High kicks in suburban strip malls

In the past couple of decades, suburban Minnesota has seen a serious landscape shift. Most of the area’s strip malls have lost their small bakeries and video rental stores, but nail salons and Asian restaurants have repurposed those spaces.

One type of business in particular has saturated suburban strip malls: dance studios, which are usually small enterprises  geared toward age ranges such as “two to two hundred.”

Why are they so prolific? Is their ubiquity unique to suburban Minnesota? Perhaps most intriguingly, does every student dream of Broadway, or do other motivations drive this trend? 

Most dance studios per capita?

According to Yelp! and Google Maps, Minneapolis has one dance studio for every 22,505 residents, and Anoka County has one for every 18,382 (not including universities or professional dance companies). When I factored into the equation the percentage of minors in each location, however, I found that the city’s studio-to-minor ratios were much more similar; Minneapolis had one dance school for every 4,546 people under 18, and Anoka County’s number was one to 4,484.

Because these Minneapolis/Anoka County statistics are so similar, the boom of dance studios in Minnesotan suburbs seems directly correlated with the presence of local children. It falls in line with supply and demand; the number of potential clients determines the number of classes offered.

In cities and suburbs in other parts of the country, though, the studio-to-minor ratio is more disproportionate. Portland, Ore. has a fairly low percentage of minors (19.1%), but its one-studio-for-every-5,575-minors ratio overwhelmed neighboring Washington County’s one-to-9,194 figure. Austin, Texas also had more studios per capita than its neighboring suburb (one to 5,459 vs. one to 7,158).

Either way, Minneapolis and Anoka County seem to have close to the most studios per capita in the country. While considering studios in Ore. and Texas, I erred on the side of including too many (I saw a few listings that were probably outdated or otherwise invalid), which means that Minnesota seems all the more impressive.

However, if I only consulted numbers, I’d still have little idea about what actually motivates all these students to enroll in dance classes.

“This is fun!”

When I walked into a kindergarten/first-grade class at Champlin, MN’s chapter of Just For Kix, the dancers were just starting to file in for their lesson. Just for Kix began 30 years ago in Brainerd, Minnesota and has grown into a multi-faceted dance company with 128 Minnesota locations and a presence in 12 other states, serving more than 21,000 children. (Their popular YouTube channel has hundreds of dance videos.)

One by one, Champlin’s young dancers set their animal-decorated water bottles on a cafeteria table and jumped over to the middle of the room (which doubles as the seafoam-green cafeteria at Champlin-Brooklyn Park Academy). Several girls practiced skills while they waited to begin. A small girl in a flowy blue dress, named Nora, yelled, “This is fun!”

During the class, instructor Kayla Hanson ran through stretches, a pair of holiday routines, and several ballet steps. The twelve students followed along; their zeal impressed me. Before sinking into the splits, Nora met eyes with me, shouting, “Watch this!” I laughed.

Outside the cafeteria, dance moms and dads waited for their children. I asked one mom why she’d enrolled her two daughters in that night’s class, and she told me that dance helped them learn teamwork. Enrollment appeared to have a generational element, since she herself had danced as a child. As for continuing on to competitive dance, her daughters would take it one year at a time, she said.

Hanson’s theory on the widespread nature of suburban dance studios involves—like a lot of American culture—television. “I really think So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing With the Stars. . . all this stuff right now on TV is really getting young people to watch it and think, ‘Oh, I want to be like that when I’m older!’ It has a lot to do with why, all of a sudden, dance is so huge.”*

Though Hanson never pursued professional dancing after her own classes ended, she’s happy to have found a career in performing arts. “It’s nice there’s this avenue where you can still teach,” she said with a laugh. And it became clear that many studio proprietors and instructors, in starting their own classes, must simply enjoy dancing enough to teach it to others. “Even in classes, I’m still kicking my own butt—kicking as high as I can, and doing all the turns!”

“Not everybody who comes through the door will love dance,” Hanson said eventually. “They may go on to something else. But there are dancers who say, ‘I really love it and I want to do this.’” No matter where they end up, “it’s nice to see these dancers continue to grow.”

If you make it there. . .

Joan Heeringa, a 24-year-old Minnesota native, is still on the dance path. Heeringa lived in Eden Prairie for most of her school-age life, enrolling at studios including Center Stage Dance Studio (now located in Prior Lake, Minn.). Since then, she’s made her way to New York City—and around the world.

“I danced competitively from second grade until senior year of high school,” Heeringa told me via phone while sitting at an Upper East Side café in New York. Having grown up in a theatrical family, she said she eventually gravitated toward musical theater: “My older siblings were always in shows, and my mom was costuming them, so I’d be around all these big kids singing and dancing. That is where I’ve always felt my groove.”

After earning a B.A. in dance performance at Pittsburgh’s Point Park University, Heeringa has traveled the world on two dancing contracts from Royal Caribbean. She’s worked in productions like West Side Story at Long Island’s John W. Engeman Theater, which a New York Times reviewer praised. She’s always “striving for Broadway,” showing a special enthusiasm for the new Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, Hamilton. “It’s exciting to see musical theater evolving,” she said of the production. “The choreographer, Andy Blankenbuehler, is definitely someone I’d like to work with.”

Looking back, she’s glad she pursued dance while young. “I was at dance more than I was at home a lot of times […] I saw my dance family more than my regular family.” She concluded, “I really grew up and learned most of life’s lessons in a dance studio.”

After travelling and studying away from home, Heeringa believes the large amount of dance studios in Minnesota is unique. “When I left Minnesota to attend college,” she said, “I met students from across the country that […] knew of Minnesota’s strong reputation in competition dance.” And it’s a good thing: “The level of talent prevalent in Minnesotan dance studios helps push each studio to stay relevant, to create cutting-edge choreography [and] costuming, and to provide overall quality training for their students.”

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*Here’s an abridged version of popular dance shows, which seem to have taken off in the United Kingdom, before landing for a United States audience:

Angelina Ballerina (UK: 2002-2006; US: 2009-2010)

Strictly Come Dancing (UK: 2004-present)

So You Think You Can Dance (2005-present)

Dancing With the Stars (2005-present)

DanceX (UK: 2007)

America’s Best Dance Crew (2008-2012; 2015)

Shake It Up (2010-2013)

Bunheads (2012-2013)