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Two years ago, a physical therapist told me that I needed to start taking Pilates on a regular basis. I was dealing with mysterious chronic lower back pain, and she assured me that a commitment to Pilates would help. I began frequenting Fort Pilates, a lovely studio in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and wound up one evening in a class taught by the choreographer and dancer Sofia Engelman. Something about the sense of creativity and discovery in Sofia’s class — combined with the grounded, non-judgmental clarity of her teaching — would lead me to return to her again and again. (I also appreciated that she taught a discounted weekly community class, which I learned to sign up for weeks in advance; it was always in-demand.)
Around this time last winter, when I was recovering from a surgery for the treatment of endometriosis, I saw Sofia for a series of private sessions at her home studio. At a time when I was feeling estranged from my body, doubting if I would ever feel like my old self, she was a steadying, nurturing force who helped me ease back into movement with both rigor and levity. I came back feeling even stronger than before.
As the founder of her own practice, Queer Body Pilates, Sofia teaches through a queer- and trans-centered lens, guided by a philosophy of making Pilates accessible, supportive, and playful for all. “I understand and approach ‘queer’ not just as a label pertaining to gender identity and sexuality,” she writes on her website, “but also the action of queering: to question, reorient, and make strange. I facilitate Pilates queerly.” She is especially interested in how language — the art of Pilates cueing — can invite people to tune into their bodies and develop new kinds of physical awareness. As she put it when we met to chat at her Brooklyn apartment in December, “I’m trying to give people tools to map themselves in a new way.”
“For me, Pilates is a way to connect with yourself,” she said. “It’s a little bit of a duet with yourself on whatever day — and maybe also a trio with this equipment or these props.”
Sofia came to Pilates from extensive training in modern and postmodern dance. After graduating from Smith College as a dance major in 2019, she taught adult beginner modern dance in Western Massachusetts. In the early days of the pandemic, with fellow dance artists Em Papineau (her partner) and Anna Maynard, she founded freeskewl, an online (and later in-person) platform for movement classes that responded swiftly to the isolation and instability many dancers were facing.
Later in 2020, after moving to New York, Sofia ended up in the hospital for emergency abdominal surgery. Pilates helped her heal, and she started exploring it more deeply. She completed her Pilates mat teaching certification that year and started seeing clients one-on-one — the beginning of Queer Body Pilates. This fall, with additional teacher trainings and several years at Fort Pilates under her belt, she decided to branch out fully on her own, devoting more time to QBP and her choreographic work.
As she embarks on this new professional chapter, we got together to talk about her method and her journey as a Pilates practitioner: how dance informs her approach, how language can draw people in (or shut them out), and what it’s like, so far, to be fully self-employed.
As always, at the end of this conversation, you’ll find my quick recommendations of shows to see in the coming weeks. And stay tuned for the next Dance List (January festivals edition), coming your way in the next few days.
Siobhan Burke: How did you get into practicing and teaching Pilates?
Sofia Engelman: I think there was always a little bit of Pilates in my modern dance training without it necessarily being named. But the more logistical answer is that back in 2020, I had emergency surgery for a huge ovarian cyst. It was larger than a grapefruit and had taken over my right ovary and fallopian tube. I was supposed to perform two days later, but suddenly I was in the hospital with this enormous scar. I turned to Pilates for recovery, and it was really useful. I felt really curious about the magic of how the system helped me heal from this fissure, this kind of explosion that had happened inside my body.
I think I was attracted to Pilates as a system because it was so sensation-based, and I’ve always been really interested in stuff with a lot of physical feedback. I was going to contact improvisation jams when I was 14. Pilates offered that in a non-dance context — being in this response system with gravity, with these props and this equipment, and that felt exciting.
I’ve been thinking about [the dancer and choreographer] Jenn Nugent’s teaching because I just went to her class this morning. There’s this way she’s able to guide you into something that might end up looking very known, but she brings you there in a way that isn’t — she takes you through a back door where you’re able to maybe get disoriented, and in that process, you experience more presence and arrive at what you’re doing in a new way. I’m interested in the art of cueing in Pilates as a way of bringing people through that back door.
Can you tell me more about your early dance training?
When I was 3 and 4, I did Isadora Duncan dance at the Dance Complex in Cambridge, MA. I remember skipping around, and we got to have scarves, and I really liked playing with the scarves. I think that was the beginning of me getting really excited about moving with objects. Then I spent a lot of time in elementary school really terribly playing soccer. I was just really bad at it. All I wanted to do was to be at home reading books, and my mom was like, “OK, you don’t have to play soccer anymore, but you need to have some kind of exercise.” My mom’s an artist, and I had been digging into different art forms like drawing and painting and local theater. And I was like, “OK, I’ll try dance, but it has to be modern dance because that’s the creative kind.” So I started doing that, and then I got roped into ballet for a bit.
I went to high school at Cambridge Rindge and Latin — the public high school in Cambridge — and they had a great dance program. That’s where I got into contact improvisation and Bartenieff Fundamentals, and I started going to the Bates Dance Festival in the summer.
It’s interesting that you studied things like Bartenieff and contact improv at a young age. I think for many people, ballet or competition dance is their entry point into dance, and they discover these other forms later on. What was your relationship to ballet growing up?
I was told to go to ballet to support my modern technique, and there was something about starting when I was 12-ish where the cueing just did not make sense to me. I remember my teacher trying to get me to only use a certain part of my glutes, and it felt so weird. I was at an age where I was questioning everything, and this was the beginning of me being really curious about how people talk about movement and the body. I think because of my educational background, I immediately identified ballet as being incredibly patriarchal, and I pushed away from it really quickly.
In college I refused to study ballet at all for a long time, but then toward the end of college I remember having this realization: Like, yes, ballet is all of these things I don’t like. It’s this embodiment of a lot of abuse of women over a few centuries; it’s incredibly gender-normative and colonialist. But inside of that, maybe there’s a lot of wisdom that’s been passed down around body knowledge. I think Pilates allows me to access a certain kind of more deliberate movement vocabulary that I had pushed away, in a different context.
When you were recovering from surgery and starting your journey into Pilates, did you gravitate toward certain teachers?
I was taking class a lot with Jessie Young. There’s a way she teaches that’s kind of the opposite of how I teach, and I’m so impressed by it, where she’s able to jump from one thing to the next and make these massive shifts inside of the flow of a class. I was also really interested in Irene Dowd’s teaching and how she approaches biomechanics. She does a really interesting job of helping reorient people to themselves and to different joints, and to kind of flip upside down the places where we often work to find stability or mobility. Like when she’s working with the hip joint, she often works on stability of the leg and mobility of the pelvis around it. That flip of intention is exciting to me.
How did you arrive at a queer- and trans-centered approach in your Pilates practice?
I did my teacher training at a few places, for mat work and reformer work and different equipment, so I was exposed to a lot of different perspectives. But I had not spent much time in a traditional Pilates environment before my training, and pretty quickly I found myself questioning a lot of what was being put forward in those spaces. I’m someone who as a queer person has a lot of privilege, being straight-passing, and it’s rare that I find myself in environments where I feel othered. But I was feeling that, just noticing how a lot of the cueing was so oriented toward a normative idea of a female body and the assumptions that were happening in the room. By the time I finished my mat training, I was already questioning who I wanted to be doing this work with. I was coming from this process of recovery and these results I had seen, and I was asking myself who could really use and need the magic that I experienced with this form, and who isn’t already getting it?
I’m really interested in how this work can be digestible to someone walking off the street. With a lot of the cueing that I usually see in a Pilates class, there are things that get repeated over and over, like telling people to bring their bellybutton to their spine as a way of accessing the core. I think what happens when we hear something like that is this idea of: Oh, we need to pull our stomach in, so in this room there’s a value of being smaller, of being skinnier, of maybe breathing less, of minimizing myself, of being rigid. I’m interested in how we can accomplish that same core activation without any of those ideas crossing our mind.
“I’m really interested in how this work can be digestible to someone walking off the street.”
What other language in your training felt limiting?
There were a lot of references to moving around your bra line. I was like, what is that? Not even all the people in this room who are cis and straight have a bra on. I’m confused. A lot of references to the waist; that was a big one. The waist is not even an actual place, it’s just an idea of something. And also a lot of reference to keeping the hips still and referring to your ASIS as “the hip bone.” I’ve noticed that talking about the hips can bring a lot of confusion for clients, because it’s like, are you talking about the joint? Are you talking about the front of the pelvis? There’s also this assumption that everyone can easily find their ASIS, and that’s actually not accessible for everyone, the way their flesh lays on their body. In Pilates, a lot of teachers also cue shoulders away from the ears, but this is so rigid and not always biomechanically sound or necessary. Another one is lifting the side of the “waist” when lying on one’s side; not everyone is going to have visible space under there. So, I started thinking about how I could come up with cues that might be just a little bit more universal, that would encourage people to stay present and connect to themselves in a new way.
What are some alternatives you’ve found?
It started with figuring out how to talk about the pelvis, which is such a huge focus in Pilates. So much of what we’re doing is stabilizing the pelvis or activating muscles in and around the pelvis, or figuring out how to move the pelvis and legs separately from each other, or identifying different surfaces of the pelvis and the bones inside of that system. It’s also a part of the body that’s really loaded — for my queer and trans clients, but also for folks who don’t hold those identities.
One of my favorite cues is talking about people’s back pockets. This is such a simple way of sensing into the back surface of the pelvis and identifying that it has two halves and that they shift in relationship to how our weight moves, without even referencing the whole front surface that can have all this baggage. I also like to look at the sitz bones as a bony reference point that people can find — imagining the sitz bones as having this gaze and envisioning where they’re looking and feeling into them.
I think because we’re such frontal beings, and the front surface of us is so vulnerable — and also the part we see in the mirror and the part that faces the world — I find myself getting people to tune into their edges, their sides, their back. How can we find these new landmarks?
I also always like to cue movement rather than a position. We’re here to move, and stillness is ultimately impossible to achieve. So I might invite somebody to pour into their right back pocket as they lift their left foot in order to stabilize their pelvis, rather than telling them to simply keep it still.
“I think because we’re such frontal beings…I find myself getting people to tune into their edges, their sides, their back. How can we find these new landmarks?”
You recently decided to leave your studio job and work for yourself full-time. How did you come to that decision?
I’m someone who tends to have a lot of rub in serving someone else’s vision, and I felt that the people-pleaser part of me was pulling myself in so many different directions. I was catering to the needs of all my clients, and then trying to do that in a way that would fit someone else’s idea of what the work should look like. That was making Pilates take up more energy in my life than I wanted it to, and it was making it difficult to be an artist.
Quitting felt like a big, scary jump. It's been really interesting how in creating this space for myself, suddenly I have 28 of my own private clients, and I’m able to focus on the one-on-one work, which is really what feeds me ultimately; it’s so much about this collaborative building of a space together. I do love teaching group classes, but it’s exhausting to do for hours on end in the way that I felt I needed to, to live by my own ethics of creating enough room for people to choose their own adventure, to truly nourish the fact that there might be eight really independent experiences happening in the room. You can’t go on autopilot.
How do you balance your work as a Pilates practitioner and a dance artist?
In the busyness of freeskewl, and then diving from there into Pilates, my solo practice as a dance artist fell away a little bit. I still was making time for collaborations I really love, like with my partner, Em, and some other folks. But over the last few years, my most consistent movement practice has been Pilates; it’s the thing I do almost every day.
In this time of working for myself again, it’s been interesting to see how that shows up in the studio. I’ve been finding that I’m really attracted to walls, to the floor, to levering off of things and myself. There’s something about the feedback loop I get in Pilates and the way I get to follow pleasure — not only pleasure as in things that feel good or easy, but the pleasure of feeling, of sensing, of: “Oh, wow, when I translate a cue that was expressed to me as touch or language into my body, I really feel that!” I’ve been exploring how that translates into my dance practice.
I’m working on something new; I don’t know what it is yet. I spent a lot of time in the studio this weekend with 20 yoga blocks in a pile that I was moving on. So, there’s some way that all of this is coming together.
Learn more about Queer Body Pilates at queerbodypilates.com and @queerbodypilates on Instagram.
Mark Your Calendars
So much is happening in January! And a lot of it all at the same time; such is the way of January festival season. Here are five shows to have on your radar in the first stretch of the new year, including Camille A. Brown’s I AM in February, which could very well sell out (I saw this at Jacob’s Pillow last summer, and it’s not to be missed).
Ronald K. Brown, Grace: Jan. 1 and 5, performed by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at City Center; Jan. 14-19, performed by EVIDENCE at the Joyce
Julia Antinozzi, THE SUITE: Jan. 10-12 at Triskelion (part of Live Artery 2025)
Angie Pittman, Black Life Chord Changes and Kyle Marshall, Joan: Jan. 11 at BAM Fisher Hillman Studio (part of Out-FRONT! Fest)
Symara Sarai, I want it to rain inside: Jan. 11-13 at New York Live Arts Studios (part of Live Artery 2025)
Camille A. Brown & Dancers, I AM: Feb. 5-9 at the Joyce