It’s incredible to me that an industry as socially responsive, culturally and historically rich as this one, lacks the activism and initiatives to prioritize the care of the human bodies that it is built upon.

How you build your body impacts how you sing or dance.

Your conditioning may be de-conditioning you!

Often enough in the performance world we hear the words flexibility and mobility used interchangeably. Let’s face it they’ve become a bit of a buzz word. We readily use these words in multiple conversations about what a class focus will be, why we feel so tight, why we feel in pain, why we can’t reach specific positions or why we don’t have a desired range of motion. The exhaustion of these buzzwords in our industry has created a fog around what it is exactly each word stands for and what each word entails.

Conditioning goes beyond being fit enough to deliver a good performance. The combination of conditioning in your dance classes along with conditioning through outside training influences how your body will behave when faced with the particular demands each show brings.

What are you training for? What is the end game?

In my opinion, as singers, dancers, and actors you have demands of your body that aren’t dissimilar to athletes. As performers you are asked to perform 8x a week during a run of 4-6months. Your body goes through a lot of physical demand… not only do you have to be prepared to perform at your best 8x a week but you also have to be mentally and physically prepared to pivot and fulfill different demands…

As performers their bodies are their tools to voice out the particularities of life we must accept and love, and create a new collective ground where variability of identities are celebrated not vilified.