The first time I walked into the rococo room at Mo Luzern I forgot to take my shoes off. I have not stopped thinking about that room since.
Cream walls. Gold leaf around the cornices. Two crystal chandeliers that have been there since the room was a ballroom in 1898. A ceiling painted to look like a sky just before rain. The floor is parquet — the original — and it has held more dancing than your living room ever will. We laid mats out on it. Eight of them. We did a class.
A friend asked me, very gently, why we don't just rent a normal studio. "It would be cheaper," she said. "It would be more consistent." Both true. But I have come to think that where you do the thing changes the thing you do. And I think the women I teach feel that, even if none of us have words for it on a Tuesday at six o'clock.
The room remembers.
There is a reason ballet companies don't rehearse in fluorescent rooms. There is a reason concert pianists don't practise on plastic keys. The room you put your body in changes the information your body gives back. A beautiful room with old ceilings asks something different of you than a basement gym with rubber flooring. It asks you to stand longer. It asks you to breathe slower. It asks you to put your shoes by the door carefully.
(Also — and I think this matters — a beautiful room means everyone arrives a little early. Nobody wants to miss it.)
What I tell new women.
When someone joins for the first time and looks up at the chandelier, embarrassed to be lying on a mat under it, I tell her this: the room was always meant for the body. Look at the floor — those scuffs are from heeled boots and slippered feet since before your grandmother was born. We are part of a long line of bodies who used this room. We just happen to be the ones doing pelvic curls in it.
And then we get on with the class.
One small theory.
People will pay more for a room that is honest about what it values. We could do this in a chrome-and-LED studio for half the rent. The class would be the same in my hands and in yours. But the after would be different. Nobody stands in the street outside an LED studio for forty minutes after class talking. Nobody hugs the radiator in a chrome studio.
I think we have a lot of beautiful old rooms in Switzerland and we use almost none of them for anything that matters. I would like, slowly, to put more bodies into more of them.
Tuesday, eighteen hundred. The chandelier will be on. Bring socks.