Posts from ‘art & creativity’
announcing: yoga + body image, the book!
Melanie Klein and Anna Guest-Jelley are doing some of the most important work in the yoga community. Both women are committed to writing about the complicated relationship between yoga, body image and feminism. So it’s natural that they should team up and co-edit a collection of essays exploring this tricky territory. Yoga + Body Image will be ready for the world in 2014. Melanie has all the details below – read on!
It is with great pleasure that Anna Guest-Jelley and I officially announce our anthology on Yoga + Body Image forthcoming in 2014.
I first met Anna almost three years ago. I was introduced to her work through her blog post “Welcoming the Curvy Yogini.” Not only did Anna’s words speak to me but I was taken by her brief bio at the bottom wherein she described herself as “an advocate for women’s rights by day, a yoga teacher by night.” Given my work as a Sociology + Women’s Studies professor and my activist work, I felt I had stumbled upon a kindred spirit.
Anna and I had our first phone conversation in 2011 and the synergy was palpable. We immediately realized that we had to collaborate on a project. After a few months of percolating, we realized that it only made sense to collaborate on a book focusing on yoga and body image. Continue Reading
Imagine all of these people dancing (image via Lunch Beat Mtl FB page)
Montrealers, ditch your noon hour yoga class and dance! While a little stretching and breathing on lunch break is always a good thing, sometimes you need to move your body in reckless and spontaneous ways.
Enter Lunch Beat. From the country that brought us Robyn, the latest Swedish craze is sweeping the world and finally lands in Montreal on Thursday, May 9 from 12:00 – 1:00 pm at Cinema Excentris. Montreal-based DJ Hissy Fit will be on the turntables, and each participant will receive a vegetarian lunch from Cafe Méliès and a bottle of RISE Kombucha (included in the $10 admission).
Lunch Beat started in June 2010 with 14 friends dancing in a garage, and locally-organized events have since popped up around the world. Their vision:
By promoting 1 hour of day time dancing we make it possible to fully embody the buzzwords of playfulness, participation & community. A physical knowledge that will make you create magic during the rest of your day too, and so will make Lunch Beat your week’s most important business lunch.
Daytime dancing and magic, FTW! Also, you have to love any dance event that has its own manifesto. Get your tickets for Lunch Beat Montreal here – and don’t worry, your noon hour yoga class will be waiting for you on Friday. Continue Reading
A couple of weeks ago, I pulled a quote from an interview with saxophonist Colin Stetson and posted it on IAYB. Shortly afterwards, his publicist emailed me and offered to set up an interview so I could hear more about his “yoga regime.” I agreed, since I’m always interested when yoga shows up in unlikely places. Best known as a bass saxophonist, Stetson uses a circular breathing technique that allows a continuous tone. Pranayama helps keep his lung capacity in top form, and his asana practice prepares his body for the physical rigors of holding a massive instrument.
Stetson took a break from his drive between Montreal and a cabin in Vermont to talk to me about how his yoga and meditation practice has developed, the ways that yoga helps him access his creativity, and how discipline doesn’t always have to be a struggle. Listen to our conversation below – then go listen to Stetson’s mesmerizing and unsettling music. Actually, listen to the music first, then the interview. Or just skip the interview entirely and listen to his music. Better yet, go see him live at one his upcoming tour dates.
One shot, three takes, no edits, 60 people and a whole lot of spreadsheets. This is just a small slice of the work that went into Queen Street Yoga‘s super fun lip dub to MC Yogi‘s “Give Love.” The Kitchener, Ontario-based studio produced the lip dub (a single-shot music video in which participants lip-synch a popular song) as a study in new media and an experiment in community building.
QSY director, Leena Miller, and producers Emma Dines and Aimée Morrison talk about the planning, preparation and coordination of the three and a half minute video.
What inspired this lip dub video?
Leena: The idea for the video came from one of our keenest students, Aimée Morrison. She’s an English prof at University of Waterloo and specializes in Critical Media Studies. She proposed the project as a way for her graduate students in new media to study what’s involved in making a YouTube video (copyright, filming, editing) and how then videos spread through social media networks (like awesome yoga blogs!). We loved the idea and thought it would be a really fun community-building event. Emma, one or our lead teachers and studio manager (who also happens to be an amazeballs drama/music geek) took on the project and enlisted the help of one of our work-trades, Jill. We invited our students and friends in the community to get involved at the studio and on social media. About 60 people turned out on filming day.
Emma: If I wasn’t a yoga teacher, I would have been a drama teacher, so this was a dream project for me!
Aimée: I got the idea while my daughter (blonde kid sitting on the floor in the final shot) and I were dancing around to Pilgrimage at home. It’s such a catchy album, and “Give Love” is such a great song, I knew immediately that I wanted to do a lip dub with QSY. The community just has that vibe, that joy. It seemed perfect. Continue Reading
YogaDork reported today that “Yoga Journal is shutting down production, ceasing its normal publication and reemerging as a blogger run online magazine.” The gossip girl of the yoga world then went on to describe the new team behind Yoga Journal 2.0:
Yoga Journal is excited (read: also shocked) to have infamous yoga bloggers from YogaDork, It’s All Yoga, Baby and Linda’s Yoga Journey take over in order to get in line with the times and reach the yoga folks of today. “They just weren’t hip, digital or edible enough,” says a source, referring to Yoga Journal’s longstanding magazine that is made out of indigestible paper and which appeals largely to a narrow scope of white middle and upper middle class practitioners.
What will change? Who’s in charge?
Some of you may have heard Kaitlin Quistgaard recently and quietly stepped down as YJ Editor-in-Chief after almost 7 years in the position and 10 years at the magazine. What you may not have heard was that Roseanne Harvey, founder and the intrepid blogger of It’s All Yoga, Baby will be stepping up to take her place!
“When they asked me to be EIC, I was shocked. Because I would try to make the magazine all lefty and diverse, I would offend advertisers and stakeholders, and I would want longer, more in-depth articles about real issues.” Lucky for Roseanne, that’s just what they were looking for. Who is ‘they’? No one really knows, but word has it the new owner of YJ has a very itchy third eye and looks a lot like a dawg.
Happy April Fool’s! The Yoga Journal takeover was inspired by some Twitter activity and campaign #IAYBforYJ earlier this weekend, after @vstasang tweeted: “The staff listings in latest issue of @Yoga_Journal indicate @kquistgaard is no longer the editor-in-chief: i nominate @itsallyoga_baby FTW!”
One day, perhaps, Yoga Journal will be run by hip bloggers and will actually be relevant to the yoga community at large (not just its current privileged demographic). In the meantime, we will continue blogging!
