Aerobic Dance and the City: Individual and Social Space

Abstract

The desire to look better — clothed or unclothed — is a prime motivating factor behind the expanding aerobics phenomenon. After years of complaining about any dance class which began before 9.00 a.m., I took to my local fitness club at the unheard-of hour (for me) of 6.30 a.m. to obtain first-hand knowledge of my object of study. Fortunately, benefits have been increased lung capacity and looser-fitting clothes. A performance-dance background and education in American and English higher education institutions left me with a degree of elitism towards the fitness trend. However, the growing diversity and availability of aerobic exercise classes and increasingly, aerobic dance classes, challenged my initial reductionist metaphor of aerobics in the city essentialised by a step-aerobics class. Densely-packed classes, with platforms at various heights corresponding to an urban landscape of skyscrapers, sweating bodies responding to shouted commands in a seemingly automaton fashion — such images are bound in more complex relationships between aerobics, dance, urban (and suburban) life and the individual.