Flow Study: Where Dance Meets Yoga by Penelope Hearne
When I first stepped into the new Yoga Off East space at the American Tobacco Campus, I immediately saw a dance studio. The high ceilings, large windows, and exposed brick took me back to spaces in New York where I used to dance. But beyond the studio's visual elegance, there was a sense of openness in the room, an energy that invited movement.
My dance journey began around four when I took my first creative movement class. It was a joyful mix of chaos, developing listening skills, and discovering choreography. Over time, I realized what made those classes so compelling wasn't just the movement; it was the shared experience of moving with a community, something dance shares with the physical practice of yoga.
In dance, I wasn't content to move wildly on my own—I needed others to witness it, to engage with it. That sense of being seen and moving together became central to my understanding of dance as an art form. Eventually, I trained in classical ballet and modern dance, and I auditioned for companies. That path led me to study dance in college and, later, to teach and perform professionally. Through all the structured and unstructured movements that I explored, I knew moving in a community could be deeply healing, though I didn't fully understand why.
As life shifted, I stepped away from dance and found my way into yoga. Like dance, yoga provided a vast vocabulary of movement options rooted in philosophy, while also incorporating meditation and mindfulness. Yoga offered a new kind of discipline, one I welcomed. But I also noticed that in striving to "get it right" when practicing an asana, I often held unnecessary tension in my body. I began to feel the urge to break free from that rigidity, to infuse each shape with more free movement. While I'm still developing what this looks like in practice, I have found an exciting intersection between somatic movement practices and Vinyasa yoga.
A few months after the American Tobacco Campus studio opened, I came across a study from the National Library of Medicine that showed dance to be more effective than many traditional therapies in treating depression. That moment lit a spark. I wanted to create a movement-based class that focuses not on perfecting shapes, poses, or steps but on calming the nervous system and reclaiming a sense of freedom through movement. That's the vision behind my upcoming class: Movement to Free the Body. This class is a space for students to soften, let go, and reconnect without the pressure of form.
