When Missett, then a recent Northwestern graduate, took a fitness test at her local YMCA, the employee puzzled over her results: The rubric had been conceived for a male physique, and Missett’s considerable strength defied his expectations, given that “all” she did was dance.īack at Chicago’s prestigious Gus Giordano studio, where Missett taught dance, she noticed other obstacles to women becoming physically active. For most, the idea of “going to the gym” was uncommon, and the word exercise might call to mind the Presidential Fitness Challenge common in physical-education classes or muscle-bound bodybuilders. In the 1960s, this future was unimaginable for many women. At the height of its popularity, in the mid-1980s, Jazzercise was the second-fastest-growing franchise business in the country, after Domino’s Pizza. Taught primarily in freestanding suburban centers or in community spaces such as churches and schools, Jazzercise is in every U.S.
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According to her forthcoming memoir, Building a Business With a Beat, Jazzercise has netted $2 billion in cumulative sales. “We’re still here,” Missett reminds me when I ask about her career in the past tense during an interview. Judi leads a class at the Jazz Dance World Congress at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 1996. The feel-good fitness language that Jazzercise birthed, however, blended newly empowering affirmations with old beauty directives that prized a thin and conventional sort of prettiness-a mixed ethos that pervades U.S.
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The program challenged an enduring machismo that still limits women’s full participation in many exercise environments. Perhaps most crucially, serving a female clientele when exercise was perceived as the domain of men, Jazzercise invited women to find the “joy” and “flair” in working out. Jazzercise set the standard not only for contemporary choreographed offerings, but also for the franchise model exemplified by the likes of Curves, Pure Barre, and Barry’s Bootcamp. The format founded in a dance-studio basement by Judi Sheppard Missett, the front woman in the videos, established the style and substance of “boutique fitness,” the fastest-growing segment of today’s $26 billion fitness industry. Tempting as it may be to dismiss Jazzercise to the dustbin of fitness history, the dance-cardio program-which turns 50 this month-is more than a punch line.
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The caustic cue conjured grainy VHS tapes-the kind that circulate on social media for their Totally ’80s aesthetic-featuring a gyrating blonde who’s all limbs, leotard, and embarrassing exclamations like “Find that boogie body.” My instructor was calling us uncool. I’d never done Jazzercise, but I knew what she meant. “You’re not in Jazzercise, ladies,” a trim, tattooed fitness instructor chided me and the roomful of women who were attempting to work up a sweat one morning a few months ago.