It was “déjà vu all over again.” There we were, stretched out at the ballet barre in a room at a neighborhood church. Above the taped music, dubbed from scratchy vinyl LPs, we laughed and chattered, playing catch-up.
“You still look just the same,” I told them. They were nice enough to say I did, too, but we hadn’t seen each other for about 12 years, so it might have been nostalgia talking.
A class called “Movement” at the Arkansas Arts Center started it all. I heard about it from a friend, and I started taking the class when I moved to Little Rock in 1982. It was a great way to get the kinks out of my body after a day at the office.
A few weeks into the class I noticed that the routine never changed. When I mentioned this to the woman beside me at the barre, she said, “I’ve been doing this for years, and the routine has never changed.”
A little old Cuban man named Manolo Agullo taught the class. In his day, Manolo had been quite a dancer and had lots of stories to tell. When he learned that I was singing in the chorus of the Arkansas Opera Theatre’s “Carmen,” he told me about a “Carmen” production that he had danced in. It seems the singer playing Carmen had made herself so unpopular that, before she went onstage to dance with Manolo, the stage hands placed a chair on the train of her gown. The review from the next day, Manolo said, mentioned “Carmen, Manolo and the chair.”
The Arts Center retained Manolo for years, but eventually he left to spend his later life in a nursing home. At some point, however, the discs he’d spun for the Movement class had been transferred onto tapes, so the faithful in various locations were able to keep the class going, even after he left. An instructor wasn’t really needed; after all, the routine never changed.
Even years after I’d given up the class, rumors of its afterlife reached me from time to time. Occasionally I’d run into one of the “alums,” who’d say, “We’re meeting at such and such a place; you ought to come join us.”
Then I had a bad car wreck and broke my back. When I returned to the world of the living, a friend at church recommended an exercise class she’d been going to. It wasn’t too strenuous, she said, mostly a lot of stretching. It might help my recovery. And so, one evening a little after 5 p.m., I pulled into the parking lot of a dance studio at the bottom of Cantrell Hill. A few minutes later I was in a mirrored, ballet-barred room with old friends from the Movement class. A couple of them, I remembered, had also had spinal injuries. And there was a pregnant woman in the class, and one who had recently had a baby; I thought, “If they could do it, so could I.”
The tapes, however, weren’t holding up as well as the women. At one point I suggested we update them. I was a musician, I reminded the others; I could find something with a similar beat and tempo. You’d have thought I’d suggested rewriting the “Star Spangled Banner,” maybe even the Ten Commandments. After that, I just tried not to hear the scratches from the old LPs.
The class did, in fact, help my recovery to the point that, after awhile, I dropped out again. I still ran into old Movement friends from time to time, and they’d tell me where they were meeting and invite me to join them.
I was volunteering at the Central Arkansas Library System’s gently used book sale when I noticed a familiar face among the shoppers. Sure enough, it was one of the old Movement crowd. Before long I had the address of the class’ current venue.
So after almost 30 years in Little Rock, I’ve come full circle. The Movement class is the same—same routine, same music (scratches and all), some of the same faces. And in a world of so little certainty, it’s a comfort to know that some things never change.