If anything, I should be put at ease by songs and dances that are close to my heart, but more often I feel like I'm standing out. Today, I often feel that same kind of freakishness in hip-hop dance classes. “Can you teach me how to dance like that?” my classmates would ask. It called to mind my private school days when I was alternately gawked at and praised for my amazing ability to dance. I wanted something where I can twerk and have a good time and not be at the club,” says Rahmaan.īut I couldn't help but notice that not everyone in the studio seemed to get the same blast of nostalgia, and that some didn't know how to do the Wop or the Kid and Play.Īnd at first it bothered me to watch the women around me struggle to do dance moves that I learned from my friends before the days of YouTube. “My dad owned a nightclub, so I’ve been around music all my life. And I thought, ‘I’d love to learn “Crazy in Love” and “Get Me Bodied.' " So when she got laid off from a marketing position with Island Def Jam Music Group, Rahmaan hooked up with a couple of instructors via Craigslist to create exactly what she was looking for: sweaty cardio dance classes set to current hip-hop hits that mimicked the moves from the music videos. I was looking at a dance class to Beyoncé’s music, but they weren’t doing the choreography. “I was never really a hardcore fitness person. “I had just had my son, and I was trying to find ways to work out and lose the baby weight,” she tells SELF. Ratchet Zooba is one of five class types offered by Banana Skirt Productions (the name is a nod to the iconic black performer Josephine Baker), founded in 2014 by Akinah Rahmaan, a young black mother who really just wanted to dance to Beyoncé. It’s made even more acute when the teacher leads the class through watered down dance moves that don’t capture the essence of Bey’s fabulosity. And it feels downright strange to see it used as a hype song for HIIT, especially in a room full of women who probably have no idea what it’s like to feel insecure about kinky hair or wide noses. Lyrics like, “I like my baby hair with baby hair and afros I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils,” speak to my culture and appearance as a black woman. Typically, I am the only woman of color in the room, which makes me cringe when songs like Beyoncé’s “Formation”-my summer 2016 theme song-come on. Awkward for me, that is I'm sure the other people in my workout classes don't even notice. Being a black woman in the predominantly white fitness scene of New York City, this is the norm. I can’t help but notice that the crowd lurking near the door is overwhelmingly white-cue the internal eye roll. It's 7:30 P.M., and I'm waiting in line for Throwback Ratchet Zooba, a hip-hop dance cardio class.
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