Generation Sweat: Revving the Engine of Commerce with Ryan Heffington

By Rebecca Pappas

AND SO IT ENDS…AND BEGINS

Class ends with what I call the Diva Reverence. While the song “Laura,” a

sweeping piano ballad by Bat for Lashes plays, we follow Ryan Heffington through a

series of arm gestures. He stands at the front of class facing the mirror, curly pony tail,

handlebar moustache, while fifty of us follow along behind. As in a traditional ballet

reverence the gestures are elegant and express respect and graciousness. They are a

cooling down and closing up of the effort that has preceded them. While the quality of

our movement is soft, the positions we pass through are angular and mannered. We are

paying tribute to a staple of female performers from Beyoncé to Barbara Stanwyck as we

turn our heads to the side, reach our arms in the air and touch our cheeks knowingly with

our fingers. Rather than the circular work of drawing heaven and earth closer together,

which ballet port de bras performs, the Diva Reverence imbricates us within a fabric of

pop culture referents that we draw dramatically to our bosoms then push feverishly away

with our palms. As the song ends we twinkle our fingers in a “make it rain” gesture,

drawing them in and out from one another as our torso undulates: we are going hard, we

are letting it go, we are each a “me,” we are all a “one,” we are breaking it down, we are

building it up, we are totally free, or not.

This closing reinforces the pastiche of popular culture and dance styles from

which Ryan Heffington, an LA celebrity of commercial dance, visual art, queer clubs and

fashion, draws in his Sweaty Sundays classes. Somewhere between yoga, dance class,

jazzercise, club dance, and group invocation, it is a phenomenally popular phenomenon

that regularly draws huge crowds of self-identified queers, artists, hipsters, dancers, and

spirituals to his studio, Sweat Spot, in Silverlake (Pappas 2012). The class, divided into

three distinct sections: Warm Up, Across the Floor, and The Routine, offers many

iterations of the relationship between effort, commerce and the body, and serves as a

striking example of contemporary trends in dance, exercise, and economy. I will look at

each portion of the class through a different lens, considering the warm up as a job where

the goal is physical mastery, across the floor as a personally valorizing reperformance of

cultural tropes, and the routine as a place where seams might appear in this

reperformance, and where, from these fissures, the potential for change may begin to

emerge.

The emphasis at Sweaty Sundays at the Sweat Spot in Silverlake is, quite

apparently, on sweat, the physical byproduct of effort. It is also on werque, W-e-r-q-u-e,

a respelling and restaging of effort, not as a productive “work” activity, but as an

unproductive expenditure of attitude in the purported service of freedom, joy, expression,

and sexuality. This attitude is of, but not entirely constituted by, what dance theorist

Susan Foster defines as the “industrial body” (2012, p.7). The industrial body, she argues,

has a voracious appetite for the accumulation and assimilation of movement vocabulary

from other forms, a “low-down” commitment to sweat and “working it out,” celebrates

its own sexual fleshiness, and is perpetually performing for a real or imagined camera,

circumscribing its movement within this frame (2012, p.7-8). As we shall see, the dancer

of Sweaty Sundays is industrial with a twist, adopting the postures and outward

appearance, but not the ontology of this particular body.

Another underpinning theoretical frame for this essay is literary critic and

political philosopher Michael Hardt’s definition of affective labor. Sweaty Sundays is

less about the material endeavor of perfecting a tendu or learning a leap, and more about

the performance of attitude, or, affective labor as defined by Hardt. He argues that in a

21st Century information-based economy, the labor of creating human relations,

community, and communication, becomes paramount (1999, p.96). In an immaterial

economy what is in motion, rather than manufactured goods, or raw materials, is ideas.

Money is made through the movement of these ideas, and so the more human

connections we can make, the more “likes,” we accumulate on Facebook, the more we

“network,” the more successfully our ideas move. Affective labor is the attitudinal work

of greasing the wheels of interaction in order to move ideas and make money.

PRE-GAME

As class begins, the music is loud, I-can’t-hear-myself-think-it’s-Saturday-night-

at-the-club loud, and 50 students are arrayed across the dance floor, stretching, talking,

and strutting in their leopard print leggings, their tie-dyed tops, and their sparkling

spandex. The dress code is 80s aerobic chic – the louder, the uglier, the better— and is an

expression of the constantly changing currency of cool, as out-dated fashions and trends

are adopted and made hip for their ironic credibility. One student I talked to said, “I often

describe class as a ‘living, breathing American Apparel ad’” (Pappas 2012). American

Apparel advertisements, ubiquitous on billboards throughout Los Angeles and other

American cities, feature young girls in highly sexualized positions, for instance, on all

fours, butt to the camera, wearing extremely revealing clothes. The store is known for

adopting retro styles, particularly leotards, and tights, and other dance wear, and making

them cool again. Their advertisements also claim to feature “real” girls, including

editorial text with the women’s names and backgrounds and associating the American

Apparel brand with an idiosyncratic beauty and iconoclasm. The same student preceded

this comment with, “‘It’s a fun all levels, all shapes, all sizes dance class. No one judges

you because they’re too busy having fun’” (Pappas 2012). Many other students affirmed

the idea that anyone could participate, even while confirming that they too were largely

artists or aspiring artists in their 20s and 30s who considered themselves hip and in shape.

This tension, between the performance of a very particular standard of beauty and cool by

very particular performers, set against a rhetoric of total acceptance and non-judgement is

part of what makes Sweaty Sundays so fascinating.

It is similar to the paradox articulated by Kimberly J. Lau in her book New Age

Capitalism, regarding the selling of yoga, tai chi, and other “Eastern” forms of wellness

and exercise to Western consumers. Lau points out that the attraction of yoga and tai chi

is predicated, to a large extent, on the forms’ implicit rejection of Western values and

“unnatural” ways of working the body like aerobics and weight machines. Yet, she makes

clear, it is the embrace and marketing of yoga and tai chi by Western commercial entities:

their centrality at fancy yoga retreats, the selling of special clothes and accessories in

order to perform them, and their association with an idealized slender, strong, graceful,

white, female body, that make them attractive to Western consumers (Lau, 2000).

Similarly, while the Sweat Spot website calls Sweaty Sundays “an open level, feel good

dance class for people of all ages, shapes and dance backgrounds,” (sweatspot, 2012) the

participants here are largely slim, attractive, mostly white, women and gay men in their

twenties and thirties.

As talking and stretching on the floor transitions into the “in the frame,” portion

of class, we start to bounce. We move up and down on the balls of our feet, letting the

rest of our bodies react easily to the motion. This bounce is a revving. It is charging us

up, it is letting us go, it will be returned to again and again as we transition between

portions of class, and build excitement for what is to come.

MASTERING ME

Less than five minutes in and we are squatting, our butts lifted from our heels, our

feet pushed into forced arch, and our palms switching in staccato rhythm, one pushing to

the side while the other cuts in along our center lines. The result is a stylized yoga, with a

shape drawn from the Sutras, and a gesture that is pure Madonna. This first part of class

is centered on mastery of the body. While the skills in the warm up– largely balancing

and core work from forms like yoga and Pilates—are straight forward, they are also very

challenging, with Heffington asking for longer duration, more repetition, and deeper

engagement than is usual in many dance classes. The metrics for success or failure are

clear: I’ve balanced on one leg, or I haven’t; I’ve done 20 hip swings or I’ve had to stop

early; I’ve stuck my relevé or I’ve fallen. The music has been turned down and we are

told to focus on our breath. Heffington has two different voices, the calm one he uses

when he tells us to “release our eyes, ribs, and armpits,” and the drill sergeant that yells

“Get it up! Get it up, get it up, get it up!” as we move from a difficult hip swing directly

into downward dog.

This section of class ends with a brutal balancing series where we lift our legs

over and over from a deep lunging fourth position into a relevé parallel passé and back

down to fourth. “Nail your fourth!” Heffington yells “nail it!” No matter what Sweaty

Sundays may purport about its own inclusiveness, the values present here are oriented

towards developing a lean, flexible, muscular “bod,” with the implicit assumption that

doing so will make you better, happier, or simply more worthwhile. As Lau points out

and Stacey Prickett affirms in her article, “Aerobics Dance and the City: Individual and

Social Space,” our culture tethers together the controlling of one’s body and the

controlling of one’s life, implying that a “better” body will lead to a “better” you and, in

turn, even, a “better,” world (2000, p.126). This assumption, that work i.e. working at

anything, equals achievement, which equals betterment, is underscored by Kathi Weeks’

in The Problem with Work where she observes that in late capitalist society, all of our

activities have become oriented around preparing us to be better workers (2011, p.8).

There is a decreasing boundary between our employment and leisure time, and, we

increasingly approach even our non-work activities through the lenses of work. From

inter-mural soccer to Youtube views, outcomes can be measured, achievement is

celebrated, and effort is always worthwhile. This is certainly true for exercise, where the

objective of being “in shape,” is to adjust your self, physically and mentally, to be leaner,

fitter, more goal oriented, more receptive and responsive. A self better suited to the all-

encompassing tasks of contemporary work life. At Sweaty Sundays, working it out and

getting fit becomes your job.

Yet, taken within the context of a risk economy, a term that some theorists are

using to describe our current moment of late stage capitalism, where work, home, and

family are all less stable and constant than in industrial or agricultural economies, this

segment of class can alternately be read as a striving towards stability. It was a surprise to

me, when I spoke to Sweaty Sunday participants, how many of them were exemplars of

the risk economy, making less than $30,000 per year, stringing together many low-paying

gigs to make ends meet, and making significant trade offs to afford the $12 fee to attend

Sweaty Sundays (Pappas, 2012). Dance class is, for them, a place of stability and

community, and a site where groundedness is achieved even as kinetic flow and motion

are celebrated. Taken in this context, their attempts to control their own bodies might be

not only an aesthetic endeavor, but also a search for calm in an economic storm.

Warm up finishes with a return to loud music, and fast paced aerobic movement –

a grape vine with a clap; followed by a kicky high/low skip; a touch step with small

circling arms; and, finally another revving as the music turns space-age-trippy and we

stand with our feet fixed, our palms facing the mirror, and our arms bending and

extending from our shoulders. All I can think of as we do this is a rocket ship about to

take off. “Here we go,” the arms seem to say, “here we go, here we go, here we go!”

FREE TO BE YOU AND YOU

Across the floor comes next and is marked by Ryan Heffington leading the group

in a little chant, “Let’s-go (rest) Across- the –floor!” we shout, punctuating each word

with a clap. We all move to one side of the room and begin to cross the space with simple

traveling motions like chasés and pivot turns. The group moves in loosely organized

clumps, traversing the floor with 4, or 6, or 8 other people then splitting at the end, wind-

milling back to the start to do it again. Chasés gave way to fast ponies as we quickly

extend one leg to the side and then switch, our arms echoing the motion of our legs. The

beat is quickening, the engine is revving harder. The leaps transition into what could only

be called model stomps. Pair after pair of dancers catwalk in unison along the length of

the studio, first staring fiercely ahead of themselves, and then beginning to open up and

face each other, peppering the model walks with flicks and turns and head rolls for the

benefit of their fellow dancer. One class member that I talked to said, “my favorite part of

class is when we go across the floor in pairs facing each other and doing the little walks

[shimmy gesture],” another said, she “loves to strut” (Pappas, 2012). As this continues, it

becomes a free-for-all with dancers amping up their own ecstasy by throwing their arms

and legs in the air and making celebratory “whooping” sounds, as they spread out across

the space, moving together and alone in a manner reminiscent of a dance club.

Here is where the body of Sweaty Sundays starts to diverge significantly from its

industrial cousin. Its enjoyment of motion; its sweeping movement through space,

beyond the lens of the camera; as well as its genuine engagement and spontaneity with

other living bodies sets it apart from the flattened, mediated, industrial body on television

shows like So You Think You Can Dance. It is also differentiated in that its power is

unleashed by the speed, energy, liberty, and community of this loosely structured

movement experience, not by the eyes and affirmations of a television audience, or a

panel of judges.

Yet while dancers experience it as liberty, across the floor is also affective labor

at its most concentrated. Progressing from the portion of class where strength, stamina,

and flexibility are valued, across the floor is about nothing more than style—the affective

labor of performing you for the benefit and enjoyment of you and those around you.

Model walks, are a stomping step, indigenous to very tall, very thin women on long

narrow runways, in major centers of commerce, performed to display and sell obscenely

expensive clothing. They are not choreography that express a dancer’s own personal

subjectivity, no matter how they might feel, but rather, re-performances of codes,

absorbed and regurgitated from commercial culture. The idea that they could be

personally expressive or liberating for a given group of dance students in the Silverlake

neighborhood of Los Angeles in the year 2012 is a perfect example of the harnessing of

personal volition by capitalist production.

As economist Maurizio Lazzarato points out, this kind of folding of personal

subjectivity into a set of capitalist goals and aims is one of the most insidious parts of the

emerging informational economy, where every performance of self becomes a valorizing

commercial activity (1996, p.134.5). Every decision that we make within our economy—

and there are very few areas of modern life not circumscribed by commerce—is

perceived as a singular expression of our personal worth for which, and by which, we feel

affirmed and valorized. This valorizing process is girded by a Toyota-ist culture that

conflates the individual tailoring and consumption of products, everything from

Instagram to a new car, with unique acts of self-expression. This quote from Ryan

Heffington, in an interview with the LA RECORD, further reiterates the notion that

individual expression is always valuable, regardless of its cultural context. “The decisions

you make in class—to go the same way as others or completely opposite of the group,

whether conscious or not, are valid and accepted. If you remember to celebrate these

choices, your day turns to gold,” (Heffington in Denny, 2010). In addition to affirming

the power of student choices and its ability to transform life into a precious metal, this

quote also provides a small window into Heffington’s role within the Sweaty Sundays

universe as an inspirational and spiritual leader of the church of sweat as well as a

celebrated dance teacher.

THE ROUTINE

The final segment of class, “the routine,” is the most werqued part of the

afternoon, where dancers perform an approximately 3-minute choreographed routine to a

pop song and “its all about getting into the zone, having fun with it and then working it

out on the dance floor,” (Pappas, 2012). They thrust and circle their hips and rib cages in

time to the music, they reach their arms out and draw them back in, seemingly expressing

an uncontainable welling and flowing of emotion. They walk on tip-toe and trail their

second leg behind them, looking out from under their eyebrows and seducing the

imagined viewers. They touch themselves, a lot, seemingly revving up their bodies for

sex, performance and emotion, which are, in this world, one and the same. They are

dancing the steps of the industrial body, and for anyone who has watched a music video

in the last 30 years, it should look familiar. What might not be familiar though, is the

clumsiness, the joy, and the outrageousness. What might seem strange is the loud,

uninhibited way the dancers perform and watch one another’s dancing regardless of how

“good” it seems to be. They are generous, in the broadest sense of the word. They are

thrilled to be there and thrilled to look after and perform for one another. They are joyful.

This joy, I believe, has a queering effect on the whole enterprise. While their moves tell

you that they are cool and sexy and above it all, their faces and attitudes and whoops tell

you that they are simply really, really glad to be there.

The dance floor, as they have constituted it for the afternoon is similar to the

queer dance club as described by Jonathan Bollen in his article, “Queer Kinesthesia:

Performativity on the Dance Floor.” He suggests that the dance floor can be a magical

space of experimentation and potential that stands in marked contrast to the everyday.

Here binaries of subversion vs. hegemony, fantasy vs. reality, and liberation vs.

oppression, to name just a few, can be explored without repercussion (2001, p. 287). This

is happening at Sweaty Sundays where those who might not dance under other

circumstances can experiment with stability and motion, sexuality and fantasy, freedom,

and notions of the self that might be very different than how they see themselves in their

everyday lives. They can also activate and play with tropes from popular culture, taking

visions of dance and sexuality that have been received from their television screen or

their Youtube window and trying them out, filling them with as much joy and animation

and absurdity as they’d like. They can overflow them with good intentions, sinking them

under the weight of their earnest efforts. These strategies of subversion are, to be sure, the

domain of camp, as culturally received notions of gender and sexual expression are

exaggerated past their own limits.

Finally, I would like to argue that the affective labor of Sweaty Sundays might be

mobilized, as Hardt suggests, in the interest of a community animated by biopower. He

writes in his essay, “Affective Labor,” that,

Biopolitical production here consists primarily in the labor involved in the creation of life – not the activities of procreation but the creation of life precisely in the production and reproduction of affects. Here we can recognize clearly how the distinction between production and reproduction breaks down, as does that between economy and culture. Labor works directly on the affects; it produces subjectivity, it produces society, it produces life. Affective labor, in this sense is ontological –it reveals living labor constituting a form of life and thus demonstrates again the potential of biopolitical production (Hardt, 1999, p.99).

What Hardt is saying is that affective labor, this work to ease human relationships and

facilitate the movement of ideas can also be constructive. It can simultaneously produce

something new even as it reproduces something received. Our connections define us, and

so can also transform us. In this argument, hope emerges in all this attitude. In the ways

that Sweaty Sundays might be productive, at the moments when the preening, and hair

tossing, coy looks and swiveling hips might build something – be it a new friendship,

increased self confidence, or simply joy— there may a world reformed, or reactivated, or

set in motion by these sweating, striving bodies.

WORKS CITED

Anon., 2012. The Sweat Spot Los Angeles. [online] Available at: <http://www.thesweatspotla.com/>[Accessed Fall 2012]

Bollen, J., 2001. Queer Kinesthesia: Performativity on the Dance Floor. In: J.C. Desmond, ed. 2001. Dancing Desires: Choreographing Desire on and Off the Stage. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Denny, D., 2010. Ryan Heffington: One Infinite Twisted Dance Party. L.A. Record, [online] 12 August. Available at: <http://larecord.com/interviews/2010/08/12/ryan-heffington-one-infinite-twisted-dance-party> [Accessed Fall 2012]

Foster, S.L., 2012. Performing Authenticity and the Labor of Dance. Unpubished lecture given at University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Hardt, M., 1999. Affective Labor. boundary 2, 26(2), Summer Issue, p. 89-100.

Lau, K.J., 2000. New Age Capitalism: Making Money East of Eden. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lazzarato, M., 1996. Immaterial Labor. In: M. Hardt, P. Virno, eds. 1996. Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p.l32-147.

Prickett, S., 1997. Aerobic Dance and the City. In: H. Thomas, ed. 1997. Dance in the City. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Pappas, R., 2012. Survey of Sweaty Sunday Participants, November 2012, Los Angeles, CA.

Weeks, K., 2011. The Problem with Work. Durham: Duke University Press. Ch. 1.