Senior instructor
Priya Raghunathan
Fast, precise, and cues with her voice rather than by demonstrating, so you learn to listen instead of watching the front of the room. Counts in a way people find unreasonably calming.
Suits — People who already know the machine and want the class to get on with it, and anyone who learns better by being told than by being shown.
she/her
Priya teaches more classes than anyone else at Halcyon — most of the early Reformer Flow slots and the Monday and Thursday evening Tower & Chair.
She danced Bharatanatyam from the age of six until she was twenty, which is where the counting comes from. Several people have said they find her class easier to follow with their eyes closed, which she takes as the compliment it is meant to be: classical dance training is fundamentally an oral tradition, and she teaches the way she was taught, by voice and rhythm rather than by copying.
What she teaches
Reformer Flow, mostly at 06:45 and 07:45, which she says are the best classes of the week because nobody talks. Tower & Chair on Monday and Thursday evenings.
On the early classes
Priya opens the studio four mornings a week. The 06:45 has run since 2019 with almost the same eleven people, several of whom have never spoken to each other. She considers this a functioning community and will defend the position.
Elsewhere
She came to Bristol from Coventry in 2014 for a job in structural engineering that she left in 2017. She still does the occasional bit of consulting, mostly so she can keep saying that a reformer is a beautifully designed piece of load-bearing equipment and be technically correct about it.
The other three
Nadia Kellner
Explains the reason for everything, sometimes at more length than the class strictly needs. Will stop a room of twelve to fix one person's shoulder and make it feel like a group discovery rather than a correction.
Ruth Ferreira
Asks more questions than she gives instructions. Will spend ten minutes of a fifty-five minute class finding out what your back actually does before anybody touches a spring, and considers that ten minutes the class.
Elin Sowerby
Loud, funny, and completely uninterested in whether the class looks elegant. Counts out loud, plays music at a volume the rest of the building can hear, and will absolutely notice if you have quietly taken a spring off.