Photograph by Jeremy Kramer
On a chilly Wednesday evening, a human ball of energy with a 1,000-watt smile leaps to the front of a dance class in the large, brightly lit studio. Black clothing hugs her sculpted curves. A sequin sweat band sparkles in her short, wheat-colored hair. She claps her hands and shouts, “There’s so much going on in the world out there. But now let’s get into our bodies.”
Standing students, ranging in age from their 20s through their 80s, follow her arm-swooping warm-up stretches, then prance and leap across the floor in new layers of choreography. Facing the mirrored wall, she says, “You’re gonna go up, up, up, side, 1, 2, 3, side, together!” She energizes the crowd: “Sparkle! Be gorgeous!” And wiggles a hand: “It’s a little like a nae-nae!”
From the sidewalk, it looks like a rehearsal for a music video. The black exterior of this minimalist, industrial-style studio frames picture windows with views of stark white walls and a high black ceiling. Passersby can see and hear 50 or so people attacking modern, fast-paced movement to thumping pop tracks. Technically, this is “just” an exercise class. But there will be a show. Twelve times a year, students spill out across Cincinnati in funky flash mobs.
Welcome to DanceFix, the Cincinnati-born fitness phenomenon that’s part high-intensity workout, part ecstatic dance party, and part community kumbaya. For more than two decades, it’s built a devoted following around its charismatic founder, Heather Britt. As DanceFix blows up in its new purpose-built home in Walnut Hills and eyes expansion into other cities, a question hangs in the air like sweat: Can this intensely local, supremely Britt-centric culture scale without losing what makes it special?
Courtesy DanceFix
Britt switches the music to “blare” and starts the class in earnest. She yells instructions over “Joy” by Rita Ora, a song with about 25 choreographed dance moves. Aside from one short break to gulp water and mop faces, there’s little let-up between songs.
Smiles, shouts, and body heat build. Some dancers stray from the choreography to add an ad hoc shimmy with a neighbor or personal hand flourishes. Like all core DanceFix sessions, this one follows a set format of 10 songs in an hour’s time. Every two weeks, one song falls out of rotation and a new one is added. There are more than 1,000 total moves in a typical class. It’s not for the faint of heart.
DanceFix students, known as “DanceFixers,” routinely describe the same mix of exhaustion, exhilaration, and belonging. “It’s all walks of life,” says Sally Davenport, a Wyoming retiree. “As a kid, I found the dance world to be very judgmental, not a warm and welcoming place. DanceFix is completely different from that.”
Davenport uses the word fun 36 times in our interview. The raw joy of flailing around for an hour is what brings them in. The connection keeps them coming back.
Zumba, Jazzercise, and other dance workouts are nothing new. They’re mainstream and beginner-friendly. DanceFix, on the other jazz hand, is Cincinnati-born, harder to master, and more like a way of life. “It is sort of a cult,” says Elissa Yancey, a Northsider and executive director of a nonprofit. “People use words like obsessed and addicted, words that may not sound very positive, but it’s such a positive atmosphere that it is also addictive.”
Davenport chokes up when she says, “I’ve made these lovely friendships with the most amazing people, people I never would have otherwise known.”
There’s a welcoming vibe but little technical hand-holding for a novice. “When I started, it was like drinking from a firehose,” she says. Many students say they have to come at least twice a week to keep up with the shifting sequences. The trial by fire leads to student bonding.
Then there are the flash mobs, which inject high-octane joy into events like Cincinnati Pride, the Northside Fourth of July parade, and BLINK. In colorful, devil-may-care costumes, DanceFixers swarm public spaces, turning sidewalks and streets into impromptu stages. They’re more than a fitness class; they’re a subculture. “The point is to raise the vibration,” says Britt.
Photograph by Jeremy Kramer
Britt started creating DanceFix 26 years ago, though she wouldn’t establish the name until 2014. Boiled down, DanceFix is a suite of fitness classes featuring original choreography. But calling it an exercise routine is like calling Procter & Gamble a soap-maker. There’s so much more.
Were it not for free dance instruction, Britt says she herself wouldn’t have become a professional. Her “humble” (as she puts it) west side family wouldn’t have been able to afford paid classes, but she auditioned successfully for the School for Creative and Performing Arts. “SCPA really prepared me for all of this, having a career in high-quality arts, and what teaching and choreographing was like,” she says.
She declined a college dance scholarship to Kent State, taking a year-and-a-half-long break due to burnout. She moved to Durango, Colorado, for school and connected with college professors who danced for fun and rekindled her passion. Britt moved to New York to teach dance for a short time, then to San Francisco in the 1990s, where she performed in several dance troupes.
Aerobics are also in Britt’s blood. She got certified to teach the high-intensity workout while still a teenager, following in the agile footsteps of her mother, who taught it in its 1980s heyday. Aerobics provided an adrenaline boost to Britt’s usual rotation of classes, from ballet to African to capoeira. “Dance is like a sprint,” she says. “You go across the floor and stop. But in aerobics, you keep up your endurance and get that endorphin rush the whole time. I needed that extra cardio work to feel good in my body and stay in shape.”
Photograph by Jeremy Kramer
Always seeking the more dance-inflected aerobics classes, she discovered Rhythm & Motion in San Francisco, which invites the uninitiated into classes taught by pro dancers. “It’s a great welcoming equalizer space around dance and fitness,” says Britt. Excelling immediately, she was hired to teach and later to export the concept to its first satellite in Colorado, where she returned with her then boyfriend/future husband. It was a hit.
So when Britt moved back to Cincinnati in 2000 to plan her wedding, she opened a second Rhythm & Motion outpost. “It was complicated,” she says of having to teach, keep books, and promote the business. “I had to become a business person, and artists are not known for being great at that. I was just winging it. How do I recreate from scratch what they’d been doing for 27 years? There was no blueprint.”
Britt laments some of her past business decisions. “I was not the best negotiator,” she says. If she flunked, however, it was upwards. Profits grew every year from 2004 until COVID hit and have since returned to their pre-pandemic numbers. She built the business while working day jobs in the dance profession and raising two children as a single mom. (The marriage didn’t work out.) In hindsight, it’s clear Britt had a head for strategy after all.
Students wanted more structure and more sophisticated choreo, she sensed. Asked why DanceFix tends to drop newbies into the proverbial deep end, she says, “If I do a lot of intro classes, the people who come don’t stay. The choreography is difficult because we want people to feel they’ve accomplished something. That builds retention. Students have to come often, and so they develop deep relationships with each other.”
In 2014, Britt trademarked the DanceFix name. She liked the double meaning of the classes being a fix for a body craving dopamine and the notion that dance can fix you. A third meaning is also possible: As DanceFix continues to expand, Britt is focused on fine-tuning the brand in line with its mission of inclusiveness and community—keeping the vision fixed and unmuddled.
“The classes were successful not because of Rhythm & Motion but because of Heather and her style,” says Ron Houck, an entrepreneur and former professional dancer who has attended since the early days. “She has IQ, charisma, and magnetism. It’s innate in her to be a leader.”
The therapeutic aspect of dance is well documented scientifically and is gaining yet more momentum with the recent rise of somatic therapy, which seeks to heal trauma through body awareness and movement. “This is where I process my life,” one DanceFixer says. Cutting loose in an ecstatic rush to a thumping beat, students say they sort out personal problems or, conversely, get away from them.
“Since the beginning of time people have moved together in groups,” says Yancey, who attends classes about three times a week. “Maypoles, dancing around a fire, they have a neurological impact equivalent to, if not stronger than, an antidepressant.”
That sense of shared catharsis and belonging is what pushes DanceFix from “really fun workout” into “way of life.”
DanceFix is also more focused on give-back than your typical get-fit program. From the start, the company has been so involved in pro-bono classes and workshops—for school-age kids, people with special needs, and burned-out caregivers, among many other programs and events, largely for underserved people—that last year it spun off the DanceFix Foundation, a nonprofit to focus solely on those efforts.
“I have always been aware of access to the arts and how expensive they are,” says Britt. “Without access, kids don’t have a chance to be exposed to the arts and express themselves artistically, or go and see an arts performance. That access is getting worse and worse for schools. DanceFix Foundation is a way to bridge that gap.”
Photograph by Jeremy Kramer
For years, Rhythm & Motion, and then DanceFix, partnered with and then rented space from Cincinnati Ballet, using its old facility on Central Parkway in OTR and then its former academy in Blue Ash before briefly moving to the Ballet’s new Gilbert Avenue digs. Britt’s relationship with the organization runs deep. For well over a decade she choreographed for it and served as education manager in the early aughts.
Cincinnati Ballet got much more than a fun tenant out of the deal. Dozens and possibly hundreds of DanceFixers discovered the company for the first time and would go on to become patrons. “We pulled an audience into the ballet space that would have been intimidated to even walk into a ballet building,” says Britt. “They saw that it’s not so elitist. They would buy tickets to see a performance, become donors, and send their kids to the ballet academy. It’s a struggle for ballet to attract younger and more diverse audiences.”
On top of that, DanceFixers flocked like groupies to anything Britt herself choreographed for Cincinnati Ballet and donated money in fund-raisers for her works in progress. “Everyone when they start has a crush on Heather,” says Yancey. “Her enthusiasm, her ability to pull in any kind of person on any level. They can bask in her glow. I don’t know that I’ve seen a personality like that in action before.”
Supersizing with about 19 instructors into two dozen classes and workshops per week, plus numerous pro-bono offerings, DanceFix (and its ancillary classes such as African dance, ballet, and tap) outgrew borrowed spaces. Britt searched for years for a permanent location that wasn’t in a strip mall, office park, or industrial area; it had to be in and of a neighborhood, she insisted, plus have parking.
A CVS store on McMillan Street in Walnut Hills that closed during the pandemic fit the bill. The landlord, Model Group, wanted a tenant that would complement the cultural and nonprofit institutions in what’s shaping into an arts corridor in Walnut Hills. (City Councilmember Mark Jeffreys is spearheading an initiative with neighborhood leaders to establish the Walnut Hills Art and Culture District, the city’s first such designation.) Model Group did a complete renovation of the building to accommodate DanceFix and set a rent that both parties believed would be sustainable. The building was designed to also accommodate event rentals.
“Heather is a game-changer for Walnut Hills,” says Matt Reckman, Model Group president of property management, who had already been working with Britt for a couple of years to find DanceFix a new space. “She’s a magnet for lots of people and good things. People and businesses want to be close to her. The power of that is huge.”
The economic impact of 500 or so students heading to DanceFix every week and then getting coffee, a meal, or groceries nearby after class is “unquantifiable,” he says. The studio boasts 3,800 square feet of unobstructed space grounded by a shock-absorbing “sprung” floor. Four bathrooms were custom decorated by Cincinnati artists under the leadership of art gadabout Pam Kravetz.
To tweak an aphorism, if you built it, they may or may not come. “Community” is a stew of good intentions that too often never reaches a boil. DanceFix has that friendly cohesiveness in spades inside its studio but strives for integration with neighborhood residents. “There’s a socioeconomic barrier here,” says Britt. “I couldn’t say we are accepting and welcoming of all people if I have to add ‘except if they can’t afford it.’ ”
On par with average yoga class prices, DanceFix costs $18 for a single session, with lower fees when a multi-class pass is purchased. These days, the nonprofit ensures that there is always some class for free on the schedule, from African dance to line dancing. Any resident of Walnut Hills can take a first class for free.
Photograph courtesy DanceFix
The pandemic killed many small businesses and wounded countless others. DanceFix became homeless when Cincinnati Ballet’s buildings closed to the public in 2020. Intrepid as ever, Britt led socially distanced classes in parking lots and parks, even when there was snow on the ground. Students wore T-shirts that said “DanceFix skips around” and “DanceFix is on the move.”
Another blow landed in 2022: Britt was diagnosed with breast cancer. “I didn’t know how I would handle DanceFix because I’m the leader,” she says. “I’m not used to showing vulnerability.”
She kept the news secret as long as she could. “We did seven flash mobs while I was going through treatment, plus the Northside Fourth of July parade, without the students knowing,” she says, recalling that she wore a turban during BLINK. “I was negotiating with Model Group with no hair.” By the second round of treatments, there was no hiding that she’d also lost her eyebrows and eyelashes. In a surprise to no one, she danced and taught throughout her treatment. In an e-mail to students, she shared her diagnosis but asked them not to turn class into a pity party. “I didn’t want people to be like, ‘Oh no!’ and worry about me.”
Other instructors would jump in when Britt needed to take a break during a class instruction. “DanceFix was such a big part of my healing,” she says. “It gave me a sense of normalcy, just showing up and having community there. For an hour I could forget what I was going through. Showing up to work is my purpose.”
Britt finished her treatments a year later, and the experience inspired her to offer DanceFix workshops to cancer survivors and caregivers. “We’ve seen about 1,600 people for 3,600 visits,” she says of the workshops offered to survivors, caregivers, schools, youth, and more. Such efforts now fall under the DanceFix Foundation umbrella so that participants don’t have to pay.
Photos of flushed, beaming students adorn a studio wall chronicling the company’s quarter-century history. In 2016, the layout notes, the Nashville Ballet started DanceFix classes. Kansas City Ballet began offering it in 2023. “I see it growing into more cities,” Britt says. “I have been approached about franchising, but I worry about a watered-down product. You see them crash and burn, and I need to protect the brand. I always lead with that.”
Indeed, it’s been a struggle to get DanceFix in other cities to look like it does here. Can the concept expand beyond the tri-state without Britt on site?
“I don’t expect it to take off overnight,” says Devon Carney, who was associate artistic director of the Cincinnati Ballet until being hired for the top spot at Kansas City Ballet. He brought DanceFix classes to the KC Ballet about two years ago. “It’s still in its infancy. I dream of the day when we have 50 people in class.”
Similarly, Nashville Ballet, which has licensed DanceFix for a decade, still struggles to attract the kind of numbers—and energy levels—of its Cincinnati parent. “It took six months for the community here to understand the format,” says Shabaz Ujima, community engagement teaching artist who leads a handful of sessions per week. “We’re not as rowdy or diverse. We’re tame compared to Cincinnati. You’re crazy up there.”
In its capacious new home in Walnut Hills, DanceFix can accommodate its swelling number of “crazy” dancers. The DanceFix Foundation will mount its largest public event on May 6 with Kids Dance Day, when hundreds will boogie together in Eden Park. Expansion beyond the Queen City, however, may be a tough leap. Like goetta or three-way chili, DanceFix might be one of those specialties that locals can’t get enough of but others don’t quite get.
Britt, 53, would like the foundation to “be around forever,” thinking about how to make it sustainable in the years ahead. But she isn’t a hood ornament; she’s the engine of DanceFix. It’s unclear if satellites can gain traction without her close by at the helm.
“DanceFix is about the space, the people, and the community. It’s not about Heather,” says Yancey. She pauses and adds, “Even though it is really about her.”
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