“Get your spots ready for butterfly,” Barre and Pole owner Tekla Kostek tells her students during a pole tricks class last Wednesday.
The eight women stand two-to-a-pole and watch as Kostek demonstrates. Kostek positions herself next to the pole. She bends her right arm to grip the pole with her right hand. Adding her left hand above her right, she uses her core and upper-body strength to lift her legs up and over her head, to either side of the pole, in a perfect ‘V.’ She bends both legs at her knees.
In the final pose, Kostek actually looks like a butterfly — the length of her body upside-down against the pole and her bent legs fanned out, as if wings in flight.
Kostek and her husband, Mark Summa, opened the Barre and Pole studio nearly a year ago as part of a multifaceted wellness center they call the Summana Center for Healing. Summa has long catered to the rich and famous at Canyon Ranch in Lenox, doing Thai and deep tissue massage, and mystical energetics. He also works as a psychic and a medium. Kostek operates the movement department of their business — pole, yoga, and barre classes — and together they aim to help people with stressed areas of the body.
Kostek grew up doing ballet at Pioneer Valley Ballet, then trained in the art form around the world. While teaching ballet at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Kostek was drawn to yoga and began cross-training with dance and yoga. She started traveling to India regularly in 2009 to learn yoga at ashrams.
There, she said, she discovered pole dancing.
Kostek says outside of an ashram she found a group of children doing Mallakhamb, an acrobatic Indian sport involving a wooden pole. She tried it out and loved it. Craving the ability to dance and do yoga up in the air upon her return to the U.S., she decided to try out some pole dancing classes.
“I caught the bug — it’s so fun,” Kostek says. “You get into that kid space. You’re playing. It’s light and happy. I wanted to bring that to the Valley.”
Alice Vlasenko, 31, of Granby, has been taking pole classes and getting bodywork at the center since August. Vlasenko says she is going through a divorce and that it’s been a tough time. Pole with Kostek, she says, has provided a fun, challenging workout and an expressive outlet. She says that Summa has simultaneously helped her realize that she was holding tension in her back.
“Pole is the best thing in my life right now and I consider them family,” Vlasenko says, gesturing toward her fellow pole dancers students, Kostek, and Summa.
Summa knows a thing or two about the consequences of stress on the body. After the death of his daughter, he says, he was so stressed that an artery ruptured in his stomach and he nearly died.
“I made a commitment — if I live, I told myself, I’ll give myself to service,” Summa says.
Kostek’s classes begin with a warm-up. The classes are punctuated with demonstrations from Kostek — “she makes it look easy,” Summa says as he watches her — followed by the students helping each other into difficult and acrobatic positions. It’s clearly hard work — the women’s foreheads are glistening and their efforts to get up the pole are marked with heavy breathing.
It’s evident in Kostek’s teaching style that her background is in professional dance and yoga. Her demonstrations are methodical, and she clearly pushes her students to challenge themselves, but she also says things yoga teachers say, “… if that’s working for us, if not, leave it.”
Suddenly, Ludacris’ “What’s Your Fantasy” fills the room, and Emma Wellford, 26 — already on her hands and knees — breaks it down twerk-style to the lyric, “I wanna lick, lick, lick, lick you from your head to your toes.” Her classmates giggle with delight.
Yalin Geiger, 32, of Northampton, says she’s been taking classes at Barre and Pole for four months. Though she’s studied other dance forms — hip-hop, jazz, tango, salsa — Geiger says pole allows her to explore herself as a dancer. Additionally, she says, she’s gained increased confidence and a sisterhood.
“I wasn’t sure I could do it — it looked so hard,” Geiger says. “But you pick it up quick. It’s a great way to fall in love with yourself again.”
Geiger says this is her first pole class since becoming pregnant. She’s unsure how long she will continue classes during pregnancy, but says whatever leave of absence she takes from the studio will be temporary. “I can definitely see my baby growing up in this family,” Geiger tells her classmates.
Kostek casually does the splits as we sit shoeless on the polished wood floor, talking about the space she and her husband have created. Everything they do here, she says, is about healing mind, body, and spirit.
Firstly, Kostek says, pole dancing is great exercise. “It’s a full body workout but you’re using your own body as leverage,” Kostek says. “It gets into all those parts of your body you forget about. It’s yoga on a pole.”
Even on a bad day, she says, climbing up onto the pole is instantly energizing. “It really calls for your awareness. When you’re up high you engage in a different way… it’s a great catalyst for those muscles to wake up a little bit more.”
As children, she says, we hit the jungle gyms and swing through the air without fear. But many adults lose that ability. Many students fear the pole at first, she says, and she coaches them through that.
Some students wear shorts and bikini tops to classes, others dress sporty, but all need to bare some skin to grip the pole. Coming in for the first time, Kostek says, students often have a great deal of body shame. She says the space is safe and comforting and students loosen up quickly.
“I think that’s why the pole community is really tight — you have to open up to vulnerability and that asks a lot of people,” Kostek says.
As a ballet dancer — Kostek also teaches ballet at UMass Amherst — Kostek says, she is driven, focused, introverted. Pole, for her, provides a welcome contrast.
“For me, I can go deep, dark, and hard real fast. Pole got me out of that headspace. There’s no ‘have-tos’ and ‘shoulds’ in pole.”
At the end of the class, Kostek gathers the girls into a circle and asks them to share one breakthrough moment from the class and one thing they’re grateful for.
Sitting feet-to-feet, Geiger and Vlasenko lean over their straightened legs. “I can feel the bruises coming now,” Geiger says.
“Yeah, that’s the thing about pole,” Vlasenko says. “You get bruises all over your body.”
“It’s more than just a workout,” Wellford, the twerker, enthusiastically tells the group.•
Amanda Drane can be reached at adrane@valleyadvocate.com
