Stratford’s Yoga Collective celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. It started in 2001 when five teachers – Beth Beech, Paul Krempien, Jack McDonald, Margo Pronovost and Karen Zamaria – came together in a common space to offer a range of classes. By 2003, they had moved into a space in the Worth Block building at 42 Wellington Street, across from Stratford City Hall. Beth Beech remembers that, within a couple years, what was then (and is now, again) an apartment on the building’s second floor was coming vacant and the five teachers decided to rent that space.
That’s where I found The Yoga Collective in early 2005, when my doctor recommend I do yoga classes to enhance my parasympathetic nervous system. (Whenever I tell this story, people are wide-eyed at a doctor who would “prescribe” yoga.) I’m not an athletic person, and am not a bendy-stretchy sort – 20 years later, I still cannot get my heels to touch the ground in the upside-down-V-shaped pose known as Downward Facing Dog. So I went to the first class with a buck-up grimace in my soul, possibly on my face, but discovered I liked it. The yoga room had red brick walls, dark linoleum floor, dark ceilings and seemed cozy and relaxing on that first winter-evening class. Later, I started going to Beth Beech’s Saturday morning classes.
There are as many varieties of yoga out there as there are flavours of ice cream. Some are done in super-heated rooms. Some are super athletic, where the instructors are typically people who grew up studying dance or gymnastics, and they twist their bodies into improbable and astonishing shapes. And some are yoga practices where it’s about the journey, not the destination, and whatever you can do on that particular day is the best thing for you. No competition, no preening, no pressure.
The last kind of yoga is the kind you typically find at the Yoga Collective: as far as my research has been able to find, it’s the longest-running continuous yoga studio in Stratford (COVID-19 gathering restriction times excepted.)
While the occasional visitor finds the Yoga Collective for classes in the theatre season, it’s mostly locals. I was away from Stratford for 10 years but, when I came back for visits, I’d drop by for a class and usually found someone I knew there. The studio moved a couple years ago from that cozy second-floor space to the vast third floor when the building owner wanted to use the second-floor suite as an apartment, again.
That third floor, with its wood floors, high ceilings and flooded with light during the day from long windows facing east and west, had been empty for years. The staircase to it was blocked in 2005, when I started yoga on the second floor. My father-in-law told us his older brothers used to go there for dances but, by the time he was old enough to go, the space had moved on to other uses.
Dean Robinson’s writes about those dance hall days in his book, 42 Wellington – the Music and Memories 1929-1969.
“It began as The Classic Gardens. About a decade later it became The Royal Ballroom, then The Blue Room (1939-1951), The Melody Mill (1952-1954), The Blacksmith Shop (1955-1957), The Festive Lounge (1957-1959), the German-Canadian [Teutonia] Club (1959-1965) and Club 42 (1965 to March 1969). At least once during The Blue Room years, and a few times in the days of Club 42, there was roller skating on the ballroom’s hardwood. At other times, there were dozens of bingo nights, and euchre parties. There were political rallies and receptions and an art gallery. In the first two years of the Stratford Festival, founder Tom Patterson used the big room to welcome dignitaries and members of the media prior to his theatre’s opening-night performances.”
It is a big room. There are several smaller rooms along a corridor as you enter the space: a large washroom, two storage rooms, and a room used for a massage therapy practice. When you are in the main room, it’s easy to see how it once was a reception hall and bustling dance space. In the first few weeks of using it for yoga, the instructors had to figure out how they could be heard by their students: their soothing voices wafted out over all that space and got lost.
The Collective has evolved: none of the founding five teach there anymore – some retired, some moved to other communities. There’s a new crop of instructors and an expansion of offerings, including biweekly spin classes where half the class is on the bikes, and the second half is on yoga mats. There are prenatal yoga classes and, in a full-circle development echoing the space’s former dance hall days, a Latin Joy dance classes Friday evening offered by Mateo G. Torres.
Meredith Brown, a Stratford local, taught for many years in the second-floor studio and continues teaching in the big third-floor place. She explains that the Yoga Collective isn’t a financial entity, but a co-operative umbrella: “All the teachers are financially independent of one another and share the cost of the rent and share the chores of keeping things running smoothly. Generally when someone requests to teach, if their credentials look strong, we invite them to meet with the group and explain how we run things.”
The key “run things” vibe is chill. Most classes don’t require pre-registration. No-one throws a hissy fit if you arrive a couple minutes late. You can pre-pay for a set of classes: a small card with your name on it goes into an alphabetical file box, and then your instructor notes each time you attend a class. You can borrow props and a mat, or bring your own. And no-one will ever give you the side-eye if your heels don’t reach the floor in downward facing dog.
Photos: Kelley Teahen
