Remember you are a skeleton.

Let your bones float inside your flesh, or in a pool of water. Pull your bones. Soften your flesh so you can pull more. When you think you can’t pull anymore, soften and pull more. Allow curves to enter and move in your body; imagine little circles in between your bones and your flesh. Let the curves travel. Shatter the bones in your feet.

Melt your bones into the floor. Allow a quake to happen in your pelvis. Switch positions; keep switching. Build up the quake. Let it echo through your head and fingers. Connect to your pleasure. 10. nine. eight. seven. (More!) six. five. four. three. two. one.

Still. Feel the memory of it. Do less.

Twenty-six young adults allow Bobbi Jene Smith’s voice into their ears on a mildly windy Thursday. Top fox at Batsheva and freelance choreographer, Bobbi quakes and floats with us: black chiffon, flannel and red lipstick to boot. The queen is only in town for a New Year minute.

Surrounding her, long-sleeve shirts (knotted and falling from swaying hips) appear to be the favorite clothing item in the room, second only to black socks. We take her commands into our muscles, bones and skin — instruction my life lacked in the past three-and-a-half years.

When you go back to a place, a person or a thing years later, a looming fear arrives that that person, place or thing won’t be the same. In case you don’t recall, it was g-o-o-d. This fear comes in varying shapes and sizes but now you are different, and “it” is inherently different, also. Scary prospect, no? Yes.

In my lifetime I have experienced this fear with Ortega’s bean-and-cheese burrito of La Jolla, Calif., with Tia, who became my best friend at age three, with driving, with "Friends" episodes, with orgasm — and the list blurs ahead. The return to these people, places and things has ranged from painfully disappointing to sensational in its parallel of past joy. And, on rare occasion, the present form trumps its predecessor.

January 3, 2013, I stepped back into Gaga.

Let's take a quick pause for the 99-percent that think I am talking about participating in a how-to-be-a-stunner class from the singing, dancing Lady of all ladies. Not true. My ‘Gaga’ is from Tele Viv, Israel.

This dance technique that has you melt your bones with your brain is referred to as “Gaga,” created by the artistic director of Batsheva Dance Company, Ohad Naharin. In Israel, many non-dancers as well as professional and pre-professional dancers take this class, but it seems to be mostly “Gaga for dancers” in the U.S.

From the outside, Gaga might look like some fusion of modern dance, improvisation or interpretive dance. And what it looks like typically equates to what it is, but a key facet of Gaga is that Naharin created this technique to be practiced and experienced with the intention of finding pleasure through effort and fluidity in your spine. Every single body in class is in motion for the entire sixty minutes, no one is allowed out or in of the mirror-less room, no one is allowed to sit and watch. And it's not performed, but rather, influences the movement the Batsheva Dance Company performs. We are reminded to have a “sense of plenty of time” throughout the hour. We could do this all day. All year.

“We,” almost four years ago, meant a bunch of eighteen year olds at a summer intensive program — mostly female— trying to act, and dress, less ballet. My body became a foreign, beautied body. The month concluded and I emerged an addict of the quake, the little circles and that pool of water.

Fast forward a few earth rotations around that big ol’ sun and I am on winter break of my senior year as a Dance major at University of Michigan, walking into the same upstairs studio space in SoMa, San Francisco.