You want to learn to dance the best way to do it might be by not moving at all. We're going to find out more about that on today's episode of the movement movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to do everything feet first, basically to live, enjoy, feet first because those things are your foundation. We're going to break down the propaganda, the mythology and sometimes the flat out lies you've been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or dance or play or do yoga or cross whatever it is you like to do and to do it. Enjoyably, affectionately, efficiently, effectively and to mention a joyily trick question.
I know I did. But the point is if you're not having fun, do something different so you are because you're not going to keep it up if you're not having a good time. I'm Stephen Sashan from zero issues.com, your host of the movement movement podcast and we call it that because we're creating a movement and by we that includes you. Don't worry, simple and free.
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You can find us on various platforms where you can like and give us a thumbs up and subscribe and hit the bell on YouTube. You know how it works. If you want to find out more about this, please subscribe. So Kate Chapman, welcome.
Why don't you tell humans who you are and what you're doing here and then we'll dive into dancing without moving. Well, I am Kate Chapman and I'm a Broadway veteran but also a life coach, health coach and someone who's passionate about living a field better life. And so I have been speaking and writing and talking and coaching on that for about 10 years now. And I'm so excited to be here to talk about my career as a dancer, my continued space as a dancer and what that means.
So when you were on Broadway, what were you doing? I was singing and dancing. I was a performer. I've done five Broadway shows and a number of other special events through the years.
I was also Mrs. Claus for the Radio City Christmas Spectacular and I had backup girls called the Closets and we did a really great number that was full of dance and just lots of movement. And you know, I'm not a trained dancer quote unquote like a lot of the dancers that you think of who are professionals. I took some classes as a kid and I loved it and I kept doing it and I had some talent at it.
And so it ended up being a career. I'm just thinking that when it's not Christmas time, the Closets could work doing backup dancing for an English based musical. There you go. That'd be great.
They like the work I think. Yeah, maybe the Closets and I'm just referring to them parenthetically. I'll stop there. So talk to me before we get into the dancing without moving part, just say more about, I mean, because again, this is all about sort of natural movement and most people think of dance as unnatural in many ways.
If we think about ballet and ballet dancers on point, et cetera. So can you talk to me about what you're doing dance wise or what you're doing now with human beings and this whole idea of, you know, bodies doing what bodies do? So as a kid, I used to hang out in the living room just sort of moving my body. I know you started in gymnastics and I had dreams of being a wonderfully talented gymnast.
I was not. I did compete for a couple of years, but I think my best being score might have been a 4.2 or something tragic like that. But I loved to move and I didn't have a lot of people around me telling me the quote unquote proper way to do it. So I would just do it how it felt good.
And when I started taking dance classes, I had the really fortunate experience to dance with a woman named Lynn Talbot Kale and I was her only point student. So it was a one on one experience where she and I got to talk a lot about how the body was put together and how it functioned. And so I learned a lot about, you know, how you're supposed to do it based upon that, but I also just learned a lot about how the body was structured. And so when I left that classroom with her, I just took that idea of the structure and I built upon that so that every time I would go into a dance class, I thought about myself as a structure more than somebody doing dance steps.
Interesting. So can you say more, like give people some examples of what it's like when you look at the body as a structure or think about your own body as a structure? So you want to think about a structure as having to have a foundation and then everything being stacked plumb on top of that foundation, right? So it doesn't tip over.
Or if it is tipping, how do you work in opposition to that tipping so you don't fall? And so it was all about looking at where my feet were, where my hips were, how the knees played into that, what the ankles were doing, and then also looking at the core and how that was playing into things to keep the upper body so that it wasn't taking us completely off kilter. So I just realized that there's something that I used to do often when I would have these conversations that I haven't done in a little while and I don't know why, but I'm going to put you on the spot by re-doing, re-something, something that I haven't done for a while. And based on just that little bit you just said, which I love and I've got anatomy pictures in my brain, can you think of any movement based something that human beings who are listening to this or watching this now could do to get some just flavor of this whole concept of body as a structure?
Absolutely. So if you stand with your feet, you know, sort of hip width apart and barefoot's best so they're just not. I mean, actually do it. Hold on.
Adjusting. All right. Now it looks like I'm at a weird angle. It looks like I'm falling off.
You're giant. It would be more difficult for you. Totally not true. Okay.
I got my feet with the part. Okay. I'm just laying out like little root tentacles so that they've got some life and some direction to them. And then you're going to think about the heels as melting into the floor.
And so as you're sort of like becoming one with the floor with your feet, soften your knees a little bit and then get into your hips and start to just do some hip circles around. I'm just enjoying this. I'm just enjoying this. I'm just enjoying this thing of thinking of my feet as being kind of rooted and my heels as being soft, not alone.
Just, you know, change my posture. It made things very interesting. Okay. So now I'm doing hip circles, which people are walking by in the conference room.
It's a big glass wall and people are looking at me strangely, which is not the first time that's happened. So I don't care. That's excellent. And so I love that.
So as you're in your hips, I want you to think about the spiral energy of the hips going back down into the legs and spiraling down each of the legs and going into the feet and into those tentacles and down into the earth. And so just the hips and the feet are just playing right now and sort of spiral dance. And all you're doing is you're just thinking about those two centers and in doing so, you've connected yourself to a lot of what your balance is and a lot of what will keep you steady when you try to leap and jump in all these kind of things. I'm feeling my arches engage on other things, but that's a really significant thing that I'm noticing.
And then I'm also finding myself taking a number of very pleasant deep breaths as I'm doing this. And I like that it's a very, it's a really interesting feeling. I mean, even with my knees a little bent, a little soft, it feels like I've got a straight line from my hips into the ground, which is a very interesting feeling given that that's not what's going on, but that's the experience of it. And there you've experienced sort of like foundation of dance that I know about, which is different from gymnastics.
Gymastics, you have a lot of lock to knees, right? Yeah. And dance has a lot of really softness in the knees that allows you to use the power of them, but also not to stress them out as you're trying to move them from space to space. Am I going to sit back down soon?
You're going to sit back down now. I didn't want to end your joy too soon. No, that was nice. But I'm also, I'm also having a hella here day.
I'm also, I want to play with this while I'm sitting too. And just it's an interesting feeling when I'm sitting, because I can still get that find that connection between my hips and my feet, which I hadn't really been paying attention to. Yes. And so that's how I sort of grew as a dancer is really just playing in those two centers.
And so just as you've discovered, you know, you've made the connection yourself and anybody can do it at home. I'm also noticing that, you know, while we were focusing hips down, I'm noticing a sort of openness and relaxation in my upper body as well from doing that, which makes sense. You know, you have a strong foundation, the rest of it can kind of chill out. And also we, you know, the yogic tradition says that we hold anger in our hips.
And sometimes I think little things make us angry throughout the day and we might just store them. Now you're thinking about it? Different if I'm wearing boxers versus bikini breeze. I'm not sure.
I don't know that the yogics have those two differentiations of underwitches. I'm not sure they've done that study. You know, that would be a study that I definitely would not want to read the results of. So so you went from Broadway dancing and this different way, you know, it's funny when you were describing how you were moving and how you took that to dance.
You just maybe think about little kids who haven't gotten any instruction about anything or even just when I go out on the track and I'm watching if people bring their kids and the kids are just out playing. No one taught them how to move. And of course, if they're running, they tend to have perfect form. They land with their feet right underneath their body.
They're got their just the right amount of body lean. They have this stupid weird look on their face. I think it's called smiling because they're doing it for fun. And it sounds like that in many ways was kind of your way in where it's not like that for most people.
Yeah, because I didn't have anybody to tell me otherwise. And once people started telling me otherwise it did take the fun of it. I had to put on back in later. Oh, yeah.
There are a lot of dance teachers that are really pretty cruel in how they speak to dancers, especially when it comes to people who have different body types than what is considered the right body type for a dancer. And I never had the correct body type for really any of the sports or performance kind of things. So yeah, I mean, there was shame along the way that then made me hold myself and then caused injuries quite honestly. And so then I've had to kind of back out of that on the backside.
I like to say, I spent six years putting the gymnast in my body and 30 years getting him out. Yeah, that seems about right. You wanted to hold on. So moving then from Broadway to working with human beings, let's talk about that and what it is that you're doing with people and how do they come to you to begin with and what are you doing when they do?
Okay, so I was going along and Broadway just fine. And actually I was a plus sized dancer. I was what was known as a character actress. And I was quite a bit overweight and I was getting a lot of work because I was an overweight person who could dance very well or move actually what they say on Broadway.
I want to turn it correctly, but it is dancing. I might say it's movement because I don't really turn, but it's just. But I started to get a lot of physical repercussions from the weight. I mean, having excess weight on your joints, your joints don't really like that over long term.
And I was starting to have some back pain and hip pain and ankle pain and all sorts of things. And so, and then also I was promised my dream role if I would lose enough weight. So what was the role and how much weight? The role was Ava Peron and Avia.
Oh, not a bad part. Not a bad part. And it was a hundred pounds. Holy moly.
And how fast were they expecting you to be able to pull this off? I needed that was a year. And I got about 70 of it off, I guess, maybe 75. So I still wasn't to go late when I played the role.
And reviewers did call me fat. So that was a dry ball. Well, I can ask you a question about that. Because were you at the time thinking of yourself that way or were you just sort of surprised?
Because the reason I asked, I'll poison the well by saying this, I find it very interesting when people accuse me of something that I actually agree with, but I just wish it weren't true or wish they didn't notice. And over the years, especially in the last roughly 20 years, I've come to the place where if someone says, you know, you are and film in the blank with something, it's pretty much guaranteed that I can go, I can find that. But what was your experience of it? Because that's an interesting situation to be in.
Well, in this particular situation, which is different from some other ones. So I'll parse them out. In this particular situation, there were projections of the real Ava Corona on screen above me. And was I the same size as her?
No. Did I realize that? Yes. Okay.
So I did realize that. How about this is a largely fictional depiction of her life, right? It's musical theater. So suspend your disbelief.
And did I sing the hell out of it? Yes, I did. So there you go. Which that video also did say to put it.
Now, in other positions, though, I didn't have a good idea about what I really looked like because from very early on in my career, I was always being told to lose weight, even though I was really at the perfect weight for what my body wanted. And it was a very healthy weight. But in the entertainment business, people are often body shamed and weight is a big thing. And to the point where casting directors would say ridiculous things like lose five and a half pounds.
It's that a five and a half pounds look like you piece of work, right? It's that last half pound that really makes it work. I mean, the five pounds, you don't notice the difference, but that last half pound, it's all in there. That's a start them right there, that half pound.
So there were many times where I was told that I was heavy that now I look back at pictures and I think no wonder I had a bad eating disorder. There was a lot of false information being put upon me. However, by the time I played Ava Perone, I had dealt with a lot of that. I'd gone through a lot of the demons in my head.
I'd also lost the weight in a way that I'd never had before, which was by listening to my body. What? Constantly. And by doing a lot of just walking, I just walked everywhere for a while and I just talked to myself as I walked.
When you were listening to your body, that's a phrase that I got to kick out of. I'll tell you the story, but I want to hear your version of this. I'm taking a walk with a friend who made a comment about how she's trying to listen to her body. I don't remember the exact context about it, but I had to do with weight loss.
I remember literally falling on the ground laughing. And she's what? I said, well, I know what your body wants. She's really what?
I said, French fries chocolate cake and ice cream. I mean, what are you kidding? You know, calories, baby. But I've thought that same thing before with the idea that if I could do this thing called listening to my body, which I had no definition for what that meant, that it would lead me to eating things that would then change the shape of my body into the form that would then make me happy.
And I at that point realized that that in every sentence or part of that sentence is utterly ludicrous and it just cracked me up. And the biggest one being the last part of that and then I'd be happy part. But so for me, you know, I'm not a binge eater. I literally have we have a thing of Ben and Jerry, a pint of Ben and Jerry's in our freezer, but I think has been there for seven years because I had a spoonful.
I was done. And, you know, I mean, maybe I'd have it again. In fact, the other night, I was thinking I wouldn't mind some ice cream and I forgot I even had it. So, but so for you, what would listening your body mean on both the, you know, the quote listening side for many people is just am I full or not versus the, you know, the what you did when you heard whatever you heard.
Okay. So it's a process because I think, you know, societally we are trained to carry around like our brain jar, right? The body's just carrying that around. Yeah.
But they don't communicate and they don't talk to each other. And whenever the body asks for things, the brain's like shut up, we have things to do. Okay. So I started to stop with the shut up we have things to do.
And I actually started to close my eyes and just sort of climb downstairs, so to speak and look around. And I'd had a lot of medical things wrong with me as a child. So I'd had a lot of medical trauma. And so it was kind of a confluence of things whereby I didn't want to go to doctors anymore.
They weren't doing anything that was helping me. It was sort of stacking problem on problem. And so I was trying to figure out how do I know what my body needs because I'm watching my cat and when it needs some grass, it eats it, you know, and it feels better. I'm watching, you know, animals in the wild, then you document on things and they know what plants to go for because the plants are talking to.
And so I started to just become interested about my body as an animal and that that animal has instincts about what it wants. Now, if that animal is just being kept in a cage and it's being, you know, fed whatever it wants to be fed, you know, all day long, it most likely is in sort of a place where it's not being taken care of in other ways. And so that's why it's eating its feelings, you know. And so I started to look at what were the areas of my life that did make me happy.
Those were things like personal connection and having a home that I really enjoyed living in and doing things that were creative and being curious about my world and playing. And so as I started looking at those things, I realized that those were things that fed me much more than food and they were things that my body wanted much more than food. My body wants to live in a clean home that's uncluttered. It likes that, you know.
My body wants to have baths to soothe it when it feels cold. It likes that, you know. None of that is food though, but it all would fill my time and make me feel like I was doing something and I think eating sometimes is just something to do. That's really interesting.
Just finding that the, I can see this in both ways. One is that the food was giving a kind of fake kind of satisfaction or that these other things were more genuine or I can see it kind of the other way around. Suffice it to say using satisfaction as a guide and just looking for something other than just food as the way to get that. Yes.
So when I did that for about two years, suddenly the 100 pounds were gone. Lots of things were better. There were chronic health problems that I'd had that disappeared, which you know, that was not what I was expecting. So I suddenly at the age of 40 was well for the first time that I could ever remember.
Did it hit you? Did it hit you sort of that cleanly like, Oh my God, now or was it subtle enough that you had to kind of take a step back and go, Oh, whoa, there was there was a subtlety of it, but there was one day where it just sort of hit me in the head. Like, wow, this is a completely different experience of life. Was there something on that day that triggered that or just like wake up and, you know, the birds are dripping and butterflies are flying?
You know what? I think this is going to sound weird, but it is going to sound weird. I hope so. But day when I remember sitting and putting myself into a ball, I could put my knees up to my chest and I could just make this little ball as if I were in the womb.
And something about just returning to that perfect fetal position with no obstruction, just felt like magic. That's really interesting. Yeah, it's funny. I think about things that I did as a high school gymnast, certain kind of flexibility, for example, and that position, that basically getting your knees up really, really tight, that's the one thing that's changed for me as well.
I mean, I'm not, I'm not significantly overweight, but I weigh, let's see, a good 15 pounds more than I did when I was in, you know, gymnast mode. And that's a lot of, I mean, I'm only 5, 4, 5, 5. So that's a bunch of stuff. So I can really imagine just that feeling of like, be able to get in that nice tight little ball position and suddenly going, oh, yeah, that works.
Yeah. Fascinating. Yeah. And so what, did anything change with your eating other than that you were doing other things than eating?
Well, yes. I had come across Dr. Oz and Dr. Michael Roysen were both on the Oprah Show, these two things together.
And basically it was just a really great book about how the anatomy works and how food gets, you know, put through whatever. And they had a list of five things not to eat. And so partially hydrogenated oils enriched flowers, sugar in the first five ingredients, anything with trans fat was a bit thin. As long as it doesn't say, as long as the fifth one's not chocolate, I'm okay.
So basically you could boil it down to eat whole foods, don't eat the packaged foods. Because every package that I would read, one of those five ingredients was on there and so I was like, I can't eat that. You know, so it became about, I had to learn how to, how to feed myself without a lot of packaged foods. And so my favorite, and by putting air quotes around favorite phenomenon is how, especially in and around Boulder, Colorado, I don't know about other places, that's become a big deal.
It's like avoiding, you know, trying to keep whole food. Don't go for junk food. But the joke is that there's all these quote healthy versions of the same junk food that we ate as kids. So there's healthy giitos and there's healthy, you know, whatever the hell they are.
And it's like, yeah, it doesn't have those five ingredients, but it's still basically junk food. You know, it's like, oh, we can't have those pepperaged farm goldfish. We need to have the righteous goldfish, the ones that are free range goldfish that are, you know, fair trade goldfish that were hand harvested by nuns in Switzerland. You know, I mean, it's like the same garbage, just with different ingredients.
It does feel more pious, though, as if you're following original religion of choice, right? Yeah, I think in fact, when you open that bag of, you know, healthy goldfish, you can actually hear Gregorian. Yeah, no, it's amazing. So anyway, this is a fascinating detour, you know, but I want to come back for the hell of it to movement related to things and human beings that you do things with.
So once I started to get myself to the point where I was not so gummed up with a lot of just like heaviness of myself, right? I started to figure out more movement things that I liked. And yet I was doing Mary Poppins on Broadway through a lot of that. And I discovered that I just couldn't run the dance combinations as many times as I needed to run them to get them into my body.
There just, there was no way. And some of the stuff had repetitive stress injuries, things attached to it as well. And we tapped on steel. It was a steel deck.
So that's really hard on your hips and your ankles and your knees to keep banging on that steel because the taps are steel. So you got steel on steel. Well, we don't pause there. Some people don't really understand.
So steel, so there's this whole idea in physics of elasticity and elasticity isn't how much something stretches. It's how much something comes back and it was original shape. And the most elastic thing you can do is steel on steel. So there's an exhibit at the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco where they take a steel ball and they drop it through a little plexiglass plate that has a hole in it and it hits another steel plate with concrete underneath it.
And the ball, the first bounce of that steel ball hits the plexiglass plate from the bottom and then it bounces 260 more times. So when you're putting force into the ground, tap dancing, PS, when I was at Duke University, I did research on cognitive aspects of motor skill acquisition, which was a fancy way of saying I mapped out what my brain did when I learned how to tap dance. But be that as it may. So when you're putting force into the ground on a tap, steel on steel, you're getting the most of that force back into your body.
And even if you're wonderfully aligned, it's still a lot of force. Yeah. And it was meant and we were all boys in that number. We were all chimney sweeps, right?
So it was very down into the ground, very muscular, very kind of machismo dancing, right? So I discovered though that I started thinking about the music man, you know, Harold Hill, the thinkology, like the think system. And I had read somewhere that they were doing studies about that with exercise and how the effects would be on the body, basically, if you did it versus if you just thought about it. And it turns out that that's a couple of different ones that kind of conflict.
So I can't really say it, but the data seems to be that by just thinking about exercise, you can get about 70% of the benefit that you would get from doing it. So now we're moving into where we tease about the best way to dance about not dancing. I want to, before we jump into that, I want to bring this up because this is often against very confused by many people where they think it's the same. So I love that you said about 70%.
I don't know what the number is or isn't. But it's not the same because moving is a very different thing than not moving. But there's also the twist on that where people think just visualizing it goes to get instantly better. And they quote a seeming study about free throws and basketball and how the people who visualize can prove by 20%.
And I said, I know that that's complete bullshit. And so I said, why? I said, well, because free throws often make or break a basketball game. And if you could get 20% better just by thinking about it, every pro basketball player would have done that over and over and over until they were at 99.9% accurate, which of course is not the case.
And so clearly, there's more to this picture than me, C.I. In fact, there may not be a picture. So but your point, mental rehearsal, again, as a gymnast, super, super important. And I would do things where I would mentally rehearse what to do when things went wrong.
Because that's what happens more often than not. So how were you applying this? I was applying it that I was in my head. I was dancing in the body of my dance captain.
I wasn't dancing in my body. Okay. Because my body didn't know how to do that. Okay.
Got it. But we had two dance captains. One was male and one was female. So depending on what the number was, what the dance was, I would pretend that I was dancing in one of their bodies.
Oh, that's neat. What was that experience like? Well, it was very much observational, right? So I'm dancing, but I'm sort of observing because I'm always thinking outside of myself about what they looked like.
And I'm imitating. So when you were imagining this, were you imagining like seeing through their eyes or like being that you were half of like behind them or what was the flavor of that? It's like I was behind them, but yet feeling what they were doing. Got it.
Because dancing is such a heart-centered thing. I mean, I really think that mostly dancing comes from the heart. I was in Uganda doing an arts exchange program thing and we got to hike up into the mountains to see some native villagers and people that have never left the mountaintops for generations and generations. And so all of their traditional cultural dances are still intact because nobody has come and messed it up yet.
And so there was one point where we were speaking with the matriarch and she was, they don't know how old anybody is there because they get lost with a track of seasons. There's no seasons. So they lose track of time. So they think she was 90.
They don't know. She had one tooth left in her head and the most beautiful smile I'd ever seen in my life. But at one point, we were talking about her childhood and she had been sentenced to death for getting pregnant before marriage and put on this island called Accompany, which meant punishment. And as we were talking about that, you could tell that it was still weighing down on her all these years later being rode out to that island and left for dead by her brother.
And at one point, she just needed to shake it off, I think. And so she just got up and started stomping. And all of the other women who had been all on the other side of the camp, it was circle kind of thing, all came over and they all started just stomping and drumming and dancing with her. And all I could see was just heart cleansing.
It just, it was the most beautiful thing. And so simple. They weren't doing anything monumental, but they were showing their release. It makes me think of, there's a powerful thing by just telling the truth.
And you can tell the truth in a lot of ways. And one is by moving in a way that feels authentic with whatever the thing is you're trying to express or feel or communicate in some way. It doesn't have to be verbal. Verbal is really great.
I have this weird habit. Many people have noticed I picked it up from a friend of mine actually where I very regularly went appropriate to say things. I don't know where, like, I'm really happy. And I do it because it makes it more real by just telling the truth.
And I enjoy that. Now, my wife criticized me the other day. She pointed out that I was unaware that I often do that when I've cooked food for people and I interrupt them by saying things like, oh my God, this makes me so happy because I'm just overwhelmed by it and I've got this habit of just coming out of my mouth. So I have to be attentive to the timing in ways that I'm not normally, but nonetheless, I like to do it.
And that just seems like a beautiful way of doing something similar. Maybe you could get yourself a signature dance step that whenever you're happy, you know. You know what? It's the exact opposite.
So there's something that I started doing and I must have been doing this before, Lane and I got together as a couple, but maybe not. And what do we call it? So if either one of us is feeling particularly stressed and we're like kind of stuck in some way, we will hug each other gently and then just do whatever kind of weird shaky thing we can do. Whatever just feels right to just, you know, sort of shake it out.
But we have to do it together and often there's noise that goes with it. It's like, whatever it is, but it's, but there's a, it's just utterly goofy. I mean, there's just no way to maintain whatever state you were in while doing this, you know, ridiculous. What the hell do we call it?
I have to ask her. We've been doing it so long. But same thing. That's an acting warm up.
Yeah. Yeah. So just sort of shake it out and make whatever noises come out so that you can get rid of whatever tensions that you're carrying so that then you can take on whatever the character needs to be carried. And so it's a, it's often a thing that I will just do if I feel myself really in the lab, you know, just to shake it out, to just give me that space.
And next time you have to do it with a partner, just find any human being and tell me, you have to get back to me and tell me if it's different. Right. I'm going to have to wait because I'm actually in Colorado as well, but I'm about three hours away from you and I'm in the middle of nowhere. I've not seen another human being in person in three weeks and I've got another two to go.
Nice. Yeah. It's been very, very interesting. But yeah, when my husband gets back, we'll have to do the little shake and I'll talk in a second.
Okay. So backing up. So here you are imagining yourself as the dance captain thinking the dance rather than doing the dance and what was the effect of that? Well, I actually was much more successful in that show than I ever thought I ever would be not being a quote unquote trained dancer.
I don't have the brain that picks up dance combinations that easily it takes, it takes work for me. I really have to piece it together like a very complex puzzle. And when I first started in Mary Poppins, I was contracted as just one character and then under studying, I think another couple of them that didn't really dance. But after that contract ended, I started to be what was known as a swing.
And so that means that I know lots of different parts and I can get plugged into any one of them. And so I ended up being able to keep in my head very distinct tracks of dance and that were very intricate and really above my skill set. I came into that show with and I did it for about three and a half years and I ended up, you know, sometimes I would have two hours notice to go on stage and I hadn't done the show in a couple of months, you know, but I just, I was able to keep things in there because they were in my brain first and in my body second, but really leading from the heart to put it all together. So when you were actually dancing after you've been thinking dancing, how different was the experience of that?
I mean, did it still have that kind of slightly, you know, out of Kate experience or was it all like really in it? Every once in a while, I could actually get really in it and it felt like it was me doing it, which was really interesting and fun and cool. But most of the time it was safer if I was outside and I mean safer because if it was inside then I'd start to be like, oh my gosh, I could do this and then I would create my job. Not, oh my gosh, can I do what's next?
I remember, oh my gosh, I'm doing it. That's really funny. You know, I think we've all had, I mean, I'm imagining we've all had at least that experience at least once of like being shocked that we were doing something we didn't know we could do and then suddenly you can't do it because now you're thinking about it. Right.
Yeah, radio city was all popped in like that too because we did four shows a day and so you could get lost in what have I done this before? Did I do this already? Where am I in the show? And it wasn't like there was great plot going on.
I was Mrs. Claus. It's got, you know, I'm giving out presents and I'm looking for Sam. It's not there's not a whole lot to hold on to.
And so it was best if I just sort of would hit play and let myself go on this journey of like watching and you know, being outside of it and then it would end and then I would think back and go, well, I did that. That's amazing. You just gave me a hysterical flash mapper hysterical to me. Let's find out if it's funny to anybody else.
So when I was 18, 19, 19, 21 of those, I worked at Bush Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia doing magic at a magic show. It was just my little thing. I did it six times a day except on Thursdays when I did eight shows a day and there was more than one occasion where it was so on autopilot that I would be doing things in my head while I was doing talking doing this whole show. Like I'm doing my taxes.
I mean, literally doing my taxes or figuring out, I mean, whatever. And then every now and then I'd snap out it and not have any idea where I was and I'd have to kind of figured out on the fly, like what could I have possibly just said and then go from there. But I've been like, you know, when you're driving, you don't know, you've missed an exit or whatever it is, you don't remember how you got there. It was like that.
But while I'm entertaining a couple hundred people, like totally checked out. I know that space so well. I'm going to check back in at the wrong time, man, as it's scary. You have jumped off the cliff and there is no air below and it could turn up very wrong very quickly.
Right? If you don't learn a fly. I think I learned from that though, that about basically handling crazy situations. Like, oh, it'll eventually get figured out.
And even if it doesn't get figured out, elegantly, it's no big deal. And so like people talking to me now about going into certain things like when we did Shark Tank, they said something about us being confident. I don't have confidence. I'm just I'm sure that no one's going to throw me off, which is not the same.
Right. So that's why I've been in theater all these years, right? Like it's only so dangerous. So I'm an adrenaline junkie, but not I don't want to be hanging off the side of a mountain where, you know, one wrong move and I'm dead.
I'm not that brave, but I am, you know, I do like to have the feeling of being on the edge of a cliff like what's going to happen. And you know, theater, the only thing that's going to happen is somebody might not clap for you. They might give you a bad review. They don't really throw vegetables anymore.
So you don't have that problem. It's a shame, free salad. And once you were, you know, doing that more sort of intuitive eating, you would have liked that. Especially if I would guess if I would have to organic only outside, right?
Oh, that would be great. Right. You know, yeah, they didn't have whole foods in Manhattan then. No, it wasn't Manhattan.
Yeah, it could have happened. So, all right. I'm bringing things around. So I'm curious since we talked about the best way to dance is not dancing.
And I want to come back to the part of what you're doing with other human beings and if what we've talked about about movement and alignment and structure is how you're applying that at all to what you're doing with humans. Okay. So just to wrap up how the human being interaction came, when I lost the 100 pounds, I also lost my career. Oh my.
Yeah, because, and I had to get it back and I do have it back now and whatever, but it, you know, in the entertainment business, you are a type. Right. And I was a type and then I was not that type. And so then what do you do if she's not that type, women can only be this or this, right?
There's only two roles. And then the other problem was that I turned 40. So that's also a crime in entertainment, if you're a female. So I had to figure out something to do with myself.
And I was so amused at the way that just doing small, gentle changes had really affected my life so profoundly in such great ways. And also because I've been an actress forever, I'm always looking for ways to do things for free because there's not a lot of, you know, expendable income lying around everywhere. Or if there is, I want to go on a trip. I don't want to spend it on, you know, I want to go do some good.
So, so I making these potential changes, people noticed, people noticed that I felt better, people noticed that I was behaving better, people noticed that, you know, it was, it was an improvement. And so people started asking me, what are you doing? And I found that I didn't have the right skills to really kind of mentor someone through that as much as I wanted. And so I went back to school and I got my health coaching license and then I got certificate, whatever, since it's not licensed.
And I got my master's degree in holistic medicine and then I got my life coaching training. And what I do now is people come to me who are just needing to, they don't feel great in their life. And there's reasons why and they know it, but it's sort of a tough puzzle to put together. And they're tired of doing it in ways that aren't fun.
And they would like to have a more enjoyable experience of life. And so I wrote a book called a pixie's prescription of untool get, bo-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-ah. You have to sing the tagline. And so, you know, the book is out there so that people can read that.
I started going on a lot of, you know, podcasts and doing interviews and just letting people that know that I'm out there. And what I do is I work with people to help you have a life that you enjoy. And we do it through small, gentle changes. And most of them are absolutely just intuitively from the client.
And all I'm doing is helping support the client, find out what their feel better life looks like. It's not mine. What makes me feel better is the huddle up underneath the blanket and sitting right all day. Some people that's not their feel better life, you know.
And so that's what I'm doing with people now. And it's so much fun. And it's so much fun to teach people how to play again and how to be curious about life and to get back in touch with their essential self that just wants to soar. So it's the playing.
In fact, this is one of the reasons that we reached out to you is that's the part that supports super engineering me because play almost always involves movement. And so can you talk more about that aspect? So the first thing that I play with with my client is ideas because I do think that if you can just start to play with ideas, that then it doesn't become so self conscious, I think. There's a self consciousness to being an adult who plays.
There's a shaming that happens sometimes. Like, I have people that call me eccentric because I am very playful. Okay, you can name it. Whatever.
But you know, I look at something like I'm a cat and I want to just bat that around and see what I can do with that. And you're right, it gets physical once you start getting outside of playing with the ideas first. And the playing with the ideas is basically taking us out of our left brain where we spend way too much time and popping us into our right brain, which is in the here and now. And that's the space where intuition talks to you and where you can listen to yourself better.
So what's an example of playing with ideas? Okay. So one of them is a wonderful, I love when words leave me. I turned 51 and it happened the next day.
Oh, dude, just wait. I'm 59. I barely remember my own name sometimes. No, I knew it was common.
But as you're answering this, I want to remind you something else I haven't done a long time, which is when I talk about the movement movement, you know, some of these movements are internal. They're quote mental. And these are important movements because we often get kind of stuck or mono directional. I don't know if that's a natural word, but you know, we just go down a groove and the whole idea of playing this idea of yours is so interesting to me of playing with ideas, trying with ideas because that is a form of movement that we, boy, if you look around America now, it seems like no one knows how to be flexible with ideas.
So anyway, so that's again, you've reminded me of something. So but to your version of playing with ideas. Okay. So it's exercise was the word that left me, which is a great word to lose.
Right. I know because I it's been traumatized by the word exercise, but this mental exercise is something that sociologists, Martha Beck taught me in a class that I was training with. And it's called the seven leagues boots. So since you're a shoe guy, we're going to do this a little bit.
So what happens is you have next to your chair of special pair of boots. This is in my mind. This is in your mind. Okay.
I actually do. I know you do. Okay. So so in your mind's eye, you'd have a pair of boots and you, I'm sure will design the best seven league boots ever.
But you put these boots on and what a league is is it's basically the distance you can travel in a day. So once you've got these boots on in your mind's eye, you go seven leagues. So you travel the amount that you could just go in seven days. And so you take these big leaps and you travel far and wide.
And suddenly in your mind's eye, you're going to end up in an area that is going to be surprising. And in that area, what can you find to look around at? So let's say it dumps you in a meadow. You're looking around maybe there's a deer over here, there's a bird over here, there's a big oak tree over there.
There's a sound of the rustling in the trees. And so what we do is we play let's pretend basically, but we've got these boots on that are taking us to our pretend place. And inside, wherever the seven leagues boots takes you, our kind of answers for you about places that you might want to play, not in your mind. So when the seven leagues took me to a middle of a meadow, it let me know that I was missing time out in the middle of a meadow.
And to think about all of those things that exist in a meadow that I really, they make me feel better. And not only that, when I go out in the middle of a meadow, all I want to do is play around like a kid, right? I want to roll in the grass, I want to just grab walk, I want to dance, I want to act like I'm Maria in the sound of music, like whatever it is. So we start by just playing around with these, these just little exercises that are just, you know, let's play pretend together.
And then let's see where we can take that pretend fantasy and bring it back into today. Mm. I like that. I, where I went is, let's just say it's Hawaii, if you're like with better term, it doesn't have to be Hawaii.
But the thing that was that this place meant for me, which involves a small waterfall and a bunch of things around, including fruits I can just grab is the flashback really was to when I was in that exact spot. And what was so wonderful about it, aside from being there with my lovely wife, is that I was completely disconnected from the internet. I wasn't checking my email, I didn't have a phone. I was like totally in the middle of this idyllic little whatever.
And the relaxation from that was just spectacular. And I can't say that I don't have that now because my morning ritual, I roll out of bed, I go to the bathroom and I jump in the hot tub and I hang out in the hot tub. So it's the closest thing that I've got to it now. But the being totally, totally disconnected from the intertubes, that's a whole other thing.
And just the fantasy of that is incredibly pleasant. Yeah. So then we would work together to figure out how you give yourself permission to engage in that fantasy as much as you need to. And so I think that a lot of the things that we don't have somehow in our culture are permission to play, permission to be silly, permission to have the life that you want, permission to move in the way that feels good to you, despite what somebody else says.
It's permission of autonomy that doesn't take anything away from anybody else. That's really sweet actually. I don't know what to say beyond that. Well, I like that because when I try to put out in the world as something gentle and kind and sweet, it is my goal to be a sweet inspiration to people because those are the inspirations that have given me the most in my life.
I like it. So is there anything else that you want to share from your, I mean both physical movements, mental movements, just that pops into your brain of things that you're doing or done with humans or anything else that you want to have people experiment with or ponder again, whether it's internal movements or external movements? I think really going back to that word play. I just constantly am challenging people to play be a part of their day throughout.
And if you can't look back at a day and think, well, where did I play? I would ask, how was that day for you? Play releases a lot of stress and tension. Play releases a lot of intuition and inspiration.
If you look at creatures that are not human, they play out throughout their lives, even when they get old and still and they can't move around much, an animal will still play. And we don't. And so that's the main thing that I would say to everybody, especially coming into the holidays, which should be a time of playing with each other and going and enjoying the season and the time of communal gatherings. And let's do it in a more playful way rather than I'm right, you're wrong.
This is my politics. That's yours. This is the division between us. When you're playing, there is no division.
It's just an action of connection. And when you're working with people who haven't played in a while, what do you do with them? Because in my mind, the idea of play always involves moving in some way. And I know there's some people who, to your point previously, have a head with a thing underneath it that moves it and aren't familiar with this idea.
They haven't done it in so long. What do you do in that situation? The first thing that comes to mind is an exercise that I talk about. Like, think back in school, what was the most boring class you had?
All of them. For me, I'll answer because it's me. It was history because I can't do history in my brain. So I don't store historical things.
OK. Which is probably fine because they were written by one person's pen or perspective anyway. So it's not really history. It's just a perspective.
So it's a bit of history. So when you're in history class, what do you remember doing to get yourself through that 40, 45 minutes? Huh. See, once again, I don't do history.
So I don't remember what the hell I did. Literally. The closest I can come to, boy, I really don't know. The only thought that pops in my mind is somehow just checking out, just being distracted in some way.
I can imagine fidgeting. But I don't... Let's not the fidget because this is like, this is like, this is like, prime play territories. So when you fidget, what kind of fidgeting do you do?
Well, the image in my mind is, you know, sort of tapping my phone on the ground over and over and over and over. And then just not being able to sit still, just continually doing something to look around and move in some way. It's like finding these little things where it's not quite comfortable and just constant little motions. So that's chair dancing.
Yeah. OK. OK. So because you had a rhythm, probably going in your head, right?
Because if you're making sounds or your feet, that's rhythm connected. I can imagine that. And generally, as we fidget, there is a rhythm to it because humans like to be in rhythm. And so basically, if I can get somebody to think back that they've fidgeted, then we can start to do some riddless.
So then we might play with some rhythms together and throw that back and forth. We might do it verbally. We might do it clapping. We might do it with a drum.
We might do it with sticks, pens, whatever you can think of, right? We can start to make a band. Yeah. Yeah.
That's the idea of fidgeting. I like it. This is that's really that's it doesn't take much and it opens up a ton. I mean, for me, just literally the whole idea of take this fidgeting thing and adding one other bit to make it rhythmic to make it to make it musical.
Even if I'm barely doing it and it's not on key or in a rhythm, but just adding that little deliberate part changes the whole thing. Yeah, because then you are, you're part of the game with your body. Your body is doing that because it's bored. It really likes to move.
We are, we are up species in movement, boy. And we want to be. And even people who can't move, you know, all parts, they still want to move. I took care of my uncle for a year and a half and a Parkinson's.
And he was a pretty, you know, tied up little being, but he still wanted to move. There were times where his, the Parkinson's wasn't a problem because his body just needed to move and he'd have 24 hours, but he just did zing zing zing zing. You know, he still had the same problems going on, but the body needed to move. I like it.
And again, it's an interesting thing. It's taking something that we're doing non-consciously and adding a conscious element to it that just, again, just changes the whole dynamic almost instantly. And my experience now is after adding like a little rhythm to my foot tapping, it's not even a rhythm. I mean, if it's a rational drum, it would sound ridiculous.
But then it just wants to go somewhere else. It's like, it doesn't stay in, it doesn't stay in that repetitive groove that the fidgeting is. And then when I add something, it doesn't stay with just that one thing that I just added. It just wants to go somewhere else.
And I can imagine just, just giving yourself a few minutes during a day, just to do that, for just a couple minutes would be tremendous. Yeah. Absolutely. It's something that I recommend to a lot of people.
And then if people like to sing little songs, and I'm not saying if you're a singer, I'm just saying if little melodies come into your head, sing them. You know, we are singing creatures. I don't care if people have decided that certain people can sing and certain people cannot sing. If you can talk, you can sing.
That is the structure of the human body. Whether or not you have an ear for what Western music is is another thing. But if you go to another country and you play Western music for them, it's not good for their ear because they have micro tonal things that we don't hear. So, you know, music is subjective, but we are all creatures that want to make songs.
I did research when I was an undergrad on whether we have an eight-cent of rhythm. And to cut to the chase, the answer is we do even when we think we don't. I believe that. Yeah.
It was a fun experiment because partly to test it, we played a lot of rhythms that were completely syncopated that didn't have any rhythm and it made people want to kill me. They were so angry from these non-rhythms because they wanted the rhythm. And I found that very enjoyable. It was unexpected.
You know, I definitely understand that. You know, it's like when you end something just on the offbeat, it's like, wait, there's a reason that's called the offbeat. It's a Steve Martin movie. I wish I could remember which one it was.
And I don't remember Steve Martin was inside the room or outside the room where there's someone playing the tuba inside the room and you hear them go, bump, bump, bump, bump, and then there's a knock at the door and they open the door and they're like, freaking out. They go, hold on close the door. Just had to finish it. So it was, it was a thing.
I saw the movie theater and it got, I think the only person who laughed up roriously was me because I thought that was just utterly brilliant and no one else was like, what was that? It was just so good. So, um, is there anything that I have left out that we want to share with human beings about moving or moving by not moving? The only thing that I would say is really play around with the idea of how you want to move.
You know, do you want to move by actually moving all of your pieces and parts or are your pieces and parts a little sore from life and you don't want to move that way? It doesn't mean that you're not part of the movement movement. It just means that your movements are not necessarily being able to be perceived by those outside. A lot of what we've talked about is really seems to be about just, I don't like this phrase but I'll use it anyway of giving yourself permission.
Yeah, I think, okay, especially for women, I think it's different for men. But in a patriarchal society, a lot of what we're doing is asking for permission. And so I've stopped asking for permission. I've started giving permission.
And that is a great move to turn it around completely from being on one end of this stick to the other end. And I don't like the metaphor of the stick but that's all I got. So, Kate, first of all, thank you. Secondly, if people want to find out more about what you've been doing or they want to do things with you, how can they do that?
They can go to my website, which is bkchatmin.com because that one was less expensive than just Kate Chapman. So I had to be clear. But quite a bit less expensive. And so bkchatmin.com is my website and you can reach me there or go to my YouTube channel, which is Kate Chapman.
And there are wonderful videos there that I put up that show Constant Create just responds in a lot of play. I have a series called Little Kate on the Prairie that I did at the start of COVID that talks about a city girl moving out to the prairie and what that looks like and experiencing life in really a different climate, a different way. And yeah, and then you can hear me sing too. There's lots of singing videos on my YouTube channel.
I love it. I'm gonna get to find my book. It's on Amazon. And say the name again.
A pixie's prescription. A fun toolkit for a feel better eye. So your theme song, it's gonna be another flashback. I dated a woman who did the theme song, whatever's not much of a song.
I did it for a local big deal furniture company. And so they advertised constantly and they paid for a whopping $500 like almost 35 years ago. Yeah. They're not on my Christmas card list because when this X of mine was dying, I contacted them and I said, you know, you paid her $500 you've been using it a thousand times a day ever since.
Send her a card, do something and they didn't do that. Now, you know, people do think in this society, which is too bad that artists are just give it away. And I would be fine with that if there were a way that I could live with like not poverty by doing that. So, you know, really people in the public, if you would like artists to give it away, then set up a fund for us.
It's there've been times where that's the way it's was done. And now it's a whole different game when if you are doing certain kinds of artistic things, creative things that you're supposed to support yourself as well. And then and even crazier, you know, when there's people who make the jillings of dollars with wacky little ideas that you go, really, that's a thing. And yet they want us to round themselves an art and yet really don't want to pay the artist.
So there is a disconnect, but I hope that as more artists are getting out there and kind of talking about this, then it'll change. But in the meantime, if we can get people to be more playful on the backside, I think that it'll help them open up to more ideas of what it is to be creative. I think you're right. I think you're right.
Thank you so much. And total, total pleasure. And again, for everyone else, I hope you had a good time. I expect you.
I'm the best time. I'm the best time. And again, go check out previous episodes, et cetera, and all the different ways you can interact with us, our Facebook and YouTube and Instagram, et cetera. Just go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com.
If you have any questions for me or requests or ideas for people who we want to chat with, including people who might think I have a case of cranial reorientation syndrome, I'm open. I just want to have a conversation with people about moving about our movement movement and getting people to have more fun. In fact, that's my only prescription for living, if you will, which is go out, have fun and live life-eat first.