The first person through the door onto 45th Street on a Saturday is almost never the person who signed up first; it is the one who was most nervous, who gave themselves twenty minutes of margin for parking and now has to sit on the bench by the wall with their shoes in their lap while the room fills around them. I see them check the door every time it opens. By the time the music comes up at minute ten, they have usually stopped checking, and nothing I said made the difference; the first ten minutes did.
Nobody dances yet
The class is called Come and Dance with Me! and for its first ten minutes nobody dances. Shoes come off and line up along the wall under the mirror, water bottles beside them, and I turn the speaker down to something low enough that the street still comes through the door. I ask people to find a place on the sprung floor and lie down on their backs, and the ones who have taken a class before do it without a pause, while the ones who have not look around to confirm that lying on the floor in front of strangers is really the assignment, which it is, and I lie down with them.
Weight
For the first few minutes we do nothing but notice where the floor holds us. The sprung floor gives a little, so the back of the skull, the shoulder blades, the sacrum, and the heels each find a place to rest that a kitchen floor would not offer, and I ask people to find the heaviest point and then the lightest without changing anything. Someone always notices that one shoulder blade is on the floor and the other is hovering, and someone else finds that their hands have been in fists since they parked. This is what somatics means in this class: attention to the body as it is, from the inside, before anyone asks it to do anything.
Breath and the street
Around minute three I ask people to follow the breath without improving it. I say it that way because almost everyone who hears the word breath starts breathing deeper, and deeper is not the point; the point is to feel the breath you actually have, where it goes and where it stops. Through the propped door come a bus and somebody laughing, and I ask people to let those sounds in rather than block them, since we are not trying to make the room into somewhere else. This is the part of the class that comes from my coaching training. In Hakomi, mindfulness is a state to study experience in, with other people present, and I never ask anyone to relax, because an instruction to relax is a demand, and a body that is told to relax usually braces, whereas noticing asks nothing of it.
The first movement that is not dancing
Around minute six I ask for the smallest movement anyone can find: a hand turning over, a knee drifting toward the ceiling, a slow roll of the head. From there we roll to one side, come to sitting, and come to standing by whatever route the body chooses, and I say so out loud, because there is no correct way to stand up from a floor and watching twelve people prove it is the first dance of the afternoon. Once everyone is up, we only walk at first, across the sprung floor, past the speaker and the water bottles, noticing the other walkers as the pace changes on its own. Somewhere in that walking the music comes up, and the person who was checking the door is walking with everyone else, and that is the end of the first ten minutes.
Why ten minutes
Bodies arrive from Butler Street traffic, from a shift that ended at noon, from a week spent at a desk, and if I started with choreography, the choreography would land on all of that. Ten minutes on the floor is long enough for the week to settle a little and short enough that nobody wonders whether they came to the wrong class. It also makes the room equal in a way that a warm-up facing the mirror never does, since a person lying on the floor noticing their heels has no way of being better or worse at it than the person lying next to them.
If you want to try it
You can drop in to any Saturday for $25 without committing to the series; the class runs ninety minutes inside the 1 to 3 pm window at Attack Theatre, 212 45th Street, in Lawrenceville, and no dance experience is required. Bring water, wear something you can lie on the floor in, and plan on socks or bare feet. If lying on the floor or getting up from it is not available to you, call or text me before your first class and we will work out a version that is, in a chair or standing, because the point of the first ten minutes is attention, and attention does not require the floor. Details are on the dance page.
The bench by the wall is still there at minute ten, with a pair of shoes on it and nobody watching the door.