Embracing Individuality Through Dance and Movement

My four-year-old daughter is obsessed with a Nickelodeon star named JoJo Siwa. I knew nothing about her except that she was on Dancing with the Stars and had a bunch of movies. One movie’s premise is that JoJo Siwa likes sparkly and rainbow things and stands out with her essence. Her dance teacher wants to squelch that essence, make her uniform, and match her peers for dance competitions.

So I'm watching it over the weekend on repeat (remember, I have a 4-year-old), and it reminds me of when I danced in high school on a drill team. The whole point of the drill team is like the Rockettes, where you try to be uniform and precise to match the person next to you. You don't want to stand out or show your individuality because there's beauty in the precision.

I loved the drill team and thought it was terrific. But I was penalized for trying to stand out as a mover. Conformity was what I was asked to do, to be able to dance. So that's what I did.

Fast forward to dancing in college, which was still my mindset. I was a corp dancer, a precision dancer who matched my peers and looked beautiful. But never be a soloist. I chose not to stand out because that was negatively held against me.

So here I am teaching Pilates today (and GYROTONIC® Method too). There is a significant emphasis on precision in the movement and executing exercises very specifically. But not to add your individuality to it. Then it dawned on me that Pilates and GYROTONIC® exercises tend to fall into these constructs. Teachers want to move a certain way, look a certain way, follow a flow, and not veer from the original repertoire. And that's it. So it's like drill team, right? It's the Rockettes. It's beautiful, precise, and looks good as performance art, but there's no individuality behind it.

In the previous blog, I talked about how nothing is missing from Pilates, GYROTONIC®, or yoga. We need to recognize what it is and why it is the way it is. And then, if you find your clients are not getting the benefits that you want (or that they want), you should probably look outside the movement modality and supplement with something new.

Just like you can't eat kale all day, every day, picking one movement modality is not going to serve all your movement needs. So we can thank JoJo Siwa and her incredible movies for my little lesson today. I hope that helped you in some way. Keep being an individual, keep being you, and keep being what you were put on earth to be. Don't conform.