Meet our April 2024 Teacher Feature: Pole instructor Butchie Gamble and Aerial Instructor Adam Tabellija! If you haven’t taken class with them yet, we hope you get to know them a little better through our “Upside Down Challenge” and if you’ve already taken their classes, maybe you’ll learn something new! Best of all, enjoy classes with Butchie and Adam for $25 throughout the month of April!
Take class with Butchie: Use code BPBUTCHIE
Take class with Adam: Use code BPADAM
**PLEASE NOTE: instructor discount codes are only valid for classes with Butchie and Adam. Using the codes for any other instructor will result in early cancellation or a $45 single class purchase. No exceptions.
MEET BUTCHIE GAMBLE
- What in your background (maybe your dance or just athletic background) do you think influences your pole or how do you bring that in? I was a go-go dancer before I decided to do pole. I wanted some way to stand out from the other go-go dancers. So that’s what brought me to pole
- Do you ever bring that go-go background into your teaching? How do you do that? Of course. It influences my style. I like to be more sexy, sensual, performative for an audience, rather than contemporary would.
- When you think about teaching someone new to pole, what’s the one thing you want them to take away from that experience? To have fun, that it’s about just bringing your energy. It’s not about looking one specific type of way. It’s more just having fun exploring your body. So I always make sure that my students feel comfortable to explore.
- Do you ever have any instances where, ah, I got through to that person?! Oh definitely, all the time. We’ll see when people open up or feel more comfortable to just be themselves. My students aren’t meant to look like me dancing, they’re meant to look like them. So I just give them the tools to explore and become the best possible dancer that they can become.
- Do you have a go-to phrase? I would say to not worry about getting everything perfectly, but just keep trying and keep moving. Perfection is not the goal. Good energy and being in your body, related to music, that’s a goal.
Follow Butchie on Instagram @butchiegamble. View Butchie’s class schedule here!
MEET ADAM TABELLIJA
- You learned a new skill, can you tell us about your new skill? Well, I have lately been working on my magic, which was not on my bingo card for 2023 or 2024, but here we are!
- Do you think there’s some parallels between magic and aerial at all? I feel like there’s a sense of magic — people flying through the air, you know, and sort of like this suspension of disbelief if you will.
- Has that been something that’s been part of you prior to aerial? I just kind of take what’s given to me and what’s asked of me and what execute it., which I guess you could say, is a lot like taking class, right? People are asking you a lot to do certain things. Let’s go here. You have to look at your body as a tool, right? So it’s not just about executing or replicating things that you see. It’s about creating a new relationship with your own body. The awareness between your body and the relationship it has with the othe parts, you know? So it’s not just about showing people what to do, but it’s also about really getting them to understand what’s going on in their body and how to utilize that and carry it over into other skill sets.
- How do you break through to people that seem to be having a hard time connecting or getting into their body? Well, I think there’s a lot of pressure in class, right? You feel like there are a lot of people watching, or maybe you have this idea that the teacher has this expectation that everything needs to be perfect. So I always try to level the playing field early in my class, reminding everybody that we’re all in different places in our journey. And so it’s not about getting the skill right immediately/ It’s about exposing yourself to the pathway, letting it be crunchy, allowing yourself to make mistakes. And then once you get it into your body you’re like, “Oh, I kind of know what I’m doing”. Then you can work on cleaning it up and making it feel really beautiful. I feel like when you have enough vocabulary in your body, when you have to improvise like that, it just kind of takes over in the moment. So, even though I came out with the performance, it was like, “that did not go as planned”, nobody out there knew anything.
- What gets you the most excited or keeps you coming back for more? I mean, I love a light bulb moment when somebody has been working on a skill for a while and then one day, wow, they just get it, you know? And sometimes skills can take months to really feel comfortable in, and can take months to get into your body, you know? And so I love the measured progress of being able to see students do things that they didn’t think they could do. And then when you break it down and really give them tools that they need to understand what’s going on in space and time between their body and the apparatus, and then suddenly, they’re doing things that they really thought that they couldn’t do. And it doesn’t feel as stressful.
- What’s your catchphrase in class, your go-to? One of the things that I love to say a lot in class is, “Congratulations! You did the hard sh*t today!”.
Follow Adam on Instagram @adam.tabellija. View Adam’s class schedule here!
