Artifactuality, season 2, episode 4.
Kim Thuy (Voice Over) [00:00:04] On this episode of Artifactuality, is aerobics a sport? Why did legwarmers, leotards and headbands become an iconic 80s look? And what made a Montreal aerobics instructor into a local celebrity? My name is Kim Thuy. On this podcast from the Canadian Museum of History, together, we explore what objects and stories from the past can tell us about who we are today. What will resonate tomorrow? How will the events unfolding around us be remembered in the future?
Kim Thuy (Voice Over) [00:00:52] I remember watching aerobics on TV as a teenager in the 1980s. My family had just moved to Quebec from Vietnam. Each weekday morning on CFCF 12, there was an aerobics program featuring three women with matching spandex outfits and big 80s hair. I desperately wanted to dress like them, but we didn’t have money for those kinds of things. So one time I braided three pieces of fabric together just so I could copy Olivia Newton-John’s braided headband look.
Jenny Ellison [00:01:28] I remember going and sitting on the sidelines while my mom was doing aerobics in the elementary school gym in my small town, and it became part of fashion.
Kim Thuy (Voice Over) [00:01:37] That’s Jenny Ellison. She’s a historian at the Canadian Museum of History. Jenny has taken a particular interest in the rise of aerobics in Canada.
Jenny Ellison [00:01:49] A lot of my work focuses on the 1980s in Canada and the history of the body. And so the idea of like, how did people experience their bodies and live in their bodies in the 1980s? And so some of the instinct to do that work comes from observing my own life and my own family and the culture I grew up in in the 1980s in Canada. And equally, it comes from a desire to think beyond this idea that aerobics or women’s magazines or other forms of popular culture directed for women are necessarily bad for them. And so as I started researching this subject, I came across female fitness entrepreneurs and people who participated in these classes. And I felt like the lived experience of aerobics and the stories people told each other about that time and their motivations for going to classes, and even the way they talked about their clothes, their danskin, their aerobics gear, and, you know, the pleasure they took from their spaces offered us a different way of thinking about this topic.
Kim Thuy [00:02:50] Was it considered to be a sport?
Jenny Ellison [00:02:53] I would say yes. I think if we look back in history and we could go back to the 1800s and the beginnings of what some people would call physical culture programs for women, that have always been developed and sort of tailored towards women’s bodies for sometimes, you know, 100 years ago, because of a sense that women couldn’t do the same types of physical activities as men. And then as aerobics develops, it’s really intended to appeal to women and meet them where they are and be fun and accessible and speak to their desires and their aspirations as it relates to physical fitness. So I think it was always intended to be a sport. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s seen that way, and that’s another reason I’m interested in studying aerobics, as I think that it’s been trivialized, it’s dismissed. It’s a Halloween costume, and people don’t take it seriously as an activity because I think it was directed towards women and because it was feminine. But I think that it’s really important to think about the fact that women themselves drove the creation of this movement. Women themselves participated in droves in this movement, spent their money and their time and their energy. And so I think it sparks interesting conversations. Are people disciplining themselves in response to culture? Are they monitoring each other in these classes and making each other feel bad? And I think the answer to those questions is often yes. And I think there’s another story in these classes that relates to pleasure and fun. Sociality, female entrepreneurship… And connects out to other strands in the lives of many women. That’s a really important conversation to have.
Dale King [00:04:31] You start with the, you know, like…
Kim Thuy [00:04:33] This I can do.
Dale King [00:04:34] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kim Thuy [00:04:35] But you see, I don’t have any coordination. [laugher]
Kim Thuy (Voice Over) [00:04:39] That’s Dale King. She became a household name in English Montreal’s dance and fitness community back in the 80s.
Dale King [00:04:47] You just want to get the move like me, but not necessarily dance like me.
Kim Thuy (Voice Over) [00:04:51] Okay, she’s showing me some moves, and I’m trying to keep up, but…
Dale King [00:04:55] One, two – other arm, one arm!
Kim Thuy (Voice Over) [00:04:58] You see? I don’t know! [laughter]
Dale King [00:05:02] Don’t worry. You’re not the first. You’re not my first newbie.
Kim Thuy (Voice Over) [00:05:06] Dale moved to Montreal from Barbados in 1959, when she was three years old. In high school, she took up contemporary dance as a young adult. Dale taught Afro-Caribbean dance at Montreal community centers, and then she landed a gig at a studio, where she eventually started leading aerobics classes. But Dale didn’t want to offer a Jane Fonda style workout.
Dale King [00:05:32] I wanted to dance. I liked the idea of the exercising, but I didn’t like the look of that athletic, hardcore. So that’s what I changed, I made it dance-oriented. Michael Jackson was singing at the time, and Boyz to Men. All the 80 songs or the 80 artists that were up there, and even some of the techno crews like technotronic and rap music was coming, and that’s what I wanted to use. That’s what I wanted to dance to. I didn’t want that stiff athletic, bored exercise, and if you saw the videos and my class, you could see the distinctive difference because it was a very… I like to say stiff board movements. It wasn’t like a natural flow movement, like in dance where you flow. And in the aerobics movement it was like “ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh”. Regimented, that’s the word I want to say. It was very regimented, more so.
Kim Thuy (Voice Over) [00:06:29] She discovered a fun and fluid approach to aerobics. During a visit to Los Angeles, Dale’s friends said she had to try a class with a local instructor.
Dale King [00:06:42] My mind was blown. I went to her class, changed my life, and because she had definitely put that … and it was called Cardio Funk, and she had definitely put the dance and the cardio together. And I went, “Oh my Godness”. And it wasn’t up here yet. So when I got back, I changed my class.
Kim Thuy [00:07:03] Do you remember the first class in Montreal, the first class you taught?
Dale King [00:07:07] Yeah. When I came back that day from LA, I reformulated my music. I started looking at some moves, and Monday afternoon, I think was my 5:30 class. And I put on these – I said, “Okay, guys, I have something a little different for you today.” At the end of the class, they were like, “What is that?” I said, “It’s called cardio funk.” They go, Oh my.” It was like – they loved it. I loved it from the first, from the first class. The first class because I was lucky enough to be who I am – as you can see, somewhat energetic. And then with this method that I brought back and then with the music that I added, it just exploded. I call it the precursor to Zumba because you did get cardio, and I mixed it with dance movements more than your traditional aerobic moves at the time. And I used the latest dance music that was on the radio. That was the other big plus. It was it like canned music. It was like real music, which made it really fun and exciting.
Kim Thuy (Voice Over) [00:08:11] Dale’s distinct style and approach to marketing herself really stood out to Jenny Ellison.
Jenny Ellison [00:08:19] I came across Dale’s name in an advertisement in a Montreal newspaper, and so a couple things stood out about Dale. One was her ads were really evocative, and the other was that she was a black Canadian. And the reason that was striking to me is because, of course, of that sort of contrast that I was looking for between the image of aerobics and the lived experience of aerobics, and our image of aerobics is predominantly white, and I think for good reason. And I thought, wow, this will be an interesting story. I want to understand what led this person to become a fitness entrepreneur. What led this person to creating social impact aerobics?
Kim Thuy (Voice Over) [00:08:59] Social impact. That’s a name Dale used when she and her business partner, Karen Lewis, opened their own studio to attract students. They came up with some eye catching newspaper ads. One of them features Dale’ss backside in a high cut thong leotard with the tagline “No butts about it.” That’s “butt” with two T’s.
Jenny Ellison [00:09:24] It’s really playful. So the headline reads “No butts about it.” And underneath that you see an image of a very athletic looking woman in a thong leotard. And so you only see her from the waist down with her hand on her hips, and she’s flexing one of her legs. There’s also text that reads, “It’s time to start peeling off the pounds” and then it says, you know, “Workout with fitness queen Dale King”. So it is really striking. And in some ways I think it reflects what we know or understand about aerobics in the 1980s and then early 1990s. It looks at weight and sort of attaches, attending a fitness class with weight loss and maybe a sexier version of those iconic aerobics leotards. And so it sort of connects into some of those things we know about aerobics. I find it in other ways really powerful. As somebody who spent a lot of time looking at images of female athletes as part of some other research I’ve done. I find it really powerful and that she’s really strong. This is not somebody who is super lean or seemingly dying to be thin. This is somebody who’s really powerful and really fit. And I think that’s really interesting. And of course, I also just find it interesting that Dale herself and her business partner, Karen, created these ads. They’re the ones putting these out there. They’re the ones creating these messages. And I think that’s really important to remember when we’re talking about the history of women and gender and femininity as the ways in which some women choose to participate in that world. Most, many women identified people choose to participate in that world.
Kim Thuy [00:10:59] She’s so sure of herself in this picture that you don’t see the sexiness or the objectifying of the body. It’s more to show strength than to be attractive. You don’t apologize for being muscular and for being strong. You know something that probably back then we didn’t have the same way of showing ourselves that way.
Jenny Ellison [00:11:23] I think unapologetic is a great word to describe Dale King. And as a historian, I would say in general, when I look at the past and when I look at something like aerobics, I’m interested in the complexity and the fluidity, and I don’t think we have to feel like there’s one interpretation of what any entrepreneur was doing, what anybody was doing in a fitness class. And this is also a good example of that, of the “no butt about it”, the unapologetic nature of it, the very powerful stance of her body and the muscularity and strength of her body, which is contrasted with a message about weight loss.
Kim Thuy (Voice Over) [00:11:58] Dale says the messaging in another ad made the phones ringing off the hook. Yes. It features a picture of Dale leading a class full of students. She’s wearing her leotard and spandex tights. Everyone’s doing the same dance move arms up and walking forward. They are the only person of color in the shot. At the top, in bold letters, it reads, “The music is dynamic and the style is black.” Dale remembers mulling over how to work this ad along with her business partner, Karen.
Dale King [00:12:35] So we’re looking at the picture and we’re seeing it and we’re talking. And she said, “Well, you know, the music is really good. Yeah.” And she’s going, “Yeah, the music is dynamic.” I can’t remember if I said that, if she said it, but it was just like “the music is dynamic.” And then either her and myself went, “And the style is black”. And we both went, “Oh!” and we looked at each other.
Kim Thuy [00:13:01] That was it.
Dale King [00:13:02] Yeah. “What did you say?” And she goes, “Wait…” I said, “Oh, oh.” And you’re talking 1988, 89, almost around there. So we look at the picture again because now we’re saying something black in your face. Now, not to say it was negative, but it was something you didn’t see very often…
Kim Thuy [00:13:25] In a positive way.
Dale King [00:13:26] Yeah, in a positive way. You saw me but you didn’t really see any other black people. So it pulled your curiosity. The phone rang off the hook. People started the next week. You know, we were registering people and then a media saw it, which at the time was CBC and CTV, the reporters, and they were calling, “Well, what do you mean? The music is dynamic and the style is black?” I said, “Well, yeah, we use like all the hip hop music, Michael Jackson, Boyz II Men, like at the time. And then we do the dance workout to it.” And she goes, “Oh my goodness, this is so good.” And she told her, boss, “Look at this. We have to do a story on her.” And the rest is history, as they said.
Kim Thuy [00:14:06] You became a celebrity.
Dale King [00:14:07] Yeah, a celebrity – or I was in Quebec, with that.
Kim Thuy (Voice Over) [00:14:11] For Jenny, part of what stood out about the ads was how Dale presented herself.
Jenny Ellison [00:14:16] Prior to doing this work on aerobics, I did a study of representations of female athletes in Canadian magazines. So I looked at MacLean’s and Chatelaine in English and French to try to get a sense of how athletes had been represented in advertisements over those decades, to try to get a sense of like, what do we think of athletic female bodies? And one of the findings of that study is that women are often depicted in ways that are fairly passive and rarely depicted, for example, in their athletic gear or in motion until about the 1990s. And so one of the reasons Dale’s ad stood out to me is because she’s in a power pose. She’s wearing clothing that is appropriate or arguably appropriate to the activity, and she looks really, really strong. And we don’t see that in other ads in the decades prior.
Kim Thuy (Voice Over) [00:15:05] Dale attracted a diverse clientele to her studio, and she became a household name.
Dale King [00:15:11] One of the things about this city, it’s so multicultural, so multiethnic, every nationality, if you could imagine, was in my studio, you know, like you would assume, oh, as a black owner, oh, yeah, it’s gonna be 98% black people. No. Like, I remember having an interview saying at the time, politicians should see what Montreal is. It was everybody. Real life. Yeah. Real life. Black, white, French, Jewish, Chinese, Greek.
Kim Thuy [00:15:41] Italian.
Dale King [00:15:43] Italian.
Kim Thuy [00:15:43] Portuguese.
Dale King [00:15:43] Portuguese.
Kim Thuy [00:15:45] All that they have here.
Dale King [00:15:46] You know, Quebec, you know, French Canadians. I mean, it was everybody, everybody. And it was like, wow, this is…
Kim Thuy [00:15:55] Was it a community, did they talk to each other?
Dale King [00:15:57] Oh, yes. We all …it was like, I would have certain events like Mother’s Day specials, Father’s Day stuff. And it was fascinating to see, like welfare to Westmount would be in the same room.
Kim Thuy [00:16:11] And talking to each other.
Dale King [00:16:13] Yeah, I didn’t know after the class, you know, you’re changing, you’re talking in the change room and the women are saying, “Oh yeah, I’ve got to go pick up my son and do this and then I have to do this and this.” And she wasn’t being arrogant, she was just joining the conversation, and she says, “Yeah, it’s so hard all this scheduling.” And the other onegoing, “Yeah, you know, you have to do this. And when you have to schedule the nannies…” Silence. And so, so there was a split second silence. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So because she was –
Kim Thuy [00:16:45] Different reality.
Dale King [00:16:47] And she wasn’t saying it to flaunt, she was just part of the conversation.
Kim Thuy [00:16:51] Sharing her…
Dale King [00:16:53] Her experience. And it was like, okay, there’s a nanny, but then you got to schedule the nannies. It was like I was just passing the room, the changing room, and I heard – I burst, I didn’t burst out laughing there, but I went, “Oh, the nannies wIth an ‘S’!”
Kim Thuy [00:17:08] That was a moment!
Dale King [00:17:10] Yeah, that was a moment. So that was really, I find, so rewarding that, this studio could attract these people. And then it was seeing some of the people that did do my class that were inspired. Now, to go on, you know what? I want to do this too, and went off to get certified or went off to become dance teachers.
Kim Thuy (Voice Over) [00:17:39] Dale still keeps in touch with some of her former students. One opened her own studio in Montreal. Another is a writer in Hollywood. She wrote a movie script that features a character inspired by Dale. For Jenny, these relationships are part of the story of aerobics. She says there’s value in preserving these stories because they help tell the history of activities that brought us joy.
Jenny Ellison [00:18:08] You know, as a museum, we want to share that history and preserve the history of everyday people and capture the activities that really meant something to people in these decades. And so we’d have a really big gap in our collection on sport and physical fitness if we weren’t talking about things like aerobics in these decades. Visitors can relate to this story. They’ll see themselves or their parents, or they’ll connect to that image of aerobics. Or maybe they’ll remember Jane Fonda, and it will spark a memory and hopefully spark some reflection. And that’s why we have a museum in the first place. A second reason I like to study sport and physical fitness is because it always, always, always connects out to other social tendencies, to other tensions in our society. So when we look at sport and recreation and physical activity, we can find opportunities to think about the history of race, class and gender, the dynamics of how we lived in our bodies. We can connect it sometimes even out to the economic history of the country.
Kim Thuy [00:19:09] Oh, I think we have evolved quite a bit. We have to acknowledge that we do see our bodies very differently today than in the 80s.
Jenny Ellison [00:19:18] I absolutely agree that it’s important to acknowledge these small changes that we see in the culture because, like I said, otherwise, you erase all this change in this work that’s been done for decades to make sport and physical fitness more inclusive. And there’s a lot of different ways that people have done that. And I think that aerobics is one of them. And so that’s why I think it’s still really relevant.
Kim Thuy (Voice Over) [00:19:45] Jenny also hopes people realize the reason aerobics isn’t taken seriously as a sport is because it was created by and for women.
Jenny Ellison [00:19:57] I have a daughter, and I want her to take the things that she cares about seriously and not feel like, for example, she needs to be embarrassed to love Taylor Swift. You know, the culture that appeals to women and girls is just as important and just as interesting as anything else. And I think, there’s a little bit of, secret activism in that, as well as when we take aerobics seriously or have serious conversations about it, or at least playful conversations about it, that take it seriously. Then, by extension, I think we’re taking seriously other types of pop culture that are creative for women and girls.
Kim Thuy (Voice Over) [00:20:34] For Dale, the idea that she can help tell that story is astounding.
Kim Thuy [00:20:40] So when the museum reached out and asked to acquire items to document your story and its national collection, what did you think?
Dale King [00:20:49] I was flabbergasted. When I think about it now, I have to calm myself because it’s got to make me want to cry for the simple matter that, 100 years from now – because she made it clear, “Dale, we don’t know when this is going to happen. We don’t know.” But I said, “I don’t care.” It’s the fact that when this world is gone or whatever, and the aliens or whatever’s left and they do find the museum and they unpackaged they’re going to go, “Oh, they have this thing about aerobics.” I will be remembered, you know, and it’s not that I plan to be remembered, but somehow.
Kim Thuy [00:21:28] You were just being you.
Dale King [00:21:30] I’m just Dale King, and I did something I love to do. It just blew me away.
Dale King [00:21:38] [Aeorbics music fades in] Step, step, step, step, step, step. Double, Step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, double, walk on it, okay. [laughter] Now take it back up. Take it back. Take it. I know you write great books.
Kim Thuy [00:22:03] [both laughing] Oh, I guess I have other talents.
Dale King [00:22:06] Oh, yeah, you write great books!
Kim Thuy (Voice Over) [00:22:16] Dale King given me a private fitness class in the recording studio. Dale is now 67 and semi-retired. She still teaches classes a couple of times a week because she loves doing it. Thanks also to Jenny Ellison from the Canadian Museum of History.Thanks for listening to Artifactuality, a podcast from the Canadian Museum of History. I’m Kim Thuy. Artifactuality is produced by Antica Productions. Ann Lang is our producer. Soobin Kim is the researcher. Laura Regehr and Stuart Coxe are Executive Producers at Antica. Mixing and sound design by Alain Derbez. Jenny Ellison, Robyn Jeffrey and Steve McCullough of the Canadian Museum of History are the executive producers of this podcast. Check out historymuseum.ca for more stories, articles and exhibitions from the museum. For more information about Dale King and her artifacts, check out the links in our show notes.