Barre has become a mass commercial fitness trend, but was once a radical, decidedly erotic practice. DaniAFriedman reports
Here’s what I remember about my first barre class: The workout was so grueling it made my muscles twitch as I lay on my back, rhythmically thrusting my pelvis to a sensual cover of Rihanna’s “Umbrella.” Beyond the thrusting itself, I was struck by the expressions of the spandex-clad women beside me, who seemed entirely unamused by the synchronized schwing we performed. All around me, everyone was taking their air-humping very, very seriously.
But barre classes rarely draw attention to the workout’s sexual undertones — or to the fact that its tucks and thrusts can, as many instructors will privately admit, bring very real improvements to women’s sex lives. Sex is altogether absent from the experience. “It’s kind of like this weird elephant in the room,” my friend M., a 20-something barre obsessive who lives in San Francisco, told me. “No one talks about it.
Berk, a German-Jewish dancer who fled the Nazis for London after they forbade her from performing, originally invented the workout that would become “barre” to recover from a back injury. Over time, she found that her special combination of ballet moves, yoga, and rehabilitative exercises helped her not only to heal and hold onto her dancer’s figure, but also to get more pleasure from sex. And sex was important to her.
Then, about a decade after the studio first opened, a plucky Midwestern globetrotter named Lydia Bach found her way to Berk’s studio. Bach became hooked and saw the potential in bringing the workout to America. She bought the rights to franchise, and in 1971, opened the Lotte Berk Method studio on 67th Street and Madison Avenue in New York City. Her client list included a slate of the era’s stars — Love Story actress Ali MacGraw, Candice Bergen, and famed book editor Nan Talese.
Bach says that throughout the ’80s, the workout lost some of its sensual flavor and became more sleekly standardized. “It’s a business to a lot of people — it wasn’t a business to me,” she told me. In the decades that followed, she would help train nearly all of the women who’d go on to open today’s biggest barre franchises, from Exhale and Physique 57 to Pure Barre and Bar Method. By the time Burr Leonard became a certified instructor in 1990, barre had gone from subversive to staid.
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