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[0:00] Jackson Klein: You're listening to The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. Welcome, I'm Jackson Klein.

[0:20] Jackson Klein: Cristy Candler worked as a Broadway performer for over a decade in hit shows including Aida, Wicked, Chicago, and Rock of Ages. But when an injury brought her career to a pause, Cristy's non-surgical approach to recovery inspired her to focus on another passion of hers, the healing arts. Cristy and I spoke all about her career transition and how the healing arts can be helpful as we live through the COVID-19 pandemic. Here's our conversation.

[0:54] Jackson Klein: Hi! Can you please introduce yourself and tell our listeners where you're calling from today?

[1:05] Cristy Candler: Yes. Hello, my name is Cristy Candler and I'm calling from Santa Barbara, California.

[1:11] Jackson Klein: Thanks so much for joining us. So Cristy, you currently work in the healing arts, but before this you were a Broadway performer for over a decade. You were the original Witch's Mother and later Anessa in Wicked. You were in Chicago and Rock of Ages. What did you love most about performing?

[1:27] Cristy Candler: Like you said, the best thing I love about performing is you get into this zone where everything becomes a synergy of coherence. And that's truly the same thing with the healing arts, right? When we feel in alignment, we feel this harmony. It's like all parts are working together and in every aspect from the most outer part, like the sound and the departments and the music and all the actors and all the pieces are coming together. But also there's this beautiful mirroring of your inner self feeling totally in alignment. You just feel like you're in the zone. It's that perfect example of like Michael Jordan or like an athlete. Oh my God, there's such a perfection. I think we're all longing for that as performers to touch those moments, those precious, never to be seen again.

That's the beauty of live performance, right? These places that are just so magical. And I hate to use that word magical as a woo-woo, but there's no other way to describe it. When you see or you feel or you experience or you are performing in this place where there's like a presence and a preciousness that will never occur again. It's truly exceptional and art. It's art. I also really loved the camaraderie. I miss my family. And I think that's a big piece. I think as we're in this pandemic that people aren't talking so much about is like all the backstage antics, all the fun, all the connection, all of the relationship that you just have. It's family. You're having this beautiful career on the stage.

[2:55] Jackson Klein: And in 2014, you were sidelined by an injury. What happened?

[3:02] Cristy Candler: Yeah. In 2014, I was doing Rock of Ages. I was the dance captain. It was the hardest and most fun show I've ever done. It was so insane. It was like a hundred miles per hour, jump on stage. I was a bit older. And so the toll it took on my back with my heels and like we're wearing mic packs in our head and our wigs and the choreography and just chronically my back said, you have had it. And I wasn't listening. And many performers know this as dancers, as athletes, we just push on through. We ignore signals from our body. We just, that's part of the deal, right? You just pop eight Advil and you get on stage and you throw yourself into it and hope for you don't shatter a bone. Right. But at some point the body lets you know, and it knocks on the door louder and says, Hey, by the way, I'm not kidding.

And one morning I woke up and I couldn't bend over to pick up the cat bowls. I just couldn't move. I couldn't get out of bed and I was completely immobile and I have degenerative disc issues. I have bulging discs in my lower back. I'll five S one, most people do. And I just was at a crossroads where I thought I want to be able to move in my life. I've identified as a dancer for so long. And right now I cannot even bend over. I cannot move. And that was a real reckoning for me as someone who's been so mobile and so flexible and has such a facility and been able to do all these things. The body's like, Hey, by the way, I'm in charge. And there's a body wisdom that comes through that says, if you're not going to listen, we're just going to get louder and louder and louder till you finally submit.

And so that's what happened. I just couldn't dance anymore in the way that I used to. And my, I was in so much pain and so much agony and so much frustration, right? Because we've also been, our bodies do what we want them to do for so long as performers. And all of a sudden, guess what? I'm not in control anymore. There's something else. So it was really like surrender or there's no other choice. So I quit Rock of Ages, which was the only show I ever quit. And I just knew something deeper inside me. There was an intelligence and wisdom saying, you need to make a shift. And I left that show. I sold everything. I sold my apartment, moved. It was like something else moving through me just saying, you're, you are shifting and you need to go heal.

So I moved back to California where I'm from. I spent three months, um, just being quiet and rehabbing my own self through the ocean and acupuncture. That's all I did. I didn't do any movement. Yeah. I didn't do any yoga. I didn't do anything acupuncture and walks on the beach. And then I incorporated a little bit of sound and toning and which sounds really woo woo, but it was like, literally I couldn't do anything else. Someone else was telling me to do. I got x-rays. They told me to get surgery, blah, blah, blah. I just knew that wasn't the way I wanted to go. I wanted to figure out how to heal my body through my body's intelligence and wisdom. And I knew I could do it. I knew I could. There was something deeper saying, you know, you need to rest.

You need to sleep. You need to walk on the beach. Acupuncture. That's it. Yes. Which is pretty incredible. And I've been able to move and I feel pain free now. And I feel, I reclaimed some joy and, um, had to really surrender and let go of the obligation of moving my body in a certain way that was starting to become very torturous. It's so hard. It's such a bittersweet razor's edge, right? Of like, we love performing so much. It's so our heart's joy and bliss. And there's also that other side of the, this is really hard eight times a week. I'm forcing my body to do this. It's really a struggle. So, you know, to have, to be on the other side of it now and speaking to you from this place of just appreciating the whole journey of it. And, um, I would tell my younger self, gosh, really relish those times that you are on stage because they won't happen again.

[6:51] Jackson Klein: At what point in this recovery process, if at that point, did you decide to start your transition to your new career in the healing arts?

[6:55] Cristy Candler: So it's again, something that kind of moved through me and decided for me. And I had been studying yoga and philosophy the whole time I was on Broadway. So, uh, I had been taking teacher trainings and pursuing them always been a seeker and always been looking for ways to make sense of the world for myself. And it helped with my performing career. I thought I wasn't identified as a performer, which is so fascinating. I think we all can relate to this now in the pandemic, like, Oh, I'm cool. I'm cool. But actually it's such an identity of who we are. We've trained our entire lives for it. It's this thing that, you know, we get applauded for and rewarded for and validated, which is what we're seeking this love, this approval, this, you know, and rightly so this validation.

Um, but it, it was a time for me to shift into, okay, how can I integrate this in a way that makes sense to help others help me. So heal my body and then heal others through sound, through yoga, through meditation. And, um, I use these crystal singing bowls, which have this beautiful vibration and tone, and they relax the nervous system and relax the brain. And it's this beautiful, subtle and yet profound way to re harmonize or realign the body from the inside out. I know it sounds a bit woo again, but it is a really beautiful thing. If you've never heard of sound bath or listen to these kinds of tones, I encourage you to check it out. Um, sound is very powerful healing modality, surprisingly in beautiful ways. So I placed the bowl on the body and you can feel the vibration.

[8:25] Jackson Klein: You've come across these different specialties, sound baths, yoga, meditation. Why are these specific? I know you've touched on it a bit. Why are these specific healing arts special to you?

[8:30] Cristy Candler: The body is such a beautiful key in. It's such an entry way into healing. It makes sense to me as a dancer and performer to have this sensibility and this sensitivity. You know, we all know taking a deep breath can really change and shift our consciousness, shift our perception is can breathing can moving our bodies can listening deeply in this meditative way with sound, bring us into understanding our journeys better in a deeper way. So that even in this pandemic, if we're struggling with performing, not performing what the world is, all of the unrest going on is the challenge and opportunity for us to evolve and grow deeper because the back injury, it really devastated me. I was literally I'm never going to dance again. Who am I? What am I doing? And yet it was my greatest teacher.

[9:24] Cristy Candler: There are so many questions about the future of theater. Yes, Broadway and theater are coming back, but who knows how long it'll be until it's as robust of an industry as it was a year ago. And as a result, many workers in the arts are choosing to focus on either a parallel career or explore passions in a totally different industry to stay afloat and find joy in different ways. As someone who has made that leap, what advice would you give to someone considering a career shift right now?

[9:54] Cristy Candler: It's a beautiful question. And that's something I keep asking myself. I think there's no hard end answer of like, this is the thing, right? It's a continuous journey of stops and starts and two steps forward and five steps back. And this kind of clumsy, I've definitely keep falling and then getting back up. You know, there's no like, and like, I found the answer. And I want to hold space for a little bit of there to be some sadness, right? There's a loss, like some shows may never come back. And like, let there be some space around that and a pause and sadness and a grieving of this won't be again, what it was. There's some great shows that won't happen. And how are we as performers and creative artists going to segue, pivot, adapt, transition, we're going to find the things that we love that are authentic, that we can do in a way that's healing for us and healing for others.

One thing I know as performers and artists is that we're very, very, very creative and resilient, right? We've all been in the studio. And we're like trying to do that lift or that choreography or that scene, it's not working. And it's like, this isn't working. The minute we pause, take some space and some time, and then come at it from another angle. Somehow, we've created a creative solution in and then it works, right? And I definitely feel optimistic and positive about all of us, knowing that we have that skill in us. We know how to pivot. We know how to adapt. We just go in another door. We go in another way. You try to sing this way. Oh, you try it like this. So try to live with the hand like this.

And we're also like, we can do it like that. I mean, I came up with choreography with my collaborators and cast mates and Wicked on the spot. They're like, we need an eight count. We're like, okay, great. Let's, okay. And then you do it and you, then, you know, it's like this creative inspiration. And so I, even as hard as it is right now in the pandemic, and if we're feeling frustrated and scared and alone and despairing, there's also the other side of like, no, no, no. We know creative solutions. We know how to move into ways that maybe I won't be performing for the next year or until Broadway comes back, but I have all these skills that are useful. There's all these jobs that weren't even in existence five years ago.

So can we be that like optimistic and creative about like, listen, there wasn't a content creator. It wasn't a digital platform person. There wasn't an app developer. There wasn't a zoom teacher or, you know, like there's now creating so much more from the challenge creative solution. I say, and hopefully this is helpful for performers transitioning, being creative, being open-minded, being willing to shift perception and shift your perspective to say, you know what, I could do this and this can offer help to others and to me in a way.

[12:55] Jackson Klein: Special thanks to Cristy Candler for sharing her story with us today. The Ensemblist was produced today by Mo Brady and me, Jackson Klein. There are two great ways you can help The Ensemblist right now. One is by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. The second is by becoming a Patreon member at patreon.com slash The Ensemblist. Please follow us wherever you listen to podcasts, whether that's on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, or at bpn.fm, the home of Broadway Podcast Network. You can also follow us on Instagram. Stay safe and thank you for listening. Until next time.