Her latest client? A tiny fringe production known as "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" – though many in the press would have you believe a more apt title for director Julie Taymor and co.’s troubled opus would be "Whipping-Boy: Turn Off This Show." Rarely, if ever, has a theatrical production engendered such a bizarre combination of collective ill will and morbid curiosity as "Spider-Man" has.
Blog Stage spoke with Dr. Heus, "Spider-Man’s" official athletic performance trainer, to get the inside scoop on her unconventional work with an unconventional show, one whose rigorous physicality will likely prove to be the acid test for future big-budget Broadway spectaculars.
“Everything that I do is nervous system training. We train neurological endurance,” Heus says in describing Revolution in Motion as it applies to her work behind the scenes on "Spider-Man." "The appropriate receptors, they're in your joints, in your tendons, in your ligaments. They're specialized cells that tell your brain where your body is in space. So if we're always challenging the surface, those appropriate receptors get upgraded. A lot of times we'll have people doing things with their eyes closed or their head tilted, to basically take out the visual demand and also the auditory demand, to further develop [those] receptors. Then you add the visual and the hearing on top of an already upgraded nervous system and all those things improve."
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