I’m a bit lightheaded and in dire need of water. Heat radiates from all parts of my body, and my face is flushed with blood. Sweat is dripping profusely, and I’m feeling so, so alive.
I haven’t felt this exhausted or alive from an online Gaga class, maybe ever. Being in a larger space definitely helps me feel like I have more freedom to move. My body is definitely feeling burning sensation.
We start by finding curves and letting them travel through us, and the teacher tells us to float. It’s hard for me to find these sensations. Is the extent of my imagination slipping? Am I not stimulated or experiencing enough to feel like I did before? “Negate gravity everywhere. Float from your insides. Let your arms be shaped by gravity and feel the floating in your chest.” I begin to feel lighter, as if I’m moving in a different material, a different body of space. “Now let your arms float as well.” The feeling spreads through my chest and radiates out towards the ends of my fingertips, bringing with it the familiar sensation of pleasure.
Using the sense of touch, we find mobility in our chest, softening where our hands meet our skin. The teacher tells us to move through our chest, not just around it. “Move your sternum closer to your right ribs, and then stretch away.” I wasn’t even aware that I was moving externally around my chest, and as soon as I let go a bit more, my sternum slips down through my torso, drawing a line down my middle. We stretch towards the ceiling, grabbing from the bottom of our ribs to reach our hands up, climbing higher with one side then the other. “Grab your flesh around your arms and reach up, like you want to separate your ribs from your hips. Now let go of the flesh in your arms but keep your bones where they are. Let them slide up through your flesh.” How difficult it is to keep your bones in place while letting go of the outer layer of my body. It seems almost impossible, but I give it my best try. The pulling is a different sensation than the reaching, one with less effort. Or rather, less of a grabbing effort. I feel the effort more in the space between my bones now.
We step our legs to a wide position and clasp our hands behind our heads. The teacher tells us to press our head into our hands as we plie to a deep squat. “Keep the snake of your spine, and explore the freedom.” My legs start burning right away as I try to grab my hips down into a deeper plie. Every few moments, he reminds us to let go in our spine to find mobility, and every time, I realize tension has once again crept into my body, escaping my notice. As soon as I push my head into my hands, my back becomes stiff, but when I think about freeing my spine, I forget to push my head into my hands. This cycle repeats several times and I fight in my body and my mind to feel both, before the teacher tells us to release our heads and thus the pressure on our backs. All of a sudden, I feel my spine articulating and reaching farther places that it didn’t before. I didn’t even know I had this much range! My amazement makes me almost forget about the burning sensation in my legs. Almost.
We stand up to find a shake in our chest, letting our arms give into gravity completely and listening to the echo of the shake. We negate gravity in our arms and continue to listen to this echo. “Turn the volume of listening to the echo up. Amplify the echo in your arms until you can’t tell if you are listening to the echo of your arms or of your hips.” My arms and hips have a mind of their own, shaking and letting go. The echoes travel everywhere, and I lose track of where each is being ignited. My body is a vessel that these shakes travel through; my mind is separate and trying to process.
and I do. I feel the air, something that I don’t normally pay attention to. My skin is sensitive to the air that envelops my body from all sides, as if it’s something fuzzy or rough that I’m feeling. How do I not always feel the air if it constantly surrounds me? It feels good to be this sensitive, but also overwhelming.
We begin to squeeze our hands. I imagine I am squeezing the juice from lemons, as I’ve been told to in the past. “Squeeze your hands like you are squeezing almonds. This time, something harder.” The sensation in my hands changes from a plump, juicy citrus to the hard, unmalleable feeling of almonds. The teacher instructs us to squeeze only from our forearms at first. My bicep is already engaged. How do I stop? Trying to disengage only my bicep is a mind game that I can’t seem to win. We slowly bring the squeezing into the rest of our arms and chest and, in this thickness, still find the mobility of our shoulders. Two very different sensations. I isolated the softness to my shoulder joints and continue reminding myself to grab in various places.
We bring a bounce everywhere. We bounce just in our hips, knees, and ankles at first. The bounce feels heavy and low. “Bring the bounce into your chest, your arms, your shoulders, the back of your neck.” I feel so much lighter and buoyant, like I could fling into the air at any second. Keeping our bounce, we try to disrupt our musicality in the rhythms of our feet. I’m breathing hard by now. My brain tells my body to stop so I can catch my breath, but my body doesn’t give in.
My friend recently shared with me that the one thing she likes about Gaga is that you can be dying and exhausted and look across the room to see someone else dying with you. You can’t do that with online Gaga. I laugh a little entertaining this notion and realize it’s exactly how I feel in this moment of exhaustion. I tell my body to keep going, waiting for the teacher to tell us we can stop, but he doesn’t. “Start running in place and use all of your body to increase your speed for the last 8 counts.” My body is tired but also feels wonderful. Why can’t real running be this enjoyable?
We use our last song to explore our explosive power and let go. I’m letting go too much. My body is tired and spent and flinging itself around. I find myself on the ground every few seconds, very grateful for the plush carpet. The teacher stops us and challenges us to move our bodies off the vertical that we are used to being on.
“Imagine your head is a bucket full of water. Walk around like you don’t want to spill any of it. Hold the water in.” My head feels heavy and full, and I move around with an abundance of caution. My neck feels stuck and my movements limited. “Now slowly tip the bucket so that the water starts to spill. Let your body follow, dipping your head down, back, sideways.” I follow the momentum of my head and hope that my body can support and catch me. It’s a risky game. There’s no doubt I look silly, stumbling around my room falling and catching myself, but it’s fun so I do it. My range feels more expanded than before, my body more ready to move into extremes.