Quite unexpectedly, I have been given the opportunity to study with an anatomy teacher I have admired for thirty years.
Meeting Irene Dowd at Canada’s National Ballet School
Her name is Irene Dowd, former anatomy faculty at The Juilliard School in New York.
When I was a student at Canada’s National Ballet School, Irene would come to Canada once a year to teach the faculty. Together with Peggy Baker, who taught modern dance at the school at the time, Irene developed a series of exercises focusing on joint mobility and movement. My graduating class of 1996 was the first group of students to learn them.
Irene studied with Lulu Sweigard, who developed the work of Mabel Todd into what became known as Ideokinesis. Building on Todd’s approach, which used anatomical imagery to influence movement and the way the body organizes itself, Sweigard began referring to her work as “Ideokinesis” in the 1970s.
Irene studied with Sweigard from 1968 to 1974 and also served as her assistant. She went on to carry this work forward and develop it in her own way. Irene later taught anatomy and kinesiology at Juilliard for many years, and her work became widely influential throughout the dance world. Canada’s National Ballet School was one of the places where her work took root.
There is a small collection of Irene’s writings called Taking Root to Fly. Apparently, a copy of it happened to be sitting in the physiotherapy room at my ballet school when I was about sixteen. The physiotherapy room was somewhat like the nurse’s office in an ordinary school, except that at a professional ballet school, physiotherapists were always on staff, with treatment equipment as well as a pool for rehabilitation and training.
A boy I was close friends with at the time—who, for some reason, got along particularly well with the physiotherapists and seemed to spend half his life in that room—found the book and handed it to me.
“This looks like something Tetsuko would like.”
That was my first encounter with somatic work.
Being an “Exception” at Ballet School
This is a long story in itself, but I entered Canada’s National Ballet School as something of an exception.
It was a school where fewer than fifteen students graduating in a year was not unusual. Admission required attending a month-long summer school that also served as an audition. Even admission to that summer school required passing a national audition—there are international auditions now as well—so getting into the school was highly competitive. And once admitted, students could still be dismissed from the program each year.
The school was affiliated with the National Ballet of Canada and existed to train classical ballet dancers. I did not, however, have all of the physical and structural characteristics traditionally expected of a ballet dancer.
Through a rather unusual series of circumstances, Peggy Baker, whom I mentioned earlier, and Mavis Staines, the school’s remarkable director at the time, decided that I had some kind of talent (laughs) and should be allowed to graduate.
Normally, students had to pass an annual examination to determine whether they could continue at the school. I was exempt from that process.
In other words, I was a rather confusing exception.
Being an exception can sound like a privilege, but it can also be painful. It means being different from everyone else.
Ballet places very particular structural demands on the body. If your body does not meet those conditions, some of the movements and physical lines being asked of you simply cannot be produced in the same way.
I struggled enormously with this. Truly enormously.
No matter how much I practiced, some things simply did not work.
Looking back now, of course, that seems obvious. And only now can I begin to see, from a distance, what all that struggle eventually forced me to understand.
It took thirty years.
In the end, perhaps it was necessary for me to arrive at something that has become a fundamental principle in how I understand beauty: not the beauty of forcing oneself into an externally prescribed “ideal form,” but the beauty that emerges when a person fully explores and expresses the potential of the body they have actually been given.
Taking Root to Fly
So, back to the little book that my friend handed me.
At the time, I was practicing every day and feeling fairly desperate about my body.
Then I read Taking Root to Fly.
It was a revelation.
Until then, I had been trying to make my body move largely through effort and force. Suddenly, here was an approach that included the nervous system.
Throughout Irene’s writing, I sensed a principle that seemed to run through her work: all movement is good movement.
Every body is good.
Every movement is good.
Day after day, I had been comparing my own body and movement with what ballet demanded, feeling inadequate, and becoming increasingly rigid in the process. Her words seeped into that body.
And when I tried the exercises she described, movements that had remained impossible no matter how much I practiced suddenly began to happen with surprising ease.
I remember thinking: There is another way to approach the body?
I eventually became a professional dancer, and later began teaching Pilates and ballet.
But Taking Root to Fly stayed with me.
So did Irene’s teaching.
No matter how many times I returned to it, I found something new in it—something that continued to resonate.
Recently, while looking online, I realized that Irene was now quite elderly.
Well, of course she is.
Time passes astonishingly quickly.
It took a fair amount of courage, but I decided that while she was still alive, I wanted to tell her how much her work had meant to me. So I wrote to her.
And because I had also spent many years thinking how wonderful it would be if Taking Root to Fly could someday be read in Japanese, I told her that too.
Today, information about neuroscience, anatomy, and movement is everywhere. If I want the latest research, I can use AI to help locate the literature and follow the references back to the original papers.
But that is different from encountering the reflections of an anatomist who spent decades working directly with living, moving dancers—meeting their actual difficulties, observing them, questioning what she saw, and developing ideas through that experience.
I find that kind of writing much harder to come across.
It also makes me think about the relationship between scientific evidence and knowledge that develops through sustained observation and practice. Experimental data and quantitative evidence are indispensable, but they are not the only places from which meaningful questions emerge. Careful observation in the real world can generate questions, insights, and possibilities that may later become subjects of scientific investigation.
For that reason, I think there may be particular value now in bringing Irene’s writings—some of which date back to the 1970s—to new readers.
Going to New York in November
Through all of this, I was contacted by a Japanese student of Irene’s who lives in New York, and we met in person.
She shared a great deal with me and was very clear about one thing:
First of all, I should go to New York and meet Irene herself.
Irene, too, has kindly agreed to welcome me, so I will be going to New York in November.
I have not been there since my days at The Ailey School.
So this, too, will be my first time back in thirty years.
Before November, I need to learn Irene’s choreographies well enough to move through them and, more importantly, to arrive with meaningful questions.
I stepped away from the world of professional dance at the highest level more than twenty years ago, and I had almost forgotten the particular kind of tension that comes with it.
But apparently, once that switch has been turned on, the body remembers.
Ah, yes.
The expectations at that level are very, very high.
At the same time, I am older now, and I have accumulated a certain amount of experience and, hopefully, some wisdom.
No matter how high the expectations may be, I do not need to repeat the old pattern of working solely to meet someone else’s demands and losing sight of my own path in the process. I have encountered that lesson enough times already.
I want to learn what I genuinely want to understand.
I want to explore things that I have not yet been able to experience in my own body, but sense may be possible.
And what I learn can, I believe, feed directly back into the work I do with my clients.
That is the unknown territory I want to explore.
So I have decided to accept this opportunity that seems to have dropped unexpectedly into my life and see where it takes me.
Anatomy Classes at Noho Pilates in New York
Alongside my preparations for November, I began taking two anatomy courses in September through Noho Pilates in New York.
The courses can be taken in person or online, and recordings are also available. One of the two courses, in particular, is highly interactive: participants learn by observing one another’s movement, so attending live is preferable.
Which is why, twice a week, I have recently been joining anatomy classes that begin at 3:30 in the morning here in Japan.
The applied anatomy I had previously studied was largely connected to the practice of osteopathy. In that context, the client is primarily receiving movement passively.
But the way the body and its joints behave during passive movement is quite different from what happens when a person is actively moving.
Having now started these classes, I find the opportunity to study applied anatomy specifically in relation to active movement almost ridiculously exciting. It is, for me, the kind of thing that makes my mouth water. (Laughs.)
The material is already answering some of the questions I have carried for years—sometimes on a scale that is almost inconveniently large!—and I can see enormous potential for applying it to my clients’ concerns and questions, as well as to movement training.
Even when a movement itself is extremely small and subtle, understanding what is actually happening at the joint can completely change the direction of training.
Today’s class, for example, focused on movement at the sacroiliac joint. Because the pelvis plays such a central role in both the organization and function of movement throughout the body, reconsidering what is happening there can be relevant to almost anyone.
Bringing This Work Back to My Clients
In my own practice, I offer a program called AXIS, which works with posture and movement through the nervous system.
Beyond AXIS, I offer a second stage called AXIS Integration, where we begin to work more deliberately with movement and explore how the organization developed through AXIS carries into increasingly complex movement and everyday activity.
It has now been a year since the first clients began AXIS, and a growing number of them are reaching this second stage.
In that sense, the timing of my work with Irene could hardly be better.
And on a personal level, this opportunity feels a little like the two ends of a thirty-year circle finally meeting.
I am deeply grateful for everything that has brought me here.