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[lizzie]

Kelly Kane has taught and practiced Pilates, as well as numerous other somatic and bodywork modalities, for seventeen years. In this interview, she talks about how her many interests and areas of expertise inform her Pilates practice, and the teacher-training program she has at the Kane School of Core Integration in New York.

This interview was conducted via phone by Elisabeth Marshall, a Stott Pilates certified instructor teaching in Hamilton, New Zealand.

What led you into Pilates? What was your initial training?

Well, I first started doing it as my fitness regime, when I was working in fashion, actually. But before I went into fashion I was a medical school dropout, and I went from medical school to massage school. After I finished massage school I got into fashion for a little while, just because I had been into it when I was younger; I sewed and made patterns and stuff, and I thought I would try my hand at it. And then, as an individual working in the fashion world, I started doing Pilates as my fitness regime, and an associate of mine, an ex-dancer—we were working very long days, and tired of the whole thing, and so we both were like, “Let’s become Pilates teachers!”. And at that time there was not a lot happening; it hadn’t proliferated the way it has now. In New York, there were maybe three Pilates studios in the city, maybe four. And we started with Romana, and essentially she waved her wand and said, now you can start teaching. That was the beginning of the Pilates journey, but the body journey—I always say that I’m actually much more interested in bodies, it’s just that I choose to look at movement through Pilates. Part of the reason that I went in that direction is that when I started doing Pilates there actually weren’t that many teachers in the New York area, everyone was kind of doing their own little thing. I had been teaching Iyengar yoga pretty intensively, and I thought, my favourite yoga teachers are in the city, so I’m going to go into Pilates. Well, little did I know that yoga would go crazy here! It’s insane, there’s tons and tons of yoga, but at the time there weren’t that many yoga people. So that’s how I started with it.

So from there you stayed with Romana’s training, and kept up with that…

I went through Romana and Hila Paldi originally. Hila Paldi studied with Romana and had a studio uptown. And then I eventually got my certification through the PhysicalMind Institute. I decided to do my own teacher training after executing theirs for about eight years: I started to do mine about eight years ago.

Were there any shifts in your training philosophy, or things that you’ve come increasingly to believe, or things that you’ve come to do as you’ve gone on? You have a lot of experience with other bodywork and other disciplines: do you mix that in, or feel that it’s influenced you?

Yeah. Totally. I feel that I didn’t learn—it’s odd to say, but I didn’t learn all that I wanted or needed to know in the Pilates venue, about bodies. I felt that I learned the exercises, and how to get people strong and get people moving, but I felt that I really needed to know so much more, because a lot of times when I did an exercise I felt that I could do it about fifty different ways. Although on the outside it would look one way, there were many different ways I could think about recruiting or activating. So I had all these choices—in a way it was like my brain needed to make more sense of what my body was doing. So then I studied a lot of anatomy, and I’ve done a lot of manual therapy stuff, and I did cadaver dissections, and Continuum, which is the work of Emilie Conrad-D’oud. And I did the School for Body-Mind Centering teacher-training program—I didn’t finish it, but I finished I think two and a half years, and then I made a baby, so there was a conflict and I couldn’t continue in the program! For me it’s just always been about how bodies work and how they move, how they get into trouble, and what feels good, and what doesn’t feel good; and if I’m a practitioner I need to know the detail of it all. I feel like one of the things I learned was the schematic of the body: in this culture we think of muscles and bones and nerves, which is kind of this map of the body. And then I learned how to sense strongly with my hands so I could see how that map was different in each individual. I think that’s the hallmark of what we do here, that idea of people being able to fully understand the map. Then they get to apply it—we’ll work on their sensory perceptive skills, so they can feel what’s happening in the individual’s body that they’re working on. I feel like that’s a lot of what we do here, and what I’m interested in.

Do you think that’s something that was at odds with your initial training, or just didn’t come up?

With Romana, she was not about the anatomy. With the manual training, in the beginning, there were touches, but it was very specific and didn’t have a lot of depth. Because I had done cranio-sacral therapy, and a lot of it—meaning I had had it done to me and I had done the training—I felt that I could sense whole landscapes in people’s bodies. When they were moving, I could assist them in maybe moving more efficiently or getting out of pain patterns, or assist them in changing pain patterns by using other recruitment patterns, and so that to me—it was more like stumbling into it. But I didn’t learn that through Pilates, I learned it through an amalgamation of listening to different modalities, and listening to different visionary teachers I’d come across, and then really being a student of all my clients who had walked in my door, just really listening well to what their bodies were saying.

So how does that affect a session that you would give? Does it change the exercises that you would do, or the way that you’re hands-on with people?

I think a lot of times it’s yes and no. It’s more how the template of their own body needs to do an exercise. Like a lot of times you’ll have someone get into something and they’ll say “Oh, that hurts”. And I’ll put my hands on them and say, “Well, why does that hurt?”. And say it hurts their left SI joint; usually what I feel is that the left SI joint might be compressed, because the left femoral head isn’t gliding enough. So it’s more like really refining how people move, and not just haphazardly doing the movements. For me it’s meant really cultivating my capacity to listen well and to be present with my clients, so that it ends up being a more transformational flavour, as opposed to just working the muscles. It’s seeing people heal: and a lot of times when they heal, whether they heal by becoming more actualised and stronger and more physically capable in the world through exercise, or whether they heal by cycling through and out of pain, what I find is that when you really witness someone, and support them with your full attention, usually people process. And so they process what they need to have happen in a given session. You could do it in a cranio-sacral session, but you could also do it in a Pilates session. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that you wouldn’t move, or go hard, or move quickly, or whatever, it’s just that there would be a different kind of attention from the practitioner and from the person moving. I guess it means giving more consciousness to how one moves, and that kind of consciousness translates into stronger neural connections, which often translates into strength. And connected movement. Funny, it’s not how I usually talk about all this stuff! It’s always interesting what one says, you know?

For all your training, and you’ve done so many things, you still come from a non-medical perspective, right? You haven’t done physiotherapy or osteopathy…

No. I went to medical school, and I didn’t stay—I did my pre-med and then a semester of medical school. I really decided that that’s not where—in my culture at the time, I thought, that’s what I knew. If I was going to explore how the body is and what it is, I thought, oh, well, medical school, that’s the way. And when I got to medical school, one of the things I would say is that I’m not a huge fan of patriarchal structures. And medical school is [laughing] highly patriarchal! I wasn’t having it. I guess it would have made more sense if there was more real investigation, more room for exploration, and it just didn’t feel like there was lots of room for that at all.

Is it that aspect of witnessing and being with people that makes the difference?

I feel like that’s what we end up doing here a lot. If I look at the practitioners here, and the people I’ve chosen to work here, and the way that I’m working, that’s often what I see—a certain presence, and that cultivates a certain consciousness in the studio that is partly me, but is in large part the people who are here. And you know, the New York style of Pilates is quite fast-moving and aggressive in nature, and so in many ways we’re a real anomaly in the New York venue, in the diaspora of New York Pilates studios. It’s been interesting, people have said, “Oh, you don’t do Pilates”—or they haven’t said it to me, but they’ve said it to other people who have graduated from the school, and I love when they say that, because people do do Pilates here—it just seems like it’s fearful when people say that. Of course we do Pilates, that’s what I do, but we’re also doing this whole other thing. I think it’s naïve to think that when you interface with someone’s physicality that you wouldn’t be interfacing with them on every level, meaning their psyche and their spirit. I think that’s what happens; even though that’s not where we choose to put our focus here, there is that feeling that it’s being honoured here.

You say on your website that you’re classically based—and I don’t like that everything comes back to that distinction between classical and contemporary, but you haven’t gone outside of the Pilates.

No, what’s interesting is that I teach very classic choreography. In terms of the choreography part of our teacher-training program, it’s extremely classic. But underlying that are the principles of biomechanics, and helping people profoundly affect those biomechanics. And to affect that, you have to understand in detail how things move in relation to each other, and be able to sense and feel and affect that. So one of the things that happens with the understanding or study of anatomy is that people learn and study it in a book that’s someone’s artistic rendering of a cadaver, for example. It’s so far removed from what the actual human organism is, you know? So we study our anatomy in a two-dimensional way. And then there’s often this disconnect between studying in a book and what’s actually in front of you in the body. So even though we have this classical structure, there’s a lot of attention paid to how you see the physical anatomy in the body that’s in front of you. It’s a quite large undertaking, which is part of the reason it doesn’t happen so much: it’s not so easy.

Tell me about your cadaver work—how did that happen?

I did it with a man who I love and adore, named Gil Hedley—he is a friend of mine, and I’ve done a couple of dissections with him. It’s interesting, because he’s a theologian, but he also is a Rolfer, and has been conducting these dissections for a long time now. I heard about him because I had been involved in manual therapy and something called Structural Integration, which is kind of an offshoot of Rolfing. He does [a dissection workshop] at a place called the New Jersey School of Medicine and Dentistry, and through word of mouth I heard about the dissection, and I did all my dissections with him. In my first year of medical school we did have gross anatomy, but it’s definitely much more detailed when you’re in [medical school]—Gil’s courses are a week long, so you have one cadaver, and then I think we were having six people per cadaver. In gross anatomy at med school, it was much slower; you would spend a whole year on a cadaver, essentially. So I didn’t get through a whole cadaver in medical school because I didn’t stay in medical school. But it was such a huge part of me being able to see into the body, being able to do those dissections and proactively excavate structures and then feel them, put my hands on them and feel the three-dimensionality of them, and feel where they begin and end, and feel their relationships to other structures, which is very hard when you’re learning anatomy in two dimensions, and was always my disconnect. And he really did teach me how to be able to see into bodies; I think he was the one who helped me create that kind of vision.

When you’re training teachers, do you combine that kind of depth of anatomy study? Are there things that you’d recommend people to do, or that you require people to do?

For our teacher-training program, there’s an anatomy prerequisite, so before you enter our program you either have to take our anatomy course, or have a passing grade on our anatomy exam. Once you enter the program we immediately start with: how do we connect your understanding of anatomy, bones, muscles, origins, insertions, to the relationships with the body in front of you. The way that we do that is through touch, and above and beyond that, is through assessing visually. But for me, I feel like there’s a whole landscape that I can feel that I actually can’t always see. And that’s part of the reason that we spend so much time touching people, which is kind of difficult—in New York, that can be a little loaded, but we haven’t had any problems this far! There’s all these mandates in New York, it’s just weird, but I can’t go there—I teach my teachers how to have clear and safe boundaries, and honour and respect themselves and their clients, so that’s first and foremost, but there’s a lot of attention paid to that.

For example, there’s a lot of talk in the Pilates world about pelvic floor and transversus abdominis and multifidi engagement, and that inner unit activity. One of the things that’s so interesting to me is that when I go and teach at conferences, I think, how can you tell if someone’s pelvic floor is engaged? And people don’t have any skills to be able to assess that. That is somewhat shocking to me—yes, it’s a hard structure to be able to assess, but I want to give my students and teachers skills to be able to tell, if they’re asking their client to engage their pelvic floor, if they’re actually doing it; and if they’re doing it, what part of their pelvic floor they’re engaging. I want my students to be able to assess transversus abdominis engagement in respect to oblique engagement, and what’s the difference, and what does it feel like, and how do they assess and get their clients to do what they’re asking. And it’s the same thing—I feel like there’s a lot of talk about, for example, that inner unit thing, pelvic floor, multifidi, TvA, and diaphragm, and yet there’s not concrete skill-sets that people are being taught, to assess that their clients understand and are doing what they’re asking them to do. That’s a big thing for me—that really profound understanding of my teachers as they graduate our program, as opposed to being drill sergeants. I actually want them to teach, teach their clients something, teach them a new way of thinking or being or feeling or moving. I guess that’s a big part of the teacher-training—how can you tell what your clients are doing?

And that you do with your hands, within a session?

Yeah, a lot of anatomy study, a lot of explanation of anatomy, a lot of being able to feel, to really understand bones, like the shape of all the bones, where they are, and what they do in relationship to each other. That’s a big baseline here. What happy joints feel like when they move, and what unhappy joints feel like when they’re moving, and how to facilitate more happiness! And then how to feel muscles, and fascia, and how to feel and assess that…

How much of that comes through to your clients, in terms of having a session? Is it a more cerebral experience for them, or do they learn more terminology?

I think in part it’s one of my missions, you know? But it doesn’t have to be. I feel like a teacher needs to have that depth of understanding, and then they can choose how they communicate that to their clients. A lot of clients just can’t handle it, and they’re not interested. It’s their experience, so I don’t load them up with all that crap. But it’s one of my feelings, that if we’re going to live in this body, we should know what we got goin’ on! It’s kind of the yoke I’ve taken on, to really—not try to overwhelm, but to give people basics of how things work. A lot of times when I’m teaching I try to give anatomical cues and then abut that, or right after it, give a metaphoric cue, so that people start to relate the metaphor to the actual structure. So it depends—I don’t feel like the client always needs to know, if that’s not their area of interest, but I am clear on feeling that teachers absolutely need to know.

Are there any recommendations you’d have for other teachers, in terms of books and DVDs, courses and resources that you recommend?

I love Gil’s DVDs, you know Gil Hedley has that series out, I think it’s great. I haven’t come across dissection DVDs that have such an incredible dissection. I use Frank Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy—I know every plate in there! For beginner teachers, I like Kendall and McCreary, Muscles: Testing and Function, and Norkin and Levangie, Joint Structure and Function, I use those a lot. I also in some ways resource Eric Franklin’s stuff, and Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen’s stuff, and Tom Myers, too, his Anatomy Trains. And then in terms of teachers, I love Emilie Conrad-D’oud. She’s been one of my big teachers, even though she’s not in Pilates. And then Irene Dowd, I’ve studied with her, and I really admire Marie-José Blom Lawrence, and Madeline Black, and I love Brent Anderson. I really like Rael, even though he’s kind of not in my vein of things, I really appreciate the way he teaches, Rael Isacowitz. When I go to workshops and conferences and stuff, I always like to see what those guys are doing. I’ve studied a lot of Gyro, too, Gyrokinesis and Gyrotonic, and I’ve done a lot with Juergen Bamberger and Sebastian Plettenberg, both in New York.

Do you combine things in a session for people?

You know, not a lot. I have, I go through cycles, but not really. It’s kind of funny. In my mat classes I incorporate a lot, I use the brick, the yoga block, a lot, for different things—like the shoulder series, the bridging series, on the mat, I do that with the brick under the pelvis as opposed to having the hands hold the pelvis up. I like that series but I feel that it’s not accessible to most people, and the brick makes it very accessible. And I do feel sometimes that there’s not specific stretching of structures in the Pilates classic repertory, so I throw in stuff from different modalities. But when you come in here, it’s not so much that it looks like people are really combining tons of modalities, it doesn’t look so different. People use the equipment and kind of classic Pilates stuff, but we mix in a little bit here and there. All my practitioners study all kinds of things, so they’re mixing it up, but we keep it that we’re doing Pilates.

I got tired of Pilates a while ago. I was just like, I can’t do it any more, I’m over it. And then I thought, what do I love about it, and what is intrinsic? If I were to look at the practice of Pilates, and look at what I know about bodies, and how they work and how they move, what’s interesting about Pilates, and how could it be used most effectively? And I think it’s really accessible to everyone. You can take really varied skill levels, you can take really compromised people and very highly trained athletes, you can take people who have huge ranges of motion and people who can hardly move, and you can adapt the modality to everyone. Also I think, I’ve done a lot of different movement practices, and some of them I find in some ways more interesting to my body, but I think for the general population Pilates is … it’s safe, meaning that it’s not free-form movement, someone tells you the exercises to do, you do them; it’s not multiplanar at one time, so it’s uniplanar or biplanar movement, whereas Gyrokinesis can be tri- or multiplanar movements in one position. And I feel like that fact makes it really useful for the average bear, so to speak. I feel like it’s been extremely useful—we do fitness here, but we also do rehab and post-rehab movement; although we wouldn’t tell anyone that, that’s what ends up happening, is that people come in here to rehab from injury. The equipment is really well-adapted for that, I feel, and the movement as well. One of the things that’s just so exciting is that having been in this business for a long time, I couldn’t call myself a Pilates teacher because of the issues of the Pilates trademark—it’s just so cool that there’s so much dialogue out there now, and that’s one of the things I really, really appreciate.

Many thanks for your time and insights! Thank you for sharing so much with us.

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