We’re only a few minutes into class, and my mind is already boggled. My brain is bombarded by too many ideas to keep track of. It’s a puzzle, and I’m trying to figure out where the pieces fit in my body. The teacher did warn us that class would be about layering information, but the warning doesn’t make it any easier. It’s a challenge I can’t think too hard about.
Oh boy, am I trying. “Keep finding the curves. The opposition. Feeling alive everywhere, negating gravity all the way to your fingers and toes. Soft grabbing. A juicy flesh. Energy flowing through you. Out of you. Free up the space between your ears.” My body struggles to feel everything at the same time. One idea enters my ears as another drifts away. Is it even possible to feel all of these things at once? I start to think a little too hard, just as the teacher reminds us to keep seeing out and not internalize. Somehow, miles away, he still seems to know exactly how I’m feeling.
The layering of information doesn’t stop there. We continue in sixth position, separating our shoulder blades from the back of our ribs, keeping a soft spine, and finding juicy curves in our hips, knees, ankles, and feet, separating and articulating our feet and hands into many small pieces. My feet feel a bit like bricks right now, but I try to break them up. As I plie and look for the juicy movement in my legs, I feel myself tensing on top. Let go more, I remind myself, just as the teacher reminds us all. It’s difficult having my upper and lower half experience such different sensations, and my tendency to grip everything when I try too hard returns. It’s something I’ve had to work on my entire life and, evidently, still need to work on, but I think Gaga is helping me a lot with it.
Separating the tension and effort in my legs and maintaining a free upper body only becomes more difficult as we move into wider. We start to bend to the side, forward, to the other side, and up, all the while feeling the pull of our arms. A grin slips onto on my face as the movements become a bit too fast to keep up with. I fight to keep the sensation of my arms pulling me up but lose it in the speed of the movements.
As we move through fourth position, the teacher reminds us to keep our juicy hips, even here. “Avoid the big push onto one leg. Do what you need, go slower, negotiate your weight as you transfer it.” This is so difficult for me—not muscling it. I try to listen to the weight on my legs, seeing where I need to adjust to make this transfer smoother. It’s hard to keep as we shift faster. He makes it look so easy.
While we are in plie, I see someone in their thumbnail on my screen, completely doing their own thing and not going with the rest of the class. It was a moment that made me feel almost as if I was in an in-person class again.
We twist and wring ourselves out like a towel, using the softness of our spines to help twist farther. “Change the texture in your hands and feet. Let it travel up to your forearms and shins. A fleshy experience.” My arms, I can manage, but I have no clue how to bring that texture to my calves and shins. They just feel like lumps of meat. Will I ever figure out how to break my shins up into different parts? Does the teacher feel this way too? The texture spreads all over, and soon we are grabbing from our pelvis, our lower stomach, the back of our neck.
The teacher tells us to push our hands down through something thick, like honey, using a lot of effort to take them down and then bring them back up. We do this several times to the front and sides. I feel the bottoms of my ribs working to help me move through this sticky substance, and then my back, and then my legs. A “wow” moment. “Now let the honey dissolve and move quicker with less resistance, but still feel how other parts of your body that we activated help you move your arms.” Incredible. I really do feel it! A connection from my arms all the way down to many parts of my body. The connection is still there, even with the lack of resistance. It’s always there but just not on. We repeat this with our head and torso, and again with our legs. Bringing this work to some fondus, the teacher reminds us, “Use many places in your body that we just found to lift your leg. Distribute the effort. Everywhere at 30%.” I struggle more to find this connection with my legs, and this helps some, but I think I also have a big mental block with extensions that holds me back.
“There’s a lot to feel.” There really is.