Why I Started Hustle & Flow Dance

Anyone who has been to a class with Hustle & Flow Dance will tell you about the way the class feels before they tell you about what they learned in class. 

“It’s like a much needed hug from a good friend.”

“It feels like coming home.” 

“It’s a place where we all agree to leave pretenses at the door and just celebrate being alive.”

“It’s emotionally safe.” 

This is everything that dance means to me and everything that I wanted dance to be when I was growing up: a place where people can come and learn something new and feel good while they do it, without the judgement of others. Unfortunately, that wasn’t my experience of growing up in the dance studio and in order to understand why Hustle & Flow Dance exists in the way that it does today, I think it’s important to travel back in time with me to the early 2000s…

I have always loved performing (hello home videos from 1994 where you can hear a small Nikita saying, “Mom, the camera can’t see me! Can I sing you one more song?”) but I didn’t find myself in the studio until I was 10 years old. I was obsessed with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and I was convinced I was going to be the next Disney Channel star, despite the fact that I didn’t have an agent, didn’t live in California, and was not going to any auditions. I was a little girl with the itch to perform and when I finally started dance classes, I found that not only was I good at it, I was really good at it. I was often in the front of formations, I was called out specifically by adjudicators at competitions for being a strong dancer, and I was even on a senior hip hop team of 17/18 year olds when I was 12! The stage became my favourite place on earth. To this day there is nothing more calming and zen-like for me than being under the lights, looking out into a sea of shadowed faces, and turning my brain off and just dancing for me.

But as much as I loved to dance, I was also clearly plus sized, I had not grown into my features yet (read: I was not considered pretty and people let me know it), and in the early 2000s diverse body types were not tolerated in the studio, let alone celebrated. 

I was many sizes bigger than everyone else throughout my childhood and teen years and studio hip hop costumes at that time were often low rise sweatpants and tight TNA-brand crop tops. I was made to feel bad by my dance teacher because our class couldn’t wear the ‘cute costumes’ because they didn’t look good on me and it wasn’t fair to the other dancers. Why should they have to wear baggy sweatpants AND a baggy shirt on stage just because one person in class was bigger and didn’t want to wear the tight clothes? One year, they decided to wear what they wanted anyway (sweatpants with boxers showing and a cropped white tank top) and when I danced, my belly would fall out of my pants and jiggle around which caused me to dance smaller to try to hide, so my mom sewed my pants to my shirt in the front. God bless the adjudicator at competition who called out my teacher for choosing costumes that not everyone looked good in. 

It was also around this time, however, that I started to be pointed out specifically by adjudicators as being a good dancer and there was a clear contradiction happening in that 2002, low rise jeans, belly button ring, Britney & Christina era: Fat girls couldn’t be the best dancer in class. It was an unwritten rule that everybody knew and it left me in a weird middle place of loving to dance in a full body, feel it in your soul kind of way, while also wanting to shrink and hide every time I was there.

This is just one example of my experience in dance studios growing up. In those days there were no examples of plus sized performers being celebrated. This is before the days of Lizzo and back up dancers being diverse. So when I turned 18 and it was time to decide if I was going to continue to dance and try to make it in a pre-professional program or with an agency, I chose to stop dancing. Looking back, how heartbreaking for that 18 year old version of me to be certain in a non-emotional and matter of fact way that I couldn’t succeed at something because I was fat. Even while typing that sentence I am shaking my head. 

Fast forward to 2018. I had found myself in and out of different dance programs throughout my 20s and my friend and I had the opportunity to open a branch of a heels dance program in Langley. At this point the social narrative had begun to change. The body positivity movement was well underway and I had seen the way diverse body types could be celebrated in the dance studio. We opened in 2018 and made it our mission to create a space where every body could come and be a dancer. That program was a success! We had a great community of dancers and were growing…until March 2020. To say that keeping a dance program alive during the pandemic was difficult is an understatement. My business partner and I decided to go separate ways that year and I was faced with continuing to try to keep the dance program alive or close, as so many dance and fitness studios did in 2020. This was a really difficult decision for me because the program was going into debt, we were constantly navigating the different guidelines around masks and social distancing, and I was incredibly stressed and tired.

But I had seen over the past few years of owning a dance program that my story of growing up in the studio was not unique. That even if you didn’t grow up dancing, there were still narratives in peoples’ heads about what is beautiful and what is not, what is sexy and what is not, what is worthy and what is not. So in January 0f 2021 I rebranded as Hustle & Flow Dance. I was running on hope and a vision for the future, having only 6 or so dancers every week on Zoom learning a number to be filmed outdoors, socially distanced. 

There have been many challenges in owning a dance company since then. I’ve gone from teaching the majority of classes to teaching no classes and managing a team. I’ve had two kids. I’ve hired and let go of teachers in our growing pains. But at the end of the day, despite the stress and the challenges, Hustle & Flow Dance exists for her. For 10 year old Nikita who just wanted to dance, no matter what people thought of the way she looked. 

What started as a way to rewrite my own dance story has turned into something so much bigger. There is a ripple effect that I didn’t anticipate. One brave dancer at a time, we’re challenging what beauty looks like, what strength feels like, and who gets to take up space on stage.

So to the little girl I used to be who danced her heart out and still wondered if she belonged: you did. You always did. Now there’s a place - built from your courage and your passion - where others come to believe the same thing about themselves. Where they dance boldly, take up space unapologetically, and finally feel at home in their own bodies. A place where they reconnect with the younger versions of themselves who started to play small because someone told them they weren’t good enough, pretty enough, thin enough, or that they just didn’t belong. 

Hustle & Flow Dance is what you needed when you were younger. And now, because of you, it exists.