A darker path tolightness

Eric Wheeler strummed the notes of The Cure's The Drowning Man as his 15 students lay in a corpse pose on their mats, looking up at the ceiling and paintings of sports heroes and grapefruit.

"I've only been playing for a year and half," said Wheeler, 44, of Tampa. "I always like to play during Shavasana because I've got a captive audience."

The melancholic tune was one of many used to help move bodies during Wheeler's weekly Dark Wave Yoga class at Tempus Projects, a Seminole Heights non-profit gallery dedicated to hosting local artists.

Bands on the continuous playlist can include Joy Division, Morrissey and Nine inch Nails. Wheeler mixes a new playlist every week.

"He's an excellent mixer because he knows the music and just knows how to create that energy for the class," said Erin Wheeler, Eric's wife and co-founder of their company, Lucky Cat Yoga.

Both Wheelers teach yoga in a variety of settings all over the Tampa Bay area from studios to libraries. It was one such class at a library last year that gave birth to Dark Wave Yoga. Students approached Erin and showed her a clip of dark wave yoga from another city.

'They asked me if we could have a yoga class with this sort of music," Erin recalled. "I said sure, because we love this type of music. We're formerly sullen and formerly moody."

Thinking that such an atmospheric class would need a different setting, the Wheelers reached out to friend, Tracy Midulla Reller, 40, of Tempus Projects, to see if it would be possible to hold a weekly class there. Lucky Cat had hosted a yoga class in the space before, but weekly was something different altogether.

"I thought it was a great idea because I'm sort of a shut-in," Reller said. "I joked that I'm too self-centered to go to yoga, so yoga had to come with me."

After Christmas, Dark Wave Yoga began and a core group of music fans and Seminole Heights residents began populating the group.

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A darker path tolightness