Two decades on from striking my first yoga pose, and I was, frankly, over it. Salute to the sun, shoulder stands and warrior poses – I’d done them all. A trillion times. I’d gone through the motions in hatha classes, hung upside down in Iyengar courses, slogged it out in ashtanga, sweated through Bikram and breathed through alternate nostrils at kundalini – and was still no closer to that purported yogic nirvana. Yoga for me had become so repetitive, so predictable, so holier-than-thou, it may as well shove its downward dog up its own asana.
So when a friend started waxing about “the most amazing Friday night” he’d ever had, and then added it was a yoga class, I was sceptical, to say the least. “It was in this massive sandstone church with a DJ mixing tunes,” he gushed. “After an hour of yoga, the music built and everyone just started dancing. It was wild: Friday night, in a church – dancing! And not a drop of alcohol!”
I was intrigued. Yoga set to music was nothing new, of course. I’d been to classes soundtracked by chill-out tunes. But a live DJ? That was new. And while yoga trance dance has been gaining a steady following since it emerged on the US West Coast in the mid-’90s with yoga teachers like Shiva Rea preaching “free-form movement to liberate one’s creative life-force”, my friend’s recent experience sounded a whole lot less transcendental and a whole lot more… fun.
So the following Friday evening, as the rest of Sydney headed for the pub, I showed up at Paddington Uniting Church with my yoga mat. The teacher, Angel, 31, greeted me with a wide smile and a warm hug. Candles had been placed around the church, the floor was clear of chairs and people were lying on yoga mats, waiting for the class to begin. At the front of the church, instead of a priest, was a DJ – Matt, Angel’s husband – with his laptop, mixing ambient tracks by avant-garde composer Philip Glass.
Angel and Matt had long experimented with fusing her dance and yoga expertise with his DJ skills, and earlier this year, their weekly two-hour event,
The Future Sound of Yoga, was born. “We felt that yoga could sometimes be too serious and heavy,” explained Angel. “We wanted to bring the fun and joy back into it. We also felt there were lots of people who were no longer into the club or festival scene, but who still wanted to tap into that experience of letting go that you get when you dance to music with a group of people.”
As the class started, I let the music and Angel’s hypnotic voice wash over me. The stress of the week began to dissipate as we stretched to awaken stiff limbs, the music of Sigur Rós, Björk and Gotye matching the pace of our movements. A warrior pose led into a wide-legged forward bend, and then, a downward dog – all the same yoga moves I had grown so tired of doing. But with the ethereal space and Massive Attack spurring us on, it all felt new somehow. As “Sleepyhead” by Passion Pit reached its infectious climax, Angel had us on the floor doing body rolls and leg kicks like dizzy, sugar-high children.
And then Matt began pumping progressive house as Angel instructed us to jump from leg to leg, letting our arms swing along. “Just let the music carry you wherever you want to go,” she said. And then it did. Across the floor; into the candlelit darkness; into wild air spins and euphoric leaps and bounds. Arms flailing, legs pounding the church floor, we danced like no one was watching. When the music slowed, the class wound down to a blur of ambient tracks with gentle stretches and meditation, followed by some well-earned water and banter with fellow classmates.
That night, I walked out of the church a born-again yogi, taking with me something I’d long given up finding in a yoga class: nirvana.
By Janine Israel