Get Your Grit On It: The Power of Dance with Galit Friedlander

Galit Friedlander believes that if more people were encouraged to bring movement regularly into their lives, they would improve their mental health and energy levels. Movement and dance have existed in cultures since our earliest times, but many of us have forgotten their therapeutic and healing benefits. She believes that dance has the transformative power to build immunity and create healthier, happier lives.

Galit is a teacher, choreographer, dancer, personal trainer, and podcaster who has choreographed for Prince and WNBA’s LA Sparks and has danced on Pharrell and MC Lyte projects. She is a host of the online series for the Doctors 4 Dancers Organization and the popular podcast DanceSpeak. As a trainer, Galit brings together more than 17 years of dance experience and an incredible wealth of knowledge to help her clients understand the power of movement. By focusing on peoples’ strengths & body specifics, Galit can pinpoint technical aspects of the body to encourage empowered and mindful training for optimal performance throughout the year.

Through her own experience with depression, Galit experienced firsthand how movement and being active can connect you with your deeper fire, giving you more energy and connection with yourself.

Dance can help you connect with the moment and not think too far ahead or get caught up in your worries. Galit endeavours to travel worldwide, sharing her knowledge and passion through dance and fitness classes. We spoke to Galit about what she does and why she believes that movement should be a part of everyone’s life.

Kim: Let’s start by asking, who is Galit in your own words?

Galit: Oh, what a beautiful and daunting question. I feel like it has to do with the purpose that you give yourself to and how you create and define yourself. We are convinced at a young age of who we are and what our identities are, but in many ways, that’s a construction.

I am a deep thinker. Sometimes, I’m told I overthink. I’m creative. I care a lot. The purpose I give myself is for people to be seen and understood to their core. People motivated, and experiencing the possibility of who they can be beyond their preconceptions.

I’m going into my sixth year of podcasting as the creator and host of the Dance Speak podcast. I’ve spent many years working as a personal trainer, and I now create online programs so I can work with people all across the world. I’m also choreographing, mainly in Los Angeles, and teaching dance.

Kim: There are many aspects to who you are, and they all connect to movement in some way. What led you to that path? Was there anything that inspired you throughout your life to know that that is it?

Galit: I love this question, and I feel it goes straight to the core movement. I had done ballet when I was five and six. It wasn’t anything serious. It was a lot of fun because I had a fun teacher, and after a year, she moved to Canada. I didn’t like the next teacher, so I quit. That’s it. When I was 12, going on 13, I was dealing with depressive feelings and not just not feeling great about myself. One morning I woke up, and I asked my mom why I never went back to dance, she didn’t know, and I didn’t know, so we both decided I was going to try a dance class. It was literally one morning. So then I took my first dance class, and for that hour, nothing else mattered. Nothing else existed. I kept training with more classes and building out my curriculum, and that was my retreat, my oasis, so I feel like it found me and called to me.

Starting early teen years is considered late by many standards, so I fell behind, and I wanted to get good as fast as possible. So I started looking into cross-training for Dance and Fitness, and that’s where I found fitness was the best friend of dance.

So that’s where it started.

When I’m dancing and moving, it has my centre. It’s how I communicate and connect with people in many ways.

Kim: How did you find the union between mental health and dance and fitness?

Galit: It was a process. I found the union between mental health and movement, and I slowly became a happier person when I was dancing and active. It gave me a place to be in any state that I was in and just breathe more. I literally felt the chemical composition of my brain changing. I slowly started having more energy, and I connected with also my grit and fire.

My body built strength more easily, and sometimes my movements would be a bit jagged, but I just cared about showing up versus being so attached to a result somewhere in the future. I just became a better person, and it gave me a place where I did not have to be any other way than exactly how it was in the moment. Which I think is one of the healthiest things that we can have as humans and especially in our childhood and adolescence.

Kim: What inspired you to step into that teaching space and change people’s lives through your knowledge?

Galit: I naturally have always wanted to teach. I like to share and be on different ends of what I love doing. With dancing, I started to piece together choreography from what I had already learned and felt inspired by how the music made me feel. It was just a natural progression. Then the next step was shadowing a teacher and assisting, and it felt like what I was supposed to do. When I was in college, for instance, I went to the University of Southern California, and at the time, they did not have like a dance crew that I felt offered what I wanted to do in movement, so I created it.

I’ve always been the one that, if it doesn’t exist, I create it. If I’ve learned it and someone else wants to learn it, I want to teach it. I just felt right whenever I was creating and teaching. I also come from a line of teachers; my mom is a teacher; she’s extraordinaire with piano and piano technique and travels the world doing it. And my paternal grandmother was a teacher, my auntie is teacher, so I think it’s literally in my DNA.

Kim: What do you feel would be the most significant lesson humanity could take from having movement in their life?

Galit: I tell this to people all the time. Dance has existed before our current institutions, dance studios, concert halls, and definitely before TV, film, and social media. It’s’ run through in cultures from the beginning, and that’s important to listen to because when we’re not paying attention and people are not having a physical experience. We have so much sickness and lower immunity. We have people that are unwell and unbalanced, and there are so many things that can be avoided by moving. If society saw this existed before we had science around it, that movement and dance have
held strong, we could all thrive.

Kim: Do you have a future vision for the work that you’re doing?

Galit: I would love to combine all of it. I’ve been doing this for a long time; teaching, choreographing, training, delivering fitness and podcasting. I would love to travel to different regions and countries and have dance classes exploring movement and teaching dance techniques and fitness to dancers. Then also hosting a podcast or a panel (a full production like Wayne’s World) in that place because when we shift geographically and step into a different culture, country or city, we have more connections built.

So my dream is to travel and have the whole shebang where I give all of my offerings. I always want it to be authentic.

Kim: If your past and current self were to advise someone needing to find something to fill their life with, what would it be?

Galit: So I have two different pieces of advice. To my past selves, with the fire, grit and gumption that I have for dance, the advice is not to skip steps. Even if it feels tedious to give more love and attention to the beginner classes and the in-between, those are foundational steps, and they’re harder to correct once you’ve skipped them. I started hungrily to move up levels as fast as possible. While I achieved that, there are so many foundational things that I didn’t spend time with. So, I’d get injured, or I wasn’t ultimately at my fullest capacity. It’s also stressful if you feel like you’re rushing it.

My advice to dancers feeling frustrated is, you know our strengths and weaknesses. My strength was pushing through, and my weakness was having patience with it. That desire to get up and move is one of the most powerful things, and no one can own it like you can. Connect to your why and your desire. Understand and be willing to fall on your face as many times as you need to because the best performers, the best artists, and the best dancers are the ones who are not trying to be perfect. They explore so far outside of perfection that they find their voices hone in on it, and that is the unique voice.

Each person has it, but you have to be willing to go through the trenches. Be kind to yourself, but understand that what it takes is pushing through the tough days and figuring it out. It builds character, and in the long run, it will pay off.

If you need to be good right away and you do not feel like you’re there and you’re not willing to put in that work, then it might not be for you. I DON’T SAY IT LIGHTLY.

Kim: There’s a question I’ve been eager to ask. You choreographed with Prince, didn’t you?

Galit: I was his assistant choreographer, yes. It was really fun and not expected. I had taught voguing to a dance class, and the studio owner got really upset with me. I remember she ripped me apart and saying things like, “Who are you? What have you done? You have done nothing!” I had just graduated college, trying to make rent, and I was told that I was nothing.

And I remember how things came together to work for Prince. It was a matter of being bold, seeing an opportunity and pitching myself to the choreographer, and owning it. No one would have seen that for me, including me. It exceeded my highest dream.

One of my biggest takeaways was that you never know what’s around the corner in the best way.

I was green, and I was the youngest one around, and I learned a lot on the job. I had thought I had experienced so much, but this was so different. By the time I saw our choreography and a show, I think it was Los Angeles in 2011. I remember looking at the stage, and here’s Prince, this extraordinary man, and he’s smaller than the typical famous onstage man. He’s wearing eyeliner and something different, and I thought to myself, What if Prince tried to fit in? We would miss out on this huge force of a person.

Then I looked at all of his musicians and singers. Each of them inhabited their authentic selves, and they powerfully owned who they were, and that’s what had them onstage with Prince. They knew how to own themselves.

Kim: That sounds like an important lesson for us all to learn.

Galit: I have to thank you for asking me about this because I often forget it. So it’s a reminder to me of “just own it and own it and own it and own it.”

Kim: Galit, last question. What is your fierce truth?

Galit: I have a purpose here, and it’s not for anyone to validate. Meaning validation is great, and I appreciate it, and I love the support. I love it. I love it. I love it. But if I have something planted in my heart that I know is for me, my gut needs to follow.