Wow! Thanks so much to Yoga Dork and Elephantbeans, two awesome yoga blogs who blew the proverbial lid off this surprising story.
Welcome, fellow yogis, to the age of yoga teachers enrolling the services of talent agents! Or, to be more specific, the age of at least a few yoga teachers partnering up with one particular talent agency named the Yoga Artist Management Agency (YAMA). Details about this company are forthcoming (they don’t even have a website yet), but their name was pinned to a recent Gap, Inc. press release (Gap, Inc. being, of course, one of the largest corporate clothing retailers in the world), and they are also closely connected to the producers of the Wanderlust Yoga & Music Festival which is set to take place this coming weekend in Lake Tahoe. Verrrrry interesting, we must say!
There’s no official list of YAMA’s yoga instructor clients available yet, but given the surprising connection between YAMA and the Wanderlust Festival, we suspect that the roster of Wanderlust yoga teachers would be a pretty good place to start. (Yoga heavy-hitters John Friend, Shiva Rea, and Duncan Wong are among the headliners for this festival…)
For a great summary and further discussion of YAMA, we’re going to quote Yoga Dork’s great post from earlier today:
Remember when we spied a little note at the bottom of the Gap press release last week, something about a Yoga Agency? And then wondered what in tarnation that could be, imploring y’all to call Ava and find out? Well thanks to the awesome sleuth work from the folks at elephantbeans, they have answered our call and we now have some clarity. Which, really, is all we ever we ever ask for in life, isn’t it. Clarity.
The intrepid beaners uncovered the following:
Says founder Ava Taylor, the Yoga Artist Management Agency is “a joint venture with Velour Music Group – producers of the groundbreakingWanderlust Festival. YAMA is the premier yoga talent agency in the world exclusively representing a diverse portfolio of distinguished instructors.”
All right, so it’s a PR company promoting yoga ‘personalities’ (our words) deemed superstars (or “distinguished instructors”, sorry). Part of us is ick! Part of us says go yogis, flaunt it if you got it. Recognition sure is nice, right? (Also, yes it is that Wanderlust Fest, the one we were lusting after and were lucky enough to nab tickets to give away to readers. Go figure!)
Of course we can’t entirely blame the enterprising yoga teachers. We may notlike it, but who can knock the rock bands when they’re trying to make it big and the machine (managers, agents, labels) buys em out with a signing contract and tosses em a few bucks? Generally, some of you may have noticed a yoga teacher’s career is not a particularly lucrative one – if you’re the type to count money as a necessity in today’s world. Surely if instructors had a nickel for every student they positively influenced in their daily lives they’d be millionaires. And as of today we only know of a select few (ie.Bikram, Ramdev) who can claim that title.
Like any other athlete or Hollywood actor, big time yoga instructors’ lives are starting to require such tiresome encumbrances as frequent travel, paid endorsements, public appearances, assistants, agents, managers, drivers etc. That’s the game we’ve built for celebs these days. Yoga in North America is turning out to be no different. This may very well be yoga’s 15 minutes in pop culture stardom, should we not just let the ambitious yogs have their limelight and sell out?
–YAMA doesn’t have a roster, or website just yet, but we’re aware the fierceness of Sadie Nardini is amongst the likes of Yoga A-listers.
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