Music
dance classes, I felt a flash of camaraderie. She told me what it is
about them that she loves: “I love learning a routine over the course of
an hour. It’s like learning a language because you have to memorise the
individual steps (like vocab) then figure out how to put them together
(like sentence structure). I have a very stressful job and it’s a great
stress-reliever to concentrate so absolutely on something that consumes
your body and your mind for an hour. If you start thinking about that
meeting you’ve got tomorrow, you’ll miss a step.” She’s not wrong. My
best friend did a class with me once – the song was “Toxic” – and she
panicked, frozen in a lime-green T-shirt as the girls around her dropped
to their knees then onto all fours. Like all good sports, she laughed
it off. Over the past year, I’ve been taught routines to Bieber and
Beyoncé by dancers who have toured with pop bands and choreographed drag
balls – one had earned her first class after working as the dance
studio’s receptionist. One woman slipped on a pair of towering,
cobalt-blue stilettos to show us how to shimmy in time to J.Lo’s “Ain’t
Your Mama” while hungover on a Sunday morning; another man introduced me
to the ‘reverse slut-drop’ and loved making his students ‘melt’ against
the studio’s brick wall, and perform whiplash-inducing head rolls and
‘floor.
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