New Yorker Sweats to Sappho
New Yorker's Rachel Howard documents "Heavy Breathing" - "a summer series of free critical theory seminars in the form of absurd, artist-led conceptual fitness experiences" led by Sophia Wang (a dancer and recent graduate from UC Berkeley with a PhD in Literature) and Lisa Rybovich Crallé (a multi-media artist). More:
Chani Bockwinkel was wearing silver striped leggings with a pink, flowered silk muumuu because, as she said, “I feel as the instructor you’ve got to bring it.” The photographer and member of the feminist dancers’ collective SALTA read her favorite lines from Sappho, as translated by Anne Carson:
For she who overcame everyone
in beauty (Helen)
left her fine husbandbehind and went sailing to Troy.
“Helen’s not a passive trophy here,” Bockwinkel explained. “She has her own agency, her own desires. Sadly, that’s radical for this period of writing. So, yeah, the hope for this class today is how can we be Sapphic about it and feel our desires rather than just trying to achieve something externally?” She turned up the volume on a Dusty Springfield song. “So let’s embody that deep femme drive.” The bodies inside the Edoff Memorial Bandstand, on the shore of Oakland’s Lake Merritt, began to writhe. “Do you feel loose, heavy, buoyant?” The music changed. “We’re going to pick up the pulse here, step-touches!”
The class, “Sappho and Sweat,” was the second offering from “Heavy Breathing,” which its co-founders describe as “a summer series of free critical theory seminars in the form of absurd, artist-led conceptual fitness experiences.” The idea came to Sophia Wang, a dancer who recently completed her Ph.D. in literature, last year. She and Lisa Rybovich Crallé, a multimedia artist, were collaborating on a sculptural installation when they took a long walk up a hill and discovered that discussing Aristotle’s conception of topos while huffing could be uniquely stimulating.
“Of course, the body and the mind work together all the time, but it’s easy to forget the body when you’re in deep thought, or on your own,” said Wang during a class break. The Heavy Breathing kickoff, at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in June, drew about four hundred people for a marathon of Laughter Yoga, Sonic Meditation, and a “Get Pumped Up for Nothing!” session with the gay-night-club performer-turned-multimedia-performance-artist Julz Hale Mary. One session in the series combined Emily Roysdon’s essay “Ecstatic Resistance” with—naturally—resistance training, and another one, scheduled for later this summer, will offer participants the chance to discuss global risk practices while trying out Reichian somatics inside a bouncy castle. [...]
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