Someone stands at the back wall of the big studio at Attack Theatre at four minutes past one on a Saturday, water bottle in one hand, the other hand still holding the strap of a bag they have not put down, and they are doing the math on whether the door is still close enough to leave through. I know the posture because I have held it, and every Saturday at least one person arrives in it.
The music is already on, something with a bassline you can find without trying, and the sprung floor under the socks of the people who got here earlier has a give to it that a kitchen floor does not. I walk over and say the only thing I say to everyone: put the bag down wherever you want, and the first thing we do is stand.
What “I can’t dance” usually means
When someone tells me they can’t dance, they are almost never telling me about their legs so much as about a wedding in 2011, or a middle school gym with the lights down, or a sibling who laughed, and the sentence they have carried out of that room ever since, which goes something like: my body does not do this, and other people can see that it does not.
I take that sentence seriously insofar as it is doing real work, which is protecting someone from being looked at while they are uncertain, and less seriously as a claim about the body. If you can shift your weight from your left foot to your right foot while a song plays, you can dance, because that is what dancing is before it is anything else, and the rest of the ninety minutes is built on top of that one transfer of weight.
The first twenty minutes are not dancing yet
We start standing, or on the floor, with the wall of mirrors behind us rather than in front. I ask people to feel which foot is carrying more of them, and then to let that change, and nobody counts. Nobody faces the mirrors, because the mirrors are for later, when there is a phrase to check, and a person who already suspects they look wrong does not need a six-foot panel of evidence on the first day.
This part is somatics, which is a word I use less in the room than on this website. It means paying attention to what the body is already doing before asking it to do something new. Someone in the class last month noticed that their shoulders had been up by their ears since they walked in, and that the shoulders came down the moment they stopped trying to look like they knew what they were doing, which is the entire lesson in a sentence and takes most people a few weeks to believe.
Then the room gets warmer
Conditioning is the part where the speaker gets louder and we are moving enough to need the water bottles. It is not a workout in the gym sense, since nobody is tracking anything, but the legs get warm, the spine moves through more directions than it has all week, and the people who were standing at the back wall are now somewhere in the middle of the floor without having decided to move there.
Choreography comes next, and this is the word that frightens people, so I will be exact about it. A phrase in this class is four to eight movements long. I teach it facing the same direction you are facing, so you never have to mirror me, and we do it slowly, then slowly again, then with the music. If you lose it halfway through, you keep moving in the general direction of everyone else, which is what professional dancers do when they lose it too. Nobody in that room gets singled out for a missed count.
The part people come back for
The last stretch is improvisation, and I keep it short and structured on the first few Saturdays, because open improvisation handed to a nervous person is a cruelty. A structure might be: move only your hands for one minute. Or: cross the floor any way you like, but arrive at the far wall by the time the chorus comes back. The structure gives the mind a job so the body can get on with the thing it already knew how to do at the beginning of the class.
What I watch for, from the speaker end of the room, is the moment someone stops checking the door. It happens at different points for different people, and for most of them in a week they would not have predicted.
The room at 212 45th St in Lawrenceville is booked from 1 to 3, though the class itself runs ninety minutes, so nobody hurries you out while you find your shoes. Wear anything you can move in. Bare feet, socks or soft shoes; bring water. If you have an accessibility need, call or text me before the first class. The series is $125, or $25 to drop in on a single Saturday, and dropping in once to see whether the sentence you have been carrying still holds is a reasonable way to spend an afternoon. Details at /dance/.