The long tradition of sweatless exercise

or The Barre and The Beautiful

1947 or 2017?

I gaze at the wall of mirrors in front of me, trying desperately to not stare at the woman behind me. About the time I start to think that my skin really might look less dull if I double-cleansed, the lights go down and the music goes up. The song sounds familiar and yet also like every other dub-stepped pop cover. The women around me stand to attention, adjusting slightly, without prompting, until we are all arranged in offset parallel lows. On cue, we lift one leg and then the other. We bend. We squat. Faster and faster. Up down left right up down left right. Turn, lunge. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse. We swing our arms high above our heads, centimeters between our fingertips and those of our neighbors. We are precise. We are glowing. We’re wearing chic leggings and matching tops. We are beautiful. We are exercising. 

I signed up for ClassPass shortly after moving to Atlanta. The idea of barre had always appealed to me, but the closest studio to my rural childhood home was nearly 20 miles away in the rich part of town, so it was never accessible to me. Moving to Atlanta was my chance to finally see what all the fuss was about. I should say up front that I am not an athlete. Only the universe knows if this is due to nature or nurture. As far as nurture goes, I was not encouraged to do sports. I participated in various sports in order to fulfill state mandated requirements for homeschooling, but I never enjoyed these activities. Golf lessons with my siblings. Track practice with my siblings. Soccer practice with my siblings. I did enjoy a brief career on a girl’s t-ball team, but that was in the pre-fundamentalist times. (The concession stand was a source of constant joy to me.) Sports never appealed to me because I was never appropriately dressed and, being raised to always be aware of how you are being perceived, this was a source of constant anxiety for me. 

In Atlanta, I was reborn. I had leggings. I had sports bras. I had grippy socks. Everything I needed to be appropriately attired for this activity was at my disposal. I’d been psyching myself up for weeks. Explaining to myself and my long-suffering husband that I was doing this for my overall health, not to get ripped, and how I didn’t want to have bulging muscles but that I thought it was important to be healthy. (Yes, I repeated the health part twice.) I truly believed that if I started exercising that I would blow up like those people at Muscle Beach. Little did I know that my muscle mass at that time was probably on the precipice of being in the negatives.

My first class was on a Saturday. I was so excited to be there that I threw myself into every plie, bicycle, and plank. It was an exuberating thirty or so minutes. But, I had never moved like this before and my body made that very clear. I was a blob of rubber by the end. My arms burned. My legs burned. Some muscles on my back that I didn’t even know existed burned. I dragged myself to my apartment, taking the elevator instead of the usual stairs, dropped my things on the floor, and flopped on the bed. I stayed there the rest of the day.    

It was a day or two before I could walk up stairs without my muscles screaming at me. But I took this as I sign that I should keep going back. I attended classes regularly, growing stronger and more confident as time went on. After one class, the instructor asked if I’d done ballet before because my form was so good. Shocked, I said no, but then rambled on for a few minutes about running track, trying to hide my past as best I could. I told her about wanting to build strength without getting too bulky. She was kind enough to not call me out on my ignorance. I loved being a part of that group. I loved that instructor. When COVID-19 hit, I mourned the loss of my routine but found that online classes just didn’t do it for me.

Earlier this year, back in the studio, as my body got lost in the movement that day, I had a weird moment of recognition: I am part of a long tradition of women trying to sweat-lessly exercise. The women are more diverse in shape and race and gender identity; the music has changed and the clothing has changed; but the movements haven't. Barre was created in the 1950s by Lotte Berk, a ballet dancer in London and it was pretty radical. Author Danielle Friedman explains it this way, “at that time, in the U.K., as in the U.S., strenuous exercise for women was really considered pretty taboo. Sweat was considered unladylike. But Lotte had this vision of creating a workout that would allow women to become strong.” Here we were, decades later, emulating her movements and–whether we knew it or not–emulating some fragment of those 1950s cultural norms. 

We were there to get the body of a dancer. We were there because we wouldn’t leave dripping in sweat. We could go to the coffee shop next door, pick up a latte, and no one would know we’d just worked out for an hour. Scenes from “Mad Men”, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”, and “Don’t Worry Darling” flashed through my head. I turned to look at a woman I’d noticed earlier, who had arrived with a full-face of makeup and a perfectly teased ponytail. She looked like an advertisement for a vegan protein powder. I looked at the diamond rings, the gold bracelets, the matching Lululemon sets. Real or pretend, regardless of their race, they, we, were all aspiring to a certain kind of genteel femininity, strong beneath a layer of inoffensive grace. 

I don’t go to barre anymore. It costs more than I want to pay right now. Since the COVID19 pandemic, I’ve lost a lot of the muscle I’d built. I’m fluffy in new places, but I don’t really care anymore. Wellness culture exhausts me. I’ve grown tired of the women. Those spaces – no matter how inclusive – feel so performative to me. And yet … and yet … I must admit that I miss how I felt in those classes. I can’t help but feel that we’ve lost something by choosing to remove community dance from our lives. Who knows, I may go back to barre one day. Maybe I’ll actually take up dance. Either way, I know there will always be a room full of women in matching Lululemon waiting for me.