ART IN THE AUDAIN INSPIRES UNIQUE YOGA SESSIONS

Last year, a unique encounter between downward dogs and a Salvador Dali painting took place in the Audain Art Museum. The meeting between yoga and art occurred in one of the rooms showing masterworks from the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. Dali’s 3.9-metre-tall painting Santiago El Grande shows a horse on its hind legs in front of a net of architectural support beams of the kind you might find on the inside of a church vault. One of the yoga instructors who teaches classes at the Audain is Laura Davies. When she designs power-yoga sessions, she combines information provided by the museum with her own visits to see the art. For the Dali painting, she discovered that the long-distance trek known as the Santiago de Camino in France and Spain was one of the inspirations for the work. She also noticed the scallop-shell shapes in the painting. “When you’re in downward-facing dog, you fan you fingers out. They look like scallop shells,” she said. “If you look at your hands, your fingers form the lines that come into the centre of the body — and that’s the journey the energy takes as well — up your arms and into your core and possibly down the other side to your feet.” For most people, yoga in a group is practised in a room or gym surrounded by mirrors or often nothing more than painted walls. Being surrounded by art makes the gallery an “amazing space to practise in,” she said. The next yoga session at the Audain is on March 15 at 6 p.m. It will be in front of drawings by Henri Matisse, whose work is based on exploring line, shape and form in space — much like the way bodies move through space in yoga, Davies said. Yoga at the Audain is one of the ways the museum is working to break down the walls and engage with tourists and locals in Whistler. Each yoga session focuses on a different artist, gallery or artwork, said Suzanne Greening, director of the museum. “Yoga at the Audain is designed to inspire our visitors to connect on a unique, personal level with works in the permanent collection and special exhibitions,” she wrote in an email.