Sweating to Sappho
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 husband
behind 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.
Only a dozen people had come for “Sappho and Sweat”—the Pride Festival was in high gear across the Bay in San Francisco—but the attendees were indeed perspiring. “So who are the contemporary people that embody this femme goddess vibe?” Bockwinkel asked as she turned on a Eurythmics song. “We’ll do jumping jacks and call them out.” She blew her gym-teacher whistle.
“Frida Kahlo!” someone shouted.
“Beyoncé!”
“Annie Lennox!”
“Jane Fonda in ‘Barbarella’!”
Then it was time to embody someone on the list. A young woman with blonde pageboy bangs, wearing a gold shirt the texture of popcorn, began to wriggle on the floor. “Call out someone we all can be!” Bockwinkel said.
“Angela Davis!” The group strutted.
“Now I’m going to pass out these excerpts of Sappho, and you’re going to read them to your partner, while squatting or lunging.” When that was over, everyone shook to a Nicki Minaj song, did push-ups against partners’ backs, and learned a dance routine that began with a wild-eyed reach that Bockwinkel said reminded her of a move the British art-pop star Kate Bush would do. “Kate Bush feels it in a way that looks very Grecian to me,” she said.
There was a cooldown of improvised goddess poses. “This is a chance to play with archetypes. Which feel powerful to you, and which feel like flat boring clichés that you don’t want to participate in?” Everyone gathered in a circle. “So, I kinda would love to hear what came up for you,” Bockwinkel said.
“When you move while listening to the poetry, you find the rhythm in your body, which is cool,” said Rachel Simkover, an Oakland resident.
“That is cool!” Bockwinkel said. Then she made some points about how, rather than objectifying her lover with external descriptions, Sappho uses small, specific details that let the reader inhabit the female gaze. “She doesn’t describe the lover as, like, ‘my blonde, beautiful lover,’ ” Bockwinkel said. “Instead it’s ‘Your skirt makes me want to weep.’ ”
As the class broke up, no one seemed ready to write a dissertation, but the informal reviews were good. “It’s cool to think of being in your body as a feminist act,” said Sara Linck, a North Oakland dancer, pasta salesperson, and tenants’ rights worker.
Adrian Leong, an intern at the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in Berkeley, towelled off. “Embodied learning is new to me, but now it is something I very much want to explore,” he said, his cheeks flushing. As he and the other participants filed out of the bandstand, Bockwinkel stood with legs hip-width apart and chin lifted high, and offered them parting verse:
I simply want to be dead.
Weeping she left me
with many tears and said this:
Oh how badly things have turned out for us.
Sappho, I swear, against my will I leave you.
And I answered her:
Rejoice, go and
remember me. For you know how we cherished you.
Sign up for the daily newsletter.