Owning a fitness studio wasn’t always what Christy Sanford planned for her life.
She’s the owner of InesS Studio in downtown Halifax – a fitness studio, now in its 15th year, offering classes in pilates, aerial circus arts and pole sport.
But getting to where she is now – where she can run her own business and blend fitness and art – wasn’t a straightforward journey.
When she was younger, Sanford says her father told her she could pursue two options for education: the arts, where she could risk either becoming wildly successful or losing everything, or the sciences, where she could finish her degree and have an easier time finding employment.
Sanford chose the latter and enrolled at Dalhousie University for biology. But after doing less physical activity and trying to improve her grades, she says she “lost herself.”
After two and a half years, Sanford dropped out of the program, packed things up and moved across the country to Western Canada. It was in Whistler, B.C. where she re-found her love for fitness and spent an entire year snowboarding.
But her trip to Western Canada didn’t last long; Sanford was in a car accident and suffered a back injury causing her to move back to Nova Scotia. To rehabilitate, Sanford picked up pilates. She also decided to go back to school, this time choosing NSCAD University where she first studied jewelry but eventually switched into the design program.
“My fine arts degree really came into play when I opened the business,” Sanford says. “I had this fitness background, opened this business and now I can make my own website, make my own videos, so it finally came all together. However, there are too many things that I can do which is also my biggest fault, that I just kind of continue working indefinitely.”
While studying back home in Nova Scotia, Sanford explored various forms of art that would impact her life even to this day.
“I got into breakdancing while I was at NSCAD and DJing, so I found a home in the hip hop community,” Sanford says. “And within that I became Atlantic Canada’s first female breakdancer and female DJ and I won medals and all of that stuff.”
On top of breakdancing and DJing, Sanford found an interest in photography and film. Many of the projects she filmed were for her breakdancing group and she thought she’d pursue video editing. But the idea of working for a company she didn’t like and working with computers all day didn’t seem enjoyable. Instead, she decided to get her pilates certification, but only as a means of paying the bills and not entirely sacrificing her artistic vision.
“I found that I enjoyed working with people much more than I liked the computers, so I continued to do that more and I continued to still dance and breakdance and be involved in the hip hop community,” she says. “I guess with my love of breakdancing and my love of DJing, I had a new passion in life and a new goal of wanting to be really fit and healthy.
“I wanted to not just be a good girl breakdancer; I wanted to be able to beat the guys on the same level.”
Then in 2005, Sanford says her father encouraged her to open a business.
“He told me to go get my own loan, he wasn’t going to give me any money,” she says. “So, I did because I knew that I was privileged where I had my education paid for and many of my friends had huge student debt and no job. I was going to take out a loan and have a job, so I just wasn’t scared.”
She started InesS Studio very small, first only offering pilates classes and adding pole sport a couple of months later.
With Sanford’s background being in breakdance, she found that pole dance wasn’t her style and hired a teacher for the studio. It quickly became popular and helped Sanford opened the studio in a larger space within a year.
(Chris Stoodley/HalifaxToday.ca)
Then, nine years ago, Sanford had her daughter, and around the same time, pole competition was becoming popular. In an attempt to get back into shape, Sanford wanted to hold and compete in her own competition in Atlantic Canada.
She organized the first three Atlantic Pole Fitness Championships, a regional competition that qualified for the national competition.
“After a few years of that, I got tired of competing and just wanted to perform just to create art,” she says.
To further her art, she then took up circus arts and decided to add circus arts classes to the studio. Now, InesS Studio offers a youth aerial circus program where students learn acrobatics such as aerial silks, aerial hoops and trapeze. The studio also offers adult classes in the same categories.
Sanford also decided to create more art by starting two separate events.
She started Halifax Theatrix, a local pole and aerial competition where participants showcase their talents in categories such as pole comedy, pole art and aerial hoop.
Additionally, she started Spinning with the Stars, a cirque-style show along the lines of the television show Dancing with the Stars. Over the years, it’s featured several “Hali-famous” people including Coun. Lindell Smith, mixed martial arts champion Chris Kelades and Trailer ParkBoys stars Cory Bowles and Leigh MacInnis.
And while the COVID-19 pandemic has affected numerous businesses around the world, it hasn’t affected InesS Studio too harshly.
Over quarantine, the InesS Studio still offered classes through Zoom. In fact, Sanford taught some of her breakdancing moves to the participants in the youth program.
Now, in-person classes have resumed, and Sanford says you already have to be physically distanced to do pole sport and aerial arts.
Increased cleaning is one of the only things that is entirely new for Sanford as an intense disinfecting of the equipment and ceiling apparatuses to meet COVID-19 protocols creates more work.
But Sanford says her team, both the front desk staff and instructors, have been a great asset.
“The people who are here they’re just 100 per cent here so I feel like our team is really strong right now,” she says.
And in the near future, the pandemic isn’t holding back Sanford and her business.
Before Christmas, the studio will offer fast-track classes for more advanced students. There will also be holiday group classes where groups of eight or 10 can take a class for a team-building exercise or staff party. Sanford also says she’s preparing for a student showcase.
All of this adds to the fitness community Sanford is building in Halifax.
“We started off as a pilates studio and then we added pole. It used to be that people would do the first six weeks and then they’d never come back,” she says. “Once, I started taking over the program and working on how to make people successful … so that they’d want to do the next level, then I think people started to keep coming and create those class relationships and then the community really started to build.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
