Barre it all

On our way to the creative engagement of the evening that was the ending of this post, we passed a Barre3 studio.  We wondered, yet again, what that is all about.

And then, there I was reading a review of Jia Tolentino's book, (which M is currently reading) and the cosmos--well, the reviewer--answers that question by channeling Tolentino:

Barre dance studios, she writes, are a “nationwide fixture” that offer a cross between ballet and gymnastics, a series of positions that resemble “what a ballerina might do if you concussed her and then made her snort caffeine pills.” Barre was conceived and developed in the 1960s by Lotte Berk, a Jewish dancer who fled Germany for England before World War II and then passed the business on to her daughter, Esther. Today the largest barre franchise has more than five hundred outlets across the United States. Esther describes her mother as abusive. She dismissed the sexual proposition Esther’s father made to their daughter and said she’d pay Esther to give a blow job to one of her colleagues. Nonetheless, Esther chose to run a studio in Berkshire, England, and continues her mother’s tradition to this day.

That is perhaps far more than I would ever need to know about Barre3!

But, there is more in the review, about Tolentino as a writer, critic, and a voice coming from a younger generation:

Tolentino always has her eye out for the ugly history, the stain on the carpet that so many refuse to see. In this case, it is hard not to believe that the double trauma of the war and sexual abuse is lurking beneath this dazzling, cruel success story, the hidden spur for the “arbitrary prolonged agony” that barre inflicts systematically on its devotees (who over the years have included Ivana Trump, Edna O’Brien, and Mary Tyler Moore). Owners of barre studios have made a fortune in exploiting human masochism at a very high cost. Tolentino admits to finding it uplifting. Spandex, the luxury textile of choice for the new athletic class, was created by the military, also during World War II, to be “uniquely flexible, resilient, and strong.” Tolentino imagines herself wrapped in the material, chanting its mantra of potency on behalf of women, as blood streams from her eyes.

If you are like me, by now you are convinced that a Barre3 experience means getting on the road towards enhanced interrogation at Gitmo!

Like many, my first introduction to Jia Tolentino was through her fantastic memoir essay in The New Yorker.  As awesome as her writing was, the content was troubling and nihilistic. I, too, rejected the religion that I was born into, and do not subscribe to any faith, but I am not nihilistic about the life that I live.  Instead, I try to create meaning out of this otherwise mysterious and meaningless existence.  But, Tolentino did provide me a window into how others like her, irrespective of how many that might be, make of their lives.

The reviewer notes about this aspect too:

It is easy to be lured by the exhilaration—the fun, even—of these essays, and to miss the depression, not to say nihilism—a word Tolentino uses—that runs beneath the stream. Nihilism has almost become the common philosophical currency of the age, a way of describing the bleakness of a political system that seems always ahead, or on top, of the resistance that its glaring injustices provoke. “The half-ironic millennial death wish,” she wrote in a New Yorker essay in June, “has become an underground river rushing swiftly under the surface of the age.”

I wonder how many of the students that I interact with feel scammed the same way--if not fully--by the socioeconomic/political/religious framework that Tolentino writes about.  It would be a shame if the "half-ironic millennial death wish" is indeed pervasive.  I am confident, though, that the answer to that will not be found at a local Barre3 studio!