Somebody’s cane leans against the wall of mirrors at Attack Theatre for the whole ninety minutes on a Saturday, and the class is built so that nobody has to move it, step around it, or ask about it, which is a smaller thing than it sounds.
“All bodies welcome” is on the flyer for Come and Dance with Me!, and on most flyers for most movement classes in Pittsburgh now, and it has come to mean roughly nothing, since a sentence on a flyer does not change the floor or the playlist or the speed at which a teacher counts. What changes those things is a set of decisions made before anyone walks in. These are the ones I make, in the order the room meets them.
The room
The studio has a sprung floor, which matters more than people expect, because a sprung floor gives back a little under each step and a concrete floor does not, and the difference shows up in the knees and the lower back by minute forty. There is a wall of mirrors along one side, and for the first weeks of a series we face away from it. A person who has spent years avoiding their reflection in shop windows on Penn Avenue does not need to spend their first hour of dance facing a six-foot panel of it, and when the mirrors come into use later, for checking a phrase, it is a choice they make by turning around.
Chairs stay in the room, spaced along the wall rather than stacked in the corner, so that sitting down is one of the positions available in the class and getting a chair is never an announcement.
The pacing
Ninety minutes in a room booked for two hours. The gap exists so that the person who needs ten minutes to get from the car to the floor has them, and so that the end of class is not a scramble. Inside the ninety, every section runs slower than it would in a class with the same name at a conservatory. The somatic opening takes twenty minutes because some bodies take twenty minutes to arrive. Choreography is taught in pieces of two movements at a time, because two is the number most people can hold while also managing their breath and their nerves, and because a phrase taught at the speed of the fastest person in the room is a phrase taught to one person.
The options
Every movement I teach has at least two versions and usually three, and I teach the versions at the same time rather than offering a modification afterward, insofar as “the modification” is a phrase that tells a person their version is the lesser one. A reach is a reach from standing, from a chair, or from the floor. A travelling phrase can travel across the room or stay in place. When I demonstrate, I switch between versions without comment, so that the room sees all of them performed by the teacher and none of them framed as the fallback.
The language
I do not say “full out” or “push through,” and I do not say “everyone up,” because there is someone in the room for whom up is not the instruction that fits, and they hear the “everyone” as a count they are not part of. What I say is “find the version that works today,” and I mean today, since the body that came last Saturday may not be the one that came this Saturday, and the class is designed to meet whichever one showed up. Names for body parts are plain, and counts are offered and never enforced.
The music
Fun music, which the flyer says and I mean literally: music people recognize, with a beat you can find without being told where it is, at a volume that leaves room for a voice. A speaker that is too loud is an access barrier for someone with a hearing aid and for someone whose body reads loud rooms as danger, and I would rather turn it down and lose a little of the atmosphere than lose the person.
The access line
The flyer says: accessibility needs, call or text before the first class. The line exists because the decisions above cover most bodies and not all of them, and the ones they do not cover deserve a plan made in advance rather than a teacher improvising at 1:02 in front of a room. When someone calls, I ask what the room needs to have, what it needs not to have, and how they would like me to handle it in front of others, which for most people is: not at all. Then the room gets built around that answer before they arrive, which is the only way a flyer sentence turns into a floor.
The cane stays against the mirror through the last song. At 2:35 its owner walks over to get it, and the room, which has been moving around it for ninety minutes, does not notice.
Saturdays, 1 to 3 pm, at Attack Theatre, 212 45th St in Lawrenceville. $125 for the series, $25 per class. Call or text before your first class if there is something the room should know. Details at /dance/.