Hip and Hoppin’ : At Mel Jackson’s Laguna Beach Studio, Black-Clad Students Make an Aerobic Workout Look Like a Night on the Town
All Kim Morse wanted to do was dance.
The smoke, the crowds, the pressure of the club scene--she didn’t need any of that stuff. It was the groove, the sweat, the endorphin rush she couldn’t do without.
She found exactly what she was looking for--in an aerobics class. Six years ago, Morse walked into Mel Jackson’s Laguna Beach studio. Now, it’s virtually a home away from home for the 22-year-old Laguna Niguel resident. “The atmosphere is incredible,” Morse said. “You can’t find anything like it anywhere.”
The studio, at the anonymous gray concrete site of the former Club Postnuclear on Laguna Canyon Road, is decked out like a hip nightspot, replete with a movable stage, computerized light system, state-of-the-art sound, and, of course, the ubiquitous dangling disco ball.
On Friday night, the line between aerobic exercise and busting a serious move blurs even further, according to Jackson. “It’s the whole nightclub scene with the fog and the lights . . . it’s intense,” he said. “The moves are a little bit more . . . everyone just lets it out. And a lot of the students (prefer it to dancing in a club) because they don’t have to worry about people smoking or somebody asking them to dance, or not asking them to dance.”
Then there’s the dress code, which also contributes to the clubby mystique. Jackson requires his students to wear only black, which fashion-wise, ranges from basic butt-grabbing black Lycra shorts and sneakers to gangsta-style denim hip-huggers and clunky ankle-high Dr. Martens.
Jackson said he opted for a code as an homage to the discipline of traditional dance. “It’s also like being on a team,” he said. “You know, like a baseball team has the same uniforms. This minimizes our competitiveness.”
Besides, said Lee Westmaas, a 29-year-old UC Irvine graduate student, it looks really cool. “When you’re on the floor and everybody’s dancing, it makes it feel even more like you’re performing.”
Sound pretentious? Au contraire. “It’s really intimidating at first,” said Morse. “But it’s really low-key. It’s not a scene, it’s not a meat market, it has no attitude.”
Although Westmaas--an occasional nightclubber who lists the Boom Boom Room in Laguna Beach and Metropolis in Irvine as his favorite hangs--lifts weights at a gym, he comes to Jackson’s studio to cut the rug. “It has that club atmosphere, but of course, you’re there more for the dancing and the steps,” he said. “I love dancing, and that’s what made this really attractive for me because you feel like you’re a part of a dance troupe.”
But if it ain’t no disco, it isn’t quite the Family Fitness Center, either. The icy nihilism prevalent at most cookie-cutter gyms is refreshingly absent. “There’s no pickup pressure,” said Morse. “At Family Fitness, everyone can check you out. Here, everyone is focused on what they’re doing.”
And--shudder--people actually talk to each other here, a contrast to the unofficial no-eye-contact- allowed-except-to-check-out-my-bitchen-workout-clothes policies of most gyms.
“The first thing that struck me was that people are super-duper friendly,” said Westmaas. “They really make you feel a part of the team.”
Ironically, Westmaas ran into a fellow Family Fitness member on a recent Sunday. “I’ve seen him for probably two or three years and I never once said ‘hi,’ ” he said. But within the cheerful confines of Jackson’s Vukudo aerobics class, they’re like old chums.
On yeah, there’s one more thing: These aren’t the aerobics classes Jane Fonda taught you. You know, the same old tired routines and music that hasn’t changed since 1985.
Jackson was all too familiar with those classes--he used to teach them. Before starting his studio seven years ago, Jackson, 38, taught up to 32 classes a week at clubs around Orange County. “I had to make it more fun for myself,” he said. “I had to keep myself from getting bored.”
A unique blend of hip-hop-meets-the-Temptations choreography and exhaustive aerobic workout, Jackson’s classes are never boring. In fact, rarely are any two of them alike.
Jackson vows that the minute his classes become predictable (he teaches two daily), he’ll hang up his Reeboks. Offering up-to-the-second dance moves and music, the classes have names like Funkinetics (hip-hop), Choreofunk (street dance, MTV style) and Vukudo, which is derived from the Swahili word for “sweat.” In the past, some classes were augmented by musicians banging on drums, keyboards, bass and other instruments.
The workout itself is like a scene from a dinner-show audition for “A Chorus Line,” except that the class kicks out the jams to tribal house and funk while banging on a tambouring. People of all ages, shapes, and sizes jump, chant, and shake their tail feathers and tambourines to the pulsing beat of really loud dance music.
Jackson, a small man with a lithe, muscular frame, would get lost amid all the grooving bods were it not for his white tank top and tambourine to contrast the black-clad class. (“The privates wear the fatigues,” he said, “and they know who the captain is.”)
His teaching method is of the do-as-I-do-and-not-as-I-say school. “It’s nonverbal,” he explained. “I give people a chance to feel the music.”
The sound of the shimmering tambourines is like an incessant rhythmic snake that gives the music an ominous texture, as well as giving the bodies holding them a surprisingly strenuous upper-body workout.
“To keep them on the program you have to provide something to keep them interested,” Jackson said. “If it’s the same moves, the same music, especially if it’s the same instructor, they’ll get tired of that. And since I’m a one-man show, so to speak, I always have to come up with something different. I want people to come in and say, ‘I don’t know what he’s going to do next.’ ”
Jackson’s ever-changing moves have certainly kept Morse and a loyal coterie of participants that range from ages 9 to 62 happily off-balance and engaged. “I have never dripped sweat like I have at Mel’s,” Morse said. “Mel has a way of pushing you farther than you could ever imagine.”
But no one seems to mind. Despite the intensity of the movement, you never feel like a dunce if you don’t get it, unlike most aerobics classes, in which those who can’t keep up with the instructor are made to feel like hopeless clods. “Mel’s really helpful if you can’t get the rhythm or the right moves,” Westmaas said. “He’ll come over and take you through it step by step until you’re with the group.”
Members of Jackson’s classes even get to put on a show once a year for their friends and family. “They’ll never audition for a Janet Jackson-type performance,” Jackson said. “But it gives them a chance to feel like a performer. They feel comfortable because they know everyone here, and I make sure everyone looks good.”
Morse will second that. “He makes the (most) offbeat person have a rhythm.”
What more can you ask for, really?