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Confinement is, well, confining. Claustrophobic. Sedentary.
There’s a reason there is so much freshly baked bread on Instagram. It’s so damn satisfying to knead right now, to create, to accomplish something.
But stuck inside for the last several weeks, with one enormously immunocompromised kid and another one bored out of her mind, I’ve found the most comfort in the presence of one wildly energetic man I’ve never met, along with 5,000 other people around the world. Each of us alone, together. Five days a week I can throw my body around the room with Ryan Heffington’s “Sweat Fest,” an Instagram live dance party for the masses.
In these extreme weeks of social distancing and isolation, I’ve rediscovered how movement grounds me. Heffington brought me back to that. And in an odd way, so did this crisis.
My older daughter, Orli, was diagnosed with liver cancer, late last November. Insomnia, always a visitor, settled down to stay. In part that was fear, and in part because what kept me sleeping was, well, remaining in motion. But helping care for a very sick girl made me Olympianly sedentary: On hospital days my step counter rarely rose above 1,000 steps in 24 hours.
Challenging as chemo was, after four months in treatment, Orli had a liver transplant the first week of March in Boston, which is…not where our family lives. As she recovered, we, like much of the rest of the globe, went into lockdown. Caring for our family in an Airbnb under quarantine, I suddenly craved not just hugs and friends, homespun breads and cakes (though those too), but also: dance.
This is not that strange.
For well over a decade, I traveled constantly. And, everywhere I went, I danced. Studios the world over have a remarkable sameness: the feel of the wood or Marley beneath your feet, the smell of sweat, the endorphin high of creating art—even if you are not (as I am definitely not!) backup dancer material—the community of dancers. Movement curbed the anxiety that I carry, a sack across my body, even when not in quarantine. Dance insists you stay present. You can’t overthink or you’ll be lost. And, outside the studio, I am a chronic overthinker.
So I danced when I traveled, I danced at home, I danced when I was pregnant, I danced when each girl was born. I danced to feel less lonely. I danced to stay in shape. I met some incredible people, of course—I took class with an Israeli modern dancer in Berlin, a German flamenco diva in Madrid, a Ghanian contemporary artist in Vienna—but, just as importantly, I met the best version of myself, functioning in a second language, moving in sync.
But over time, class got harder and harder to get to. Until now.
As social separation settled in, classes and dance parties went online. I started taking every class I could take. One early quarantine week, I danced daily. I took Gaga, from Israel, with 300 Zoom windows into living rooms of strangers, each moving their limbs as through water. Rhythm & Motion in San Francisco posted enormously fun Fusion dance routines for small spaces. Ballet masters posted barre classes. Choreographer Debbie Allen began beaming into my bedroom.
And then I found Ryan Heffington. Bald-headed, mustachioed, lythe, and lyrical, Heffington peers into his phone and directly out at all of us. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and weekend days he dances—in what, a living room?—clad in short fluorescent shorts and a loose black tank top. He begins with a basic warm-up, moves into a space that’s part dance routine, part club kid standing on a platform, part pride parade. After two classes, I wrote him a fan mail message.
That studio feeling was now at home.
Heffington has danced since he was a small child; once his family noticed him peering into the dance studio windows of his cousin’s tap class (cue A Chorus Line). He’s known in Hollywood for his award-winning choreography (for Sia’s “Chandelier” music video and the Netflix show The OA, among many others) and his Los Angeles studio.
Ten years ago, Heffington tells me from his isolation location in the California desert near Joshua Tree, he started a Sunday class for beginner dancers called Sweaty. But he often had to miss class for travel, to be on sets. Not anymore.
Sweatfest, this online space, is “super super super special,” he said in a recent phone interview, and “accessible to everyone.”
That means a basic rundown of his movements at the beginning of class—a grapevine, a three-point turn. Other than the occasional plié, there are very few ballet terms. Instead you do a “pretty pony” and the “Bob Ross” (painting a mountain—and a “nasty nasty bush”!); it’s the “happy hippy” with one bent arm up, the other bent arm down. Arms are “gummy worms” or an “inflatable car wash man”; the “heavy diaper” is a deep plié, a hip isolation. We’re told to sweep the house (“get the corners, honey!”) and wash the windows. We “write an email” and send it away. And we laugh and laugh and laugh. Heffington dons a caftan, a turban, sunglasses. At one point in every dance class he calls out—insists—you pick up a “mic,” which, in his case, could be everything from a badminton racket to a ceramic cactus. Then on comes Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” or Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” and you can scream it out because, well, you are alone.
To keep up in this class doesn’t require terrible amounts of technique; it just insists we stay with him. Not to forget the world, necessarily, but to remember we’re still alive in it.
“I think that’s one of the most beautiful gifts of dance,” he says, when I tell him about my dance wanderings. “It’s not fantasy; it’s a therapeutic meditation.” He talks about how being “present in the movement” has helped him through hard times before. The sweat helps too.
Heffington carefully considers each song, the story he is telling with each class, the warm-up, the rise, the apex, the denouement. He draws from a music trove that stretches back to the ’70s and ’80s, through the clubs of the late ’90s and early aughts, to the present. (I nearly cried during Tuck & Patti’s cover of Cindi Lauper’s “Time After Time.”)
And then, at the end of each class, he invites everyone to pause together, to sense all those who have danced together.
“We will get through this. We will get through this. We will get through this,” he intones. It’s part mantra, part prayer, part reassurance.
Honestly, it works.
“It is really important for people to hold the energy they create themselves,” he says. “It is a gift to ourselves at the end.”
It gives people time not to think, Heffington told me, and to feel closer to one another. And that, in a lonely moment of global and personal crisis, may be the biggest gift of all.
It has given me the chance to find my body again, after weeks in hospital rooms, barely stepping into the street. Movement, even in confinement, is liberating.