Teaching the CEOs to Dance

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Off the Cuff interviews Edwin Olvera, internationally acclaimed dancer, choreographer, instructor and longtime member of Pilobolus Dance Theatre. We discuss his personalized training program, the Edwin Olvera Method (EOM), geared toward male Wisconsin CEOs.

Please describe what the Edwin Olvera Method (EOM) is. What does a typical group session look like?

EOM is designed to teach Wisconsin CEOs how to dance. There’s another component about flexibility, but the main focus is on getting businessmen to let loose and have a good time in any social setting. I’ve personally witnessed lots of men get tight and uncomfortable—become a deer in the headlights—when it came to participating or dancing at social functions, like weddings and large-scale events. After witnessing that, I realized that, a lot of times, they don’t know anything about how to articulate their body, or how to express themselves in a creative way because they’ve never taken dance or maybe their parents shunned movement in any way, shape or form.

My goal is to teach men to dance quickly by playing games and then getting them to interact. A one-day group session goes like this: We start off around 9 a.m. and until 10 a.m., I teach them about flexibility through yoga and some other movement sessions. Then from 10 a.m. until 12 p.m. I teach them four to five different moves, like sidestep and grapevine. It’s not about complicating things with 20 moves, it’s literally mastering seven to 15 moves [over the course of the day] with confidence and then understanding how to accent them and give them variations. An example of the games we play is the mirror game where somebody is in front of you and they do a movement and you follow it.

Then we have a lunch break and we come back. From 1 until 4 p.m., I add the rest of the moves. Later on that evening, I guarantee that you’re supposed to be dancing. There’s no excuse. I’m going to be with you, literally, in the space. I’ll be helping you hear the music, I’ll be doing the moves and you should replicate or reciprocate. Men in these positions—executives, presidents, CEOs—have very full schedules so they don’t have the time to be take class Monday, Wednesday, Friday, so in one day, they have to learn it. Whether you’re taking an intensive in acting, dancing or voice, you can learn so much just in one day. Your brain is thinking at an accelerated rate so that’s what happens. They do their stuff in the morning and in the evening hours we share a drink and go out dancing. The evening venue that I’ve really enjoyed using recently is Gibraltar because it has great music and it’s not intimidating. It has a very medium pace in the flow of people coming and going so it’s easy for my clients to just go up and dance because there’s not many people watching.

What unique challenges do your clients face?

The biggest challenge that comes up is rhythm. They often can’t hear or feel the beat. I tell them, if you’ve ever played basketball, when you dribble, that’s the rhythm. I use analogies. One guy I’ve been training did basketball when he was younger, so I told him, “This hip action that we’re doing is equivalent to dribbling a basketball side to side. If you think of your pelvis as a basketball, then just bounce your pelvis like a ball and you’ll get the rhythm.” I use lots of analogies and humor and games. Let’s be frank, a lot of these CEOs are very linear so to get them to think in a creative way can be a challenge. They’re very creative in their business—they wouldn’t have created a beautiful business if they didn’t think outside the box. It’s just that sometimes they just get stuck on data and looking at things a certain way.

What do clients stand to gain in applying these techniques to other areas of their lives?

Confidence. You should be able to go into any social setting and just let loose. For example, there was a very high-level executive from the U.K. who came to one of the workshops when I lived in Connecticut. The hardest thing that he was dealing with was the ability to be vulnerable and his wife was like, “You must take this workshop because you just need to know how to relax and be vulnerable.” And by the end, he had the ability to come down on one knee to present a rose. That’s a sweet thing. For some guys, depending on their position, the ability to be humble in front of others can be a challenging thing because they see you as a leader and think you must always be the one who gets everything done. But at the end of the day you’re a human being, you’re not a robot.

Tell me about your background and how you got the idea to found EOM.

I have a very extensive background in professional dance, and modern dance in particular. My method is all about creative movement for adults and I did that for 13 years for a company called Pilobolus Dance Theatre. A lot of the people attending the classes Pilobolus offers were business people—neurosurgeons, social workers, motivational speakers, psychologists, nurses, a dancing dentist from California—and they were coming in because they were losing their creativity because they had responsibility and business. I was teaching them how to get back into movement and dance and body awareness. When I moved here to Wisconsin about six years ago, because I interact with a lot of professional people, I kept seeing the stress on men’s faces at weddings. So I reached out to them and asked, “What’s going on?” and they shared their stories.

Do you do private lessons, group sessions, a combination of both?

I mainly focus on group sessions because people learn quicker when they’re in a group setting. There’s a concept called platooning, where one person’s up doing something and the other’s just watching and, because you see this person fail and then solve the problem on the spot in front of others, you have a reflection moment. Internally the person watching is like, “Oh God, I see what you’re talking about.” I love working in group settings. I feel like that produces more results than one-on-one.

Your clientele is very specific, but do you have any general advice for someone interested in learning to dance?

It’s a game. Dance is just a mental game. Overcome that fear with lots of play, lots of humor. And know that we dance every single day, we just don’t call it dance. The way we cross our hands, the way we sit in a chair—it’s just movements. Our body does movements every single day, except we don’t put it to music unless we actively choose to. We move every day and when you feel like you can’t do the dance, just change the thought. It’s that goofy thought that locks your body from freeing up, so change your thought.

The next EOM group session takes place Saturday, April 7 in Grace Lutheran Church’s banquet space (303 Green Bay Road, Thiensville) with evening outing at Gibralter MKE (538 W. National Ave.). To register, visit edwinolveramethod.com/events/.