back, right? Yeah. Yeah.
It's super cool. And we actually use this. We have a kid show that we do a lot of venues where we go, we'll bus in kids from a school and we'll perform for kids and we have a show called Rules Up Play. It's really about how rules as an artist, they seem like a bummer like no rules, but really, it's really, really hard.
We have no rules at all. Like you want a constraint that you can be creative within. And so this constraint for this piece was, you know, you can't use your feet on the floor. So we bring kids up on stage and usually a teacher and make them do this very thing.
Like on stage, you start here, you go there, no feet on the floor and that's what they do. There's a moment and then they all crawl or they all get on their knees and shuffle and it's like, okay, now when you go back, you know, you can't use your hands or whatever it is. And then it's like, oh, everything that they did was different than what they would have done if we hadn't given that rule. So they came up all the people who tried or you, if you try at home, you'll do something new.
And that's really the idea. Like if you decided to make a whole dance about how many ways you could move without using your feet or hands on the floor, it would be very different than if I just said, okay, make up a dance, right? Which most people will be like, okay, what are the moves that, you know, the traditional kind of thing. So it's those kind of games or what I get to play with in a class, just getting people thinking in a different way about moving, but it's not about being me, right?
It's not about being the plopplest answers about like, how can you solve that problem? Solving movement problems, really. And you know, which is where we find some commonality because I think you spend a lot of time solving movement problems. Well, that is true, but we're, but enough about me.
So is there another exercise that we can get people to think about it or maybe even do depending on where they happen to be? Well, I can think about one of the other ones in that, in that show, sometimes we do everybody here. So there's a dance piece that we do. I don't know if you can't review saw it in any of the shows you were at, but it's called the solo from the empty suitor and the dancer, it's mostly a solo for this one guy that starts with all the people.
There's a bench and there are PVC pipes. Yes. In fact, well, I've seen it in the past and I saw it on the other reason shows. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah. So this lovely lady tempts him with an apple he takes a bite and it suddenly he stuck on these PVC tubes going back and forth and he can't touch the floor. It's almost, you know, the rule is, you know, he can't touch the floor kind of like the floor is lava, right?
And then you're like, oh, yeah, I'm going to go play all play that when we were kids, you know, and it's just like in your space, how many things could you set up and what could you do to get to those things without touching the floor and how interesting could you make it, you know, and like how far away could you put that rug or that pillow that you're going to jump to? So that's another one we talk about in that show. I mean, the original Palabas rule was how do you make a dance with no dancers, right? In 1971, they had no dancers.
Right. They were just like, well, you do things you do every day. Like you've seen the piece Walk Linden and this one also is easy to find on YouTube for anybody who searches us. There's no music and it's all about entering, you know, bumping into each other meeting hello, all the funny things that happen on the street, right?
Just walking past each other and all the absurd ways you can take that as a performer, you know, you end up jumping on them and upside down and, you know, doing a handstand over somebody's back and then flipping back over another way. So, but the rule was really like, well, if you don't have dancers, you have to use movement that everybody does, you know, and then turn it into a dance. I love it. I mean, you could play another, oh, this is my favorite start to interrupt you.
One of my favorite things to do with kids or adults is tell everyone, okay, because we're never dancing, especially for a group of people that don't would not show up to a dance class. We're not dancing. We're just playing games. We're playing movement games.
So most folks have heard of the game twister, right? So you've got the thing on the floor. Well, I made up a game called Plautilus Twister. I'm going to call that a body part and you have to connect that part to another part on your body or sometimes it's the same.
I connect your elbows together. We'll start really easy or elbow to knee, okay, or head to knee. All right. You just have to freeze and do that.
Well, then I'll say now you can do that connection and move across the room. So if you've got elbow to knee, you have to keep elbow to knee and move across the room. And the cool thing is, is my version of elbow to knee might be in a kneeling position. If somebody else is not going to be standing up or it might be like holding underneath, whatever they want to do.
And then you go, okay, now you have to do this with another person. So Stephen, your elbow is going to be connected to my knee and we're going to have to work together to get across the room, right? Or my foot on your back or whatever combination we come up with and how do you move now? Because it's definitely different than something you would have thought of had I not given you that little problem to solve that movement game to do.
So you all can try that at home with your family. It's really fun to do with parents and kids. Kid belly to adult head, you know, like that that you can do. And just it's just new ways of moving yourself and being creative and like you said, having fun because if you're not having fun, what's the point?
Exactly. Well, and I'm just imagining little things like getting from the capture of the TV in the weird ways possible way or the most certain way. Yeah. Flashback, the physicist Richard, the late physicist Richard Feynman got a dog and realized that the dog doesn't know what sit means.
The dog doesn't know what down means. The dog doesn't know anything. But I can use those words to teach the dog other things. So for example, he would throw a ball and say fetch and the dog would run in the opposite direction outside the house, around the house, jump in through the window, grab the ball, go back through the window, around the house.
It's like, you know, so I can counter into a dog tricks. Yeah, oh, that's perfect. Oh, it's hysterical. What's the weirdest way that we could make you do what most people think is the simplest thing.
Yeah. I have one now, so we now have our first dog ever. And we've had him about seven months. He's maybe about a three-year-old rescue.
And I realized the other day I've been trying to teach him down. And it hit me two days ago, actually. He does it perfectly on a particular rug in our house. But he doesn't know how to do it anywhere else.
He's just totally... Like the feel of that rug on his belly. He's just gotten the idea that down means a thing connected to that rug. And now I'm trying to unwind that and get him to realize that it can generalize and mean that same thing in other places.
But I find it very entertaining. When I say down, he runs over the rug and then lies down, which is just priceless. Yeah. So these are all very fun things for people to play with.
Maybe think of something I was going to ask you. Oh, so talk, let's chat more. I want to... Well, there's so many things I want to ask you about.
But let's chat more about the classes you started doing during COVID and balanced classes, et cetera. And how... Because that's something... I'd love for people to hear how that evolved and then what you're doing and what the effects have been.
Yeah. So actually, we'll have to go back pre-pandemic. You know, it didn't exist. It did.
But like eight years ago, we got some feedback from some funders that they were looking for things for older adults. Because there's... I mean, probably you and I both know, you really have to look harder as an adult to find interesting and find things to do that are physical. I'm taking like adult cat right now.
Well, hold on, let me interject where you're not going to feel dopey going there because you're the old uncoordinated person. Yes, yes, exactly. And you're not taking dance with teenagers or you're not learning tennis with five-year-olds or something. So it is harder to find things.
So we were like, cool. We can... Because of all those things I said before, we can make a class for older adults. But also knowing that a lot of people are scared of the word dance.
And if they're not there to take a dance class, it's not like ballroom dance or whatever. I wanted people to show up. Well, what older people care about? Balance and falling.
It's like the number one thing that you're hearing about and you're thinking about. And so we were like, let's put this all together because of course a dance class and a movement class does teach you balance. And we can specifically focus on that and at the same time do all the things that we do at Blobbliss. Anyway, get people to move their bodies, get people to be creative and work together.
And so we started this program in community centers. We'd go in, we'd offer the class connecting with balance and we would meet together. It was super fun. We did a lot of things that you might see in Tai Chi, pull from Tai Chi or other physical therapy or chair yoga or different things depending on the group of folks and their ability level.
You know, warming up, doing like range of motion for your body parts, standing with something to hold on to, practicing, shifting weight. And my whole thing is as a dancer, you get to try lots of different movements all the time. You're not stuck just, I mean, most a lot of folks are either sitting or they're laying down or they're standing up and walking wherever they're going. There's not like a lot of other movements.
And when those movements happen, you know, this thing and then whoa, they go. So giving people a chance to safely experience lots of different movement patterns so that that's in their realm of things they do all the time. So we did that in person for a long time with the support of some great funders, the community foundation here in Connecticut. Then when the pandemic happened, of course, older adults are hugely impacted.
They're home. And so we're like, okay, let's, let's turn this into a video product, which we did by recording videos like you would watch any workout video and they can access them streaming. We have over 25 videos now in that library. Those are not live.
They're just prerecorded. And then we also do zoom classes of these things. Now the zoom in the at home have a little different feel because you're not in the room with somebody else, right? So you're not holding hands with somebody else.
We're tossing a ball to somebody else and that kind of thing. And luckily we are getting a chance to come back to some live in person once here. And you know, I don't, well, when we were at Breckenridge this summer, which is when I met you in person, we taught some outside, which was so fun. And we got to use the grounds there at the performing arts center and everything.
But you can, this has been huge for us because it's allowed me to not just meet people who live around here, but I can teach people all across the country. I mean, I just, I teach class on Fridays at 10 on zoom and there's somebody in California that takes the class. And that never would have happened without this whole like zoom idea. And it's really about moving again, moving your body.
What can you do now? How can we stretch that thing? And how can we play with movement for this class in order to build a more stable and mobile and balance body through these movements? And so it's super fun for me.
And I was constantly telling people like in person, no one would take their shoes off. Because they were like, you know, come from their car and they come into the building. And it just wasn't something they did. So I didn't push it because I wanted people to feel comfortable.
But then once we were home, it was like, oh, yeah, just take your shoes and socks off. Like that's very easy. And so once I found out about your company and got some of your shoes, I mean, this is now my go to I'm in the community center. Everybody's got their shoes on.
I'm like, wow, can you see how much my foot can move in these shoes? Well, that's because there are these shoes. And I just love it so much because it's such a problem. And I heard your story about your dad and it made me think about my own.
I just spent some time with my dad about some surgery and I was working with him on just moving his feet and how little his feet could move. Yeah. You think because of so many years and these tight shoes and he's not a guy that ever goes barefoot unless we're on the beach. And I just saw this like, wow, this is what happens when your feet don't move through these ranges of motion.
They just stop being able to. And so when you're even if I'm teaching class in my zero shoes and we're doing that like toe yoga, you know, your toe big toes are lifting up and then putting that can happen inside those shoes because they're made for their feet to move. And so I'm always telling folks like, take your shoes off and do the class, take your shoes off and walk outside for it safe or put on the issues where you can actually feel the ground because it's a huge component. And we as modern dancers, we get this job where we get to be barefoot all day.
Like I can literally just go hang out at work barefoot all day and it's not weird. And I know that that's not a normal experience. It's also not a normal experience to have your coworkers in their underwear. You know, and that's the normal.
Yeah, or less. Right. That's life at blah, blah, blah. But that experience for people who don't have a job where they can just like be barefoot and that be okay and normal that there's other options is huge.
And if I could get every, every older adult that I'm teaching in these classes to just not be wearing these tight shoes that are squeezing their toes together and not allowing their feet to do what they're supposed to do to keep them from falling, it would be huge. It would be so huge. There's a rumor that there's a study being done even as we speak about balance and footwear. And we were, I think we were an unknown footwear provider.
Like I didn't know that they were using our shoes, but they're using our shoes. And I'm, I can't wait to see the results of this study. Oh my gosh. I mean, we've heard anecdotally from elderly people who are like, Oh my God, you know, I'm doing so much better because I'm wearing your shoes, but I can't wait till there's something where we can talk about the science behind that.
Cause for people who don't know, my dad's one of those people who had bad, bad patterns, his feet didn't really work really well, tripped on something, fell down, broke a sept and died a couple weeks later. And I know every time I say that, people often think that I'm kind of being callous and how casually I say that, but A, it was like eight or nine years ago and B, you know, we didn't get along that way. So more importantly, it was eight or nine years ago and, you know, I'm over it. So it's interesting to think, but, you know, with modern dancers coming in and being barefoot all the time, when I was young, I don't know how it happened, but I ended up dating a bunch of dancers and almost all of them were ballet dancers and their feet were messed up.
Well, think about it. It's like the worst. It's basically worse than wearing pumps, you know, wearing cedoledo heels. Like as you're beyond your toes are squeezed together in that thing, your eyes on the top of them.
Oh, it's crazy. As soon as I didn't have to wear those anymore, they were like, I was like, I was like wearing the bras, I burned the point shoes. Well, that's, well, that's kind of my question. I mean, for both, if you could talk about your experience and just whatever you may have seen from someone who may have for whatever reason gotten the idea that maybe ballet is not for them and they come to you, what do you see in terms of getting their feet to be functional again?
Yeah, you know, that's an interesting question. I mean, a lot of people, I don't have as much of that. Like I was a ballet dancer and I ruined my feet occasionally. It happens, but honestly, just the regular shoes I've ruined most people's feet.
And it is like ballet and those point shoes are to the extreme. And it's for an aesthetic reason. It's a thing. Like I'm not saying people shouldn't do ballet.
I'm just saying, think about the impacts. It's like, you know, someone who who says like, I have a job and I have to wear heels every day. Okay, that's your life. That's what you have to do.
But know the trade off, right? And know there are other things you could be doing when you're not in those heels to try to counteract some of that, you know, like getting the heels down and like separating your toes, putting some spacers in there, just, you know, walk it out on some sand or grass and like feeling the ground again. I am. We I was joking with you because now everybody at Blobbliss just wears your issues all the time.
And my my friend and colleague at Blobbliss, we started taking tap classes, adult tap. It's so fun. Oh, tap is tap is. Wait, hold on.
I but I want to hear this, but I have to interrupt this. When I was my, maybe it was my last semester, I can't remember anyway, somewhere between my junior and senior at Duke, I did research on talking about aspects of motor skill acquisition. So I had to learn a new motor skill. So I took tap.
Oh, man, it's so much fun. It's so much fun. And it is a brain challenge as much as a physical challenge. I never knew there were so many things you could do with your foot.
You know, like I was like, I've been dancing my whole life, but it's been more about your whole body moving in space. And yes, if it's ballet, you're pointed or you're flexed or you're doing whatever. But like the number of sounds that you can make with your feet on the ground. And then there's an order, those go in that's almost like a poem, you know, and your, because our teacher always occurs just to say the names of the moves.
So you're thinking like shuffle ball, change kicks up, whatever it is. So that's like I'm thinking words in my brain. I'm trying to communicate all the way down to my feet. They've never felt further away from my head than they do at that hour.
And, but you know, you've got to wear tap shoes, obviously, you maybe you should make a zero shoe tap shoe. I would be in on that because we finished my whole level. It's probably going to get I finished. And we both were like, Oh, well, these are definitely not zero shoes because my toes have been crammed together in these tap shoes for the hour.
So I that's so funny. No, no, just my tap shoes. Yeah. Just doing nothing but making a foot shape, tap shoe kind of excess, except for though, you know, it would be perfect for the five people who would buy it.
Yeah. I realized something when you're talking a moment ago that there's, there's kind of an overarching theme in these podcasts and the conversation of having the people that I just realized. And that is what we're often trying to do in many, many different ways is get people to just break out of a pattern is like to, or more accurately, to identify when you're kind of in a particular groove and then find a way to do it differently. And, and we've talked, I've talked to a bunch of people who were, that's really the fundamental thing we're saying.
I could take us all this on party where that's the fundamental thing that we're saying is find a way to take something that you do normally and then turn that around a little bit, find a different way to do that, find a alternate way to do that, find a, you know, more interesting way to do that, find the opposite of that or whatever it is. And, and now you can talk about tap this whole phenomenon of this, just the way your brain likes to make patterns and the way that what can be really fun and valuable is to break those or at least recognize those and have options that you didn't have before. As a former gymnast, I know most people, most people that I know have never been upside down other than like on a roller coaster and they've never just spent any time upside down. And once you've been upside down for a while, you know, that's a thing that you can do and it has effects that you can discover slash enjoy.
And so I really appreciate you kind of talking about that back into the classes and then with tap too. Yeah. So I haven't done, I went to do that. I'm 16 now.
So this is when I was this 40 years ago, ish to this day, like once a month, I find myself going, it's literally thinking that I have to do it. Shuffle, wait, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, step. Yes. We can't help myself.
I always tell my students, I force them to do whatever I'm interested in or whatever I'm finding really challenging. So as soon as I start taking tap, I mean, the first thing I thought was, this is so great for my brain because I'm like literally making new pathways. And so I was like, Oh, ding, that's all my classes are going to have to do this now. So we've been doing some really simple things, you know, like lifting, tapping your toe down.
That's always like first warm up toe taps, heel taps, whatever. And it's also great for like variability of the way your feet can work. Right. So like beyond just like learning how to tap because you want to learn how to tap, like being able to move your feet in lots of different ways is just going to help you solve the movement problem.
That is, Oh, shoot, I just tripped on the rug and I've got to, I've got to catch myself, right? We can practice it as many ways as we can think of, but in the moment, you don't know what's going to happen until you're there, right? So trying to have this adaptability, have this practice of like you're saying, not the habitual like, well, then I step forward. Well, what if the rug sent you sideways and you've got to crisscross your leg over and solve that problem?
Like that quick thinking. And so a lot of my classes for balance will also use a ball, right? And we'll just do things because I know you juggle too, don't you? Of course.
Of course, right? I can't juggle, but like, well, let me preface that. That's because I was a boy who went to high school. So it was required, like all of my friends, we all learned to juggle.
OK, well, it gives you, you can take the ball and do some of the same exercises. So for example, I'm doing an exercise where they, you know, step forward, a little mini lunge forward, catch their weight, come back. Well, what if you, the reason you have to lunge forward is because you bounce the ball or talks the ball too far in front and you have to reach out to catch it, right? So that is, gives you more variability in where it's going to go.
Because you just never, you can't ever toss it to exactly the same spot unless you're trying to juggler and you're having, you're having to react, right? I really want people to have to react as much as possible in these classes. And that's what's great in person because then you've got another person, like, if I throw you the ball and I throw it badly, right? You have to react and dodge out to the side.
And I used to tell people all the time, I'd be like, now be a bad partner, like, throw it badly. Not so badly they can't get it. But like, in the center of their body, I am over here. They're going to have to go this way.
And it's like those agility drills, you know, where you have some app or whatever. And it's telling you, right, left. We don't know what's going to come next. You know, whatever.
So, and that's the fun. I mean, this is where it connects with Blobblis, the dance company, because people are always like, well, what does this have to do with what you guys do? We create all of our dances through improvisation. The dances you see on stage are not improvised in that moment.
They're set, they're done. But right now we're in the studio working on new things and they're going through a process of improvisation. They are having to react in the moment with each other to what's really happening. The person goes, hi, are you going to dodge under, right?
Or if they put their hand on your shoulder, are you going to move away? Are you going to resist and provide the opportunity for them to be lifted by you? Like all of those things are happening with discovery and like, reacting really in the moment to what's happening. And the pieces wouldn't be the same if we didn't go to them that way.
We don't, our choreographers don't sit at home and think up all the ideas for the moves and then come in and tell them what to do. It's like, sometimes they say, here's a problem to solve, right? You can't touch your hands together or whatever. Or sometimes it's just like, let's see what happens when we have three people on stage together and we're trying some, you know, trying some move that we're reacting to each other.
So that is another cool crossover from what I'm doing in valence class and when we're doing it in other Pilabas classes. And I will say to folks, we have a master classes that happen all over the country, like on our website, you can see where we're performing. We start up again in January. In most places, we do like an hour master class.
Sometimes that's specifically for a group, right? For performing at a university, a lot of times they'll have a class for their university students, but sometimes it's a community class and we do a summer week long. You don't have to be a dancer to come. Like you don't have to have ever taken a dance class.
You don't have to, you just have to be able to spend a week with us moving around and, you know, expecting to be physical for eight hours a day. But it's not, you don't have to hold somebody over your head when be physical. Just, you just have to, you're, you're creating the movement, right? So I've had people in their 80s through the workshop.
I've had a woman show up and go, I'm a middle school principal and I have no idea why I'm here, except I saw the show. I saw you do this and I was just like, go for it. You know, so those happen every summer. And really it's so fun to just be in this space where you can try something totally new with a whole bunch of people who also want to do that thing.
I was calling it, it's like adult summer camp. You know, you stay in a dorm and everybody like ends at the end like, oh, you're my best friend ever. You know, we've made so many things together. It's really awesome.
But how long does it take for people to get over the self consciousness and into this to play? Not very long because I've been doing this a long time. And so I've got a good way of welcoming us all into the thing where there's no way to feel self conscious. And the other thing is we never use mirrors.
You know, your idea of dance in a studio with a wall full of mirrors is like art kryptonite because number one, it takes you out of yourself. You're into a reflection of yourself, which is exactly what zoom did. I told everybody that everyone having to be on zoom was like everyone experiencing what we dancers live through, growing up. It's just too much looking at yourself because you're like, oh, oh, do I have those?
Oh, is this shirt ugly? You know, like, constantly that's what you're doing in the mirror when you're taking a dance class. Yes. You're trying to get your lines, right?
But you're also like, I'm fat or my arms are different than other people's, you know, so we do not use mirrors. The other reason is if you're looking in a mirror, you're not looking at your partner's face. You're not reading their their physical cues. You're not really communicating.
There's a third entity and it's the mirror and you're like, well, I am looking at that. Well, yeah, you're looking at them through a mirror. It's weird. It's a very odd sensation.
So anytime we're out and we're in a dance studio teaching, we're always like, can we cover the mirrors? Like, is there's something we can pull, you know, because that we want to create that intimate space where you're just with another person and it really does remove a lot of that because you don't know what you look like. No visual. Most people have never had many people who have never had this experience.
So let's say I'm nominally Jewish. That is I was raised in a Jewish family. I refer to my family as Christmas and Easter Jews. So we would go to say, say God for the big holidays.
And that was really kind of it. But one of the things that was really interesting when my father died is there's a tradition that when someone dies during the morning period, you cover up all the mirrors. Oh, yeah. And it's a really amazing thing to discover how much you pay attention to yourself, even if it's casual, even if it's, you know, brushing your teeth, watching your face, like it is and not doing that, not getting that feedback.
It's unbelievably liberating. Yeah, I know. It's so true. It's so true.
And I, I, you know, my kids are 12 and 14. And so they went through this like zoom period at like the worst awkward time, right? You know, I mean, it's like you're at your worst. You're getting zipped whatever.
And then you're like on screen all day with a camera like right up here. And it was like, I can't even imagine what that was like. But yeah, taking the, because it's almost like the mirror is the judgment. If you don't see it, it's not that you never judge, you know, maybe you sit down and go, like, oh, my, my waist is a little floppier than I thought it was.
But like the seeing it gives you that moment of, oh, look, oh, look at my hands. And it's worse in a way because you see yourself from a particular angle and then you look in the mirror, it's a different angle. And then so suddenly you're seeing things that you hadn't seen just from, you know, your eyes looking down left, right, et cetera. And yeah, it's really, I have to touch my mind with this.
I have a thing. We don't have anywhere to put it in our current house. I just realized that it's called the true mirror. And what it is, it's basically two mirrors that meet at a 90 degree angle.
So when you're looking at it, it's 45 degree angles because you're looking down the middle, but they figured out a way to make the scene between the two mirrors invisible. And so when you look into two mirrors that are at a 90 degree angle to each other, you see yourself backwards from the way you see in a normal mirror. In other words, being yourself the way other people see you, right, you're backwards in a regular mirror. And when we used to have this in our previous house, we'd have it in the powder room and we'd see people say, where's the bathroom?
We'd say over there. And then we would just go kind of listen because you would go, well, but they didn't realize that one eyebrow was way higher than the other because you get used to the way you see yourself in the mirror or whatever it is. And it's just some people really liked it and some people really didn't like it. Right.
You're like suddenly my parts on the other side of my head and what does that do? Well, there's kind of a similar thing. One thing I do a lot beginning of a blobblest workshop is you have a partner and you're just going to play a mirror game, right? So you'd be the leader and I would follow on anything you would do.
I would try to just copy it and then at a certain point, we switch and the other person is the leader and it's super basic exercise. But one of the fun things, well, you have to really watch, right? You're having to really take in somebody's whole body and replicate it. But always at the end, I feel like I know something more about that person because the things that they do are so different sometimes than anything I would ever do.
And I always think like I feel like I put on your skin for a little bit and I'm like, Oh, this is what it's like to be inside your body because you do these things, you know, and this is what I do. And you don't think about the habitual movements you have until you see them reflected on another person or if you're like me and I'm going around and I'm teaching this class all the time and I'm with my partner and we're teaching this class and then I realize I've done basically the same kinds of things in this demo every time. And I'm like, wow, I guess that really is my habitual way of moving. There are patterns that we do and then you see it reflected on another body and you can see them in a different way.
And a lot of times people at the end of our summer intensive will say, like, I don't actually know you, like I don't know where you live or like what your wife is like or whatever. But because we danced together and we made this class, made this piece or whatever, I have a deep understanding of you, but it's not one that, you know, maybe your co-worker has. You love this. So maybe you won't.
I don't know. I think you will. So I used to do one of the things that got me out the boulder was I was doing Zen Archery, Japanese Archery, and it was presented as a sort of, you know, meditative thing like doing just Zen meditation or calligraphy or T ceremony. It's just another one of those things.
And there's a line at the moment of release when you look at when you release the air out at the moment of release, the archer's true nature is revealed. Now, the way people who have a for lack of a better term spiritual band will interpret that is that's when you discover your true nature, you become awakened, you become enlightened by, you know, shooting things like, no, no, what it really means. There's another thing that our teacher was the imperial bow maker to the emperor of Japan. He said, when I met him, he was 80 years old.
And he would also say, tell the story that perhaps in China, the way they when they were, when some person was in charge was looking for people to be his vice presidents, essentially, for whatever it was, they would have them do archery because you could see things about their personality. So one day I was watching somebody shoot and I just had this thing go through my mind. I just, it was sort of like a window open and I could see something about them. And it just coincidentally, the, I was an assistant teacher.
Now, my job as the assistant teacher was basically to sit around and do almost nothing. But for whatever reason, the teacher said, you know, is there anything you want to say about that shot? I went, oh, and it didn't occur to me to not say something like what I'm about to say, which was, yeah, look, just because when you were a kid, your parents couldn't handle the amount of energy you had. You don't need to be yelling by me every time, you know, you let go there.
You don't be yelling at us in the way you shoot. And his eyes just got like really wide. And he went, how do you, I don't say anything, just shoot again. And then suddenly completely different.
So you do, you know, when you, if you look and feel it, you do start to understand certain patterns that people have that you would never find in any other way. And now here's the punchline of that story. The other students would say, ooh, do that to me, you know, watch me shoot. I don't need to see you should have already seen enough.
I can just tell you. But the other, the, the crazy thing that happened was the other teachers got very anxious around me because they could tell that I could do the same thing to them. And they had built very rigid personas about being a teacher who never, and I was, you know, seeing through that. So that's another thing that was pretty wacky.
Yeah, totally. I can totally see how that could happen. I mean, luckily for me, I get to create the persona that, oh, wow, I got a lot of these habits too. And look at this.
And we talk a lot about leading and following because everything, if you're going to improvise with someone, sometimes you're leading, sometimes you're following sometimes the movement is leading the movement movement. But I always tell people, like everybody has a different relationship with being a leader and a follower. Some people love leading. Some people love following, whatever.
And I always get to joke like, I obviously like leading. I've chosen a job of teaching people, standing up in front and telling you what to do, right? I realize this. I'm much more, and there's a, there's another exercise we do where one partner closes their eyes and the other partner moves them around, walking them through the space.
And I never taught this exercise until at one period of time, some of the dancers we had, they were like, I love this exercise. You should do this thing. It's really great. And I was like, why should we do it?
And then they told me all the reasons why we should do it. I was like, okay, you're making a good case. Like let's do it. And I realized the reason I never taught it is because I hate it.
I hate not being in charge. I hate not seeing what's happening. And having somebody who'll lead me around is like a nightmare. And then I was like, that's not really a good reason to not do it.
Right. That's just like my personal preference. So I do it now. And I always tell people this, like, I don't, it's my job to lead you through this experience.
It doesn't mean I'm 100% great at all of it. Right. I'm also human. And I don't like to do this.
So I probably should, right. If you don't, it's a great reason. I mean, I'm not good at tap. I never tapped before.
So I'm part of the reason I like it is because I'm like, wow, I'm not good at this yet. I'm not so bad that I can't keep up, but I'm not. I'd like it the challenge of doing something. I'm not good at, you know, well, so here's something when I was doing my research, what I did is I did like, there was five different steps and I would do them as fast as I could for a minute.
And then I would record how many I did and how accurate I was. And what was really fun was the, what would have otherwise been an imperceptible improvement was very clearly perceptible because I was, I could see the chart and I was doing it faster and I was doing it better until I could do it really, really fast, perfectly because it was just way back in my brain now and I couldn't do it wrong. And so what I'm going to recommend for the fun of it, like take one or two steps, do that, do like 30 seconds or a minute and tape it. And then, you know, probably we'd later do it again, see what you find because that changes the learning process.
It makes it so that quote frustration that we feel, which is just laying down in neural pathways has a reason. And it's a really fun one. The moving people around one, I've done something like that. And I, my thing, when I'm a leader, I like to find out where people get stuck.
I like to see where they're trying to resist, where I'm trying to go. And then I try to exaggerate that a little bit until they get, you know, until they basically they're like, you know, I don't want to do that. And then I just kind of push a little more. Right.
Right. Yeah. I have a fondness for finding where people get stuck and then finding a way to get around that or through that or under whatever the appropriate analogy or metaphor would be. Some people really like that.
But because one of those things that when we do have a pattern and we don't know, we are literally stuck in certain ways and it becomes part of our identity in ways that we don't recognize. And then you try this new thing. And suddenly there's just a new version of you too, which that's my favorite thing. Well, I mean, you're a disruptor and that's going to be a disruptor in business.
Right. I mean, you said, this is the way things are going. This is something needs to happen. Yeah.
And I think that could be a great thing. I mean, my husband, Matt, who's one of the artistic, artistic director is a plavillist. He's a disruptor. I mean, and it can be very challenging to be in a meeting, right?
Because then you're like, would you just shut up? Right. But it takes it sometimes. No, no.
Like, why? Why are you doing this? You know, I'll sometimes I'll say, oh, I like this idea because I can totally see how X, Y and Z would happen. And this other way is just way harder.
And he's like, yeah, we should do the harder one. I was like, no, no, no, I want to do it away that I already see. He's like, yeah, but then we're just going to do those things that you've already come up with in your head. Right.
If you're a creator, right, you can't just do XYZ, but you've already done because then it's just going to get boring. And we're going to all say, like, we've seen that show. We want you have to have disruptor doesn't mean you enjoy the disruption. It's well, that's the thing.
It's worse. One of my best friends called me 20 years ago and said, you know what your biggest problem is? I said, oh, this is good. He says, you like to just tell people when they're wrong or factually inaccurate or logically inconsistent or in some cognitive bias or, you know, whatever, because you find that interesting.
But they think you're an asshole. And oh my God, you're absolutely right. I never put two and two together like that. You just did it.
Yeah. But it's something that and it's annoying. I'm the first one to admit it because I know that this is a tendency that I have that many people find, horribly obnoxious. And it's almost impossible for me to stop myself when I'm seeing someone, you know, making some argument that it just doesn't make any sense.
It's a non-sequiturs and whatever it is. Yes. And and yeah, I don't do well at certain dinner parties. It's the best thing.
No, I feel like you could be my husband. Like that's exactly the same thing. I can't tell you how many it's so frustrating to him when there's like a rule that makes no sense. Yeah.
Because he just wants like the, you know, you go get a rental car and they give you the keys and it's two sets of keys and they're locked together with that metal chain. You know, and when they first started doing that, they like handed it to him and he's like, they're like, don't lose the keys because it'll be a $300 charge. And he's like, okay, so why don't you cut this and take one of these? Then I only lose one key and you have one.
And they're like, but no, but it's not our policy. And he's like, yeah, that makes no sense. Why would you give me two sets of why you have two keys? So that one is one place and one is another place and like 30 minutes later, I'm like, can we just leave?
Like there's obviously this is their rule. It doesn't make sense, you know, but if it doesn't make sense, he wants to tell them. Yeah. Like they must not know.
They must not understand that it doesn't make sense. Well, I will concede though that there was one that didn't make sense when I was in college. And basically it was a sign, I'm not going to get it all that he doesn't take too long, but there was a sign that kind of guided people about how to deal with getting your food in the cafeteria in what they thought was the most efficient manner, but seemed completely ludicrous. So I spent a semester, every time I walked by that sign, it was screwed into the wall.
I take my knife and I'd unscrew a quarter turn. And by the end of the semester, I pop it off the wall. The next semester, at the beginning of a new year, a new freshman came in and they didn't see the sign that had the stupid rule and they did what normal people would do otherwise. And it made it impossible to do.
No. Yeah. I was. It wasn't as ludicrous as you thought.
Yeah. It was ludicrous, but not in the way that I thought. And I permanently ruined getting lunch at Duke University because you couldn't get your food fast enough to get to class. And then happily I graduated.
That year. Yeah. Well, you know, it's like we were talking about disruption. And I think that's what I think that's what Belavela did 52 years ago is that dance was happening in a certain way.
And not just ballet, but like modern dance, it was happening like there was this amazing person and then a student of theirs would go off and make their own thing. And there was a new thing. Another student would come off, which is awesome. And people joke that blah blah blah is like the mushroom that's growing in the dirt of the dance family tree.
You know, we're not part of it exactly, but we're not completely separate. Right. We're in the light in the stuff. We're in the dirt.
But the fact that they didn't know five, six, seven, eight, or they hadn't been told you're supposed to point your toes or you're supposed to interact like this, made them do things differently. And then for the audiences, it was a disruption that ended up causing them if they had made dances like everybody else was making dances, it probably would have gone nowhere. And they were, I mean, some of the first reviews about blah blah blah blah were like, well, I don't know what this was, but it wasn't dance. And I'm always telling students this now because like what they see now, even if they see something for 50 years ago that made people say that they would never say this isn't dance, but also people do collaborations people do things differently now.
But when we always feel like we're trying to have that moment again, like what can you do in 2022 that makes people go like what? Like what was this? And I probably in 2015, we did the collaboration with Penn and Teller. You read my mind.
I know. I know. And I didn't get to see the creation because they're constantly working in Las Vegas. So our company went out and they would work during the day with Penn and Teller and then they would go do their show at night.
So I didn't get to see anything. And when they came back with this piece, which is now called the symbol for escape that's on your computer, you know, it's like the two brackets and ESC, but basically it's an escape act. And Penn was like, we want to do something that we could not do like that we physically could not do and but have it be magic, right? Like how can, how can we, I mean, Pilobles can do all these amazing things or what are the escapes that we can put Pilobles into and put them into.
And so many people after we did that, and it has a voice over by pendulette, which is ruined my life for about three months while my husband tried to pick, which was a great thing. And so I thought, well, my husband tried to pick which version of hello, I'm pendulette like there's 14 versions of that playing in speakers constantly. But people said like that wasn't a dance. And I said, and some of the people were really bummed and I said, oh, hey, done.