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What It's Like To Be... with Dan Heath · October 2026
The contortionist on what audiences actually respond to. Her hardest work depends on slow control of tiny muscles, but the crowd-pleaser is a fast, familiar move: running her legs in little circles around her head.
…error for someone like me. If I tried that, like it would probably be saving me from injury. But for you, it's like a false alarm. Exactly. Exactly. It's like you're constantly trying to do the exact opposite of what would be smart and safe, but it thinks it's protecting you. It's very frustrating.
Yeah. Well, so give me an example. Like paint us a picture of what you would look like on stage doing something that kind of exploits your mastery of these micro muscles.
Okay, so this is a thing that actually comes up a lot because when you're doing shows, directors always want the flashy skills, and it's really important that you can do those flashy skills. Because I understand that if I do a crazy hard trick and I move really slow, people will probably clap and they'll like it. But they never ever will clap as much as when I just run in little circles around my head. Never ever.
Wait, let me just process that. When I run in little circles around my...
So it's like if you're laying down and you run your legs up around over your head in like a little circle like a spider, people go crazy, and that's almost everybody's finale trick because it's like guaranteed something about it being so like fast and also visually like accessible, like a normal…
Oh, so it's almost like beyond their comprehension. So they they don't have the same like bodily intuition or something.