You’re going to feel stupid, Angela Trimbur promised.
It was a Sunday and Trimbur, a dancer and choreographer in a Jane Fonda-worthy leotard from the 80s, was leading a class in a studio in midtown Manhattan. Nearly 50 people were lured in by her pitch: an afternoon squirmed away in unserious but very deliberate movement. The goal, Trimbur said, was to reach the buzz of kids putting on a backyard dance show.
“We’re even, we’re 13, and we’re just going to do some crazy choreography to show our parents before dinner,” she said. “That’s the atmosphere.”
To ease the brakes, Trimbur suggested some yelling. And hug a stranger. Dancers — dressed in everything from ballet slippers with ripped tights to Converse and knee pads — were instructed to run across the room, wail in the face, and then hug. I joined: it felt great and powerful and quite ridiculous. The energy was equal parts gym class in eighth grade and righteous affirmation.
Then came the routine, on a 1986 synthy cover of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” “I don’t do counts,” Trimbur said, instructing us to slap our buttocks, roll on the floor, kick, punch, and turn. Her references were less Balanchine and more “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” – she also choreographs for faces. “For information about wild IS dancing,” she wrote in her newsletter.
The kind of intuitive move that Trimbur champions, low-stakes and accessible, found new audiences during the pandemic, as dancers and dance teachers migrated online. Ryan Heffington — the pop choreographer whose Los Angeles studio, the Sweat Spot, helped foster a ‘come on, come on’ dance culture there — had tens of thousands of followers (including Trimbur) in his Instagram Live sessions during the early lockdown. Even eminences like Debbie Allen stepped two steps before the feed and found an unexpected communion, though everyone literally danced alone.
Among this thriving crop of teachers and influencers, and the legions of creators making their moves into memes on TikTok, 40-year-old Trimbur stands out. Buoyed by an intimate, self-revealing aesthetic, she smoothly navigates from sweaty group class to phone screen to ambitious project – dance is her public palliative to physical and emotional upheaval. And yet she makes it fun.
“With her, it’s really the endorphins, the feeling that you’re in love, kind of, that she can induce,” said filmmaker Miranda July, a friend and collaborator. Evan Rachel Wood, another friend and creative partner, trusts her unconditionally: “I would privately make my own dance videos and edit and play them,” she said, “but I would never show it to anyone — except Angela, because that’s the energy Angela brings. It’s about authenticity.”
A lavish-looking dance short, “Unauthorized,” which Trimbur choreographed and Wood directed, but has yet to be released, is set to songs from Fiona Apple’s 2020 album “Fetch the Bolt Cutters.” In solos and with other performers, some traditional dance stars and some not, Trimbur leads in scenes about the Los Angeles cityscape and its dusty bare patches. It begins to move with sweet musical precision and turns into something wild, feminine and beautiful, transitioning into masculine-feminine power dynamics and rebirth. Wood and Trimbur created it as a way to deal with the pandemic and other issues, they said.
Trimbur’s work is full of empathy for people who, like her, strive, July said. “All they have is their own body, which doesn’t work perfectly and maybe let them down in a million different ways, and yet they live, and she lives, and that’s what the dance is about – that’s right there with her .”
That she unleashes all her ups and downs on Instagram has endeared her to nearly 100,000 followers. In the pandemic-driven social media dance boom, even established artists have broken new ground. Although Heffington is commercially successful, growing Sweat Spot for a decade (it closed during the pandemic), he said the overwhelming, global response to SweatFest, his Instagram series, has changed his life. It redefined for him what was possible to rid dance of its intimidation factor, turn it away from perfection and help its followers find the joy. (It also raised significant money for charity.)
“It’s not about how high you kick, your flexibility — none of these traditional rules or metrics matter, in this new wave of thinking and inclusive people,” said Heffington, who planned to quietly return to private teaching this month. , in a phone interview. “It’s just because you want to do it; that’s enough. Let’s lower the bar — let’s bury that bar — and allow everyone to come and just join in.”
In Los Angeles, where she lived until late last year, Trimbur had built a reputation as a community dance master, hosting “Slightly Guided Dance Parties” at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and summoning viral dance videos even before TikTok . (She’s also an actress and most recently played a roller-skating influencer on HBO Max’s dark comedy “Search Party.”) She created and led a women’s dance team for six years that performed at local basketball games, inspiring a fierce devotion among her aficionados and members. .
That crew and other friends enveloped her when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018 and underwent a mastectomy, chemotherapy, and then six reconstructions and related surgeries. She documented her treatment online, became an advocate for other cancer patients and established a support network through the video messaging app Marco Polo (about 500 people took part, she said).
Between Trimbur’s health and the pandemic, the dance crew fell apart. But after a shoot of ‘Search Party’ last summer, she fell in love with Brooklyn – ‘I’ve never felt so alive, you know? New York is magical” – she took 15 years of her West Coast life and her two cockatiels, and moved. Now she is reviving her career here, from a Bushwick loft that she decorates in high-gloss black and white to display on a 1980s nightclub There are multiple disco balls, Vogue magazines from 1981 fanned out atop a panther coffee table and a boxy white TV/VCR that had been in her nursery.When I met her at home for an interview, she appeared in a VHS of ‘Dirty Dancing’.
She choreographs in the studio-style mirrors she had installed, and teaches a Zoom dance fitness class—recently dubbed “apathetic aerobics,” in case you can’t handle the normal high workout fervor. (It’s set to emo.)
Trimbur is also developing a TV show about her life for a cable network, she said, with July as producer. They met when July cast her as a YouTube dancer in her 2011 film “The Future”; they later discovered a mutual affinity for real estate sales, and began secretly recording improvised scenes there.
“She’s a very special combination of innocent and blunt,” July said. “Sometimes she says something and then I just want to write it down, because it’s perfectly articulated, but not the therapy version of it, which is kind of rare these days.”
Trimbur grew up outside of Philadelphia, where her mother ran a dance studio – “When she picked up the phone, it would be like ‘Pitter Patter Dance Studio, where everyone is a star!'” Trimbur and her sister, Colleen, were the exemplary students, learning all the routines. But when Trimbur was about 12 years old, her mother became a Jehovah’s Witness, closed the studio, and took her children out of school. Trimbur’s formal dance education largely ended then, but she spent hours at home filming herself dancing – just like she does now.
“The way I like to think about dance is the version of myself that’s, like, stuck inside my living room, just dancing to Mariah Carey,” she said. “That’s what brings me joy, to just be free and not think about what the right step is.” Still, New York’s diverse dance scene opens up new possibilities, and Trimbur already has plans to take Broadway-style classes and deliver adult lectures in school auditoriums. (A Valentine’s Day dance event she hosted in front of Brooklyn’s Bell House sold out quickly.)
Dancing through and after cancer has been his own revelation. Hosting the “Slightly Guided Dance Parties” during chemo, she sometimes had to leave the stage to regain energy, she said, but she didn’t regret the performance. Dancing, she said, “is the way I talk to myself.” She and Wood made the Fiona Apple shortly before having her breast implants removed; as a dancer, Trimbur said, “they just felt like stapled Tupperware.” She also had her ovaries removed as part of the treatment, so the film is an emotional memento, one of her last appearances with her old body.
“It was palpable to see Angela dance — I completely understood that she processes things like that,” Wood said.
Trimbur begins her personal classes with students in a fetal position for a womb-like meditation, followed by listening closely to, say, Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful.” It’s not uncommon for people to cry, she said.
She wants to free them of those emotions when they start to wobble: “Get weirder, girls, get weirder!” praised them, in the class I attended.
In another class, she said, “there’s a part in the song where you throw yourself on the floor like a toddler” having a tantrum – “but the face is cute.”
“I just want to be able to make people laugh through dance without it being too much, like, toot, toot,” she told me, mimicking a dorky comedian with an air horn. There was a sense of gleeful desolation in that Manhattan studio—I’ve rarely seen so many students smile between reruns—as the screeching mingled with giggles.
Her New York dancers are already hooked. “It’s like a church,” says Chelsy Mitchell, 32, a dance newbie who has been coming weekly since Trimbur started her Sunday classes and an hour and a half from her home in the state. “Dance Therapy.”
Catherine McCafferty, a 20-year-old comedian and actor, had the weight of 18 years of ballet and other dance training when she first stepped into Trimbur’s studio that afternoon. She had come because she liked what she saw on Instagram, but she was also new to New York and nervous that she wouldn’t comply. Instead of feeling judged, she felt liberated. “The only eyes on you are a bunch of other people who want you to shine,” she said.
For Trimbur, that atmosphere of validation is paramount. “I get so frustrated when someone says something like, ‘I can’t dance,’ or when they say, ‘I’m the worst’ or ‘nobody wants to see me do that,'” she said. “It’s so sad because I know scientifically how happy you could be if you gave yourself permission to move.”
