The first hint that this isn’t your ordinary aerobics dance class is the bare feet. Everyone in the Pleasant Hill studio — instructor and students — has shucked off their shoes.
Next clue: Instructor Kellie Chambers reminds students that the practice known as Nia invites them to follow the forms and to embrace freedom. She’s got the routine; they’ve got the power.
There’s plenty of room to move to a different drummer in Nia, a fusion that includes dance, martial arts and healing arts. In between the cha cha and the grapevine steps, punches and kicks will be thrown. There will be the slow katas of tai chi and subtle guidance on more efficient ways to move. And there will be all kinds of music: pop, new age, electronic, jazz, disco, world, folk, Indigenous.
Newcomers often show up focused on getting fit, but under Chambers’ guidance they’ll discover something unexpected: Nia’s arc bends toward joy.
NIA — which stands for Neuromuscular Integrative Action, and is pronounced NEE-ya — has been around for 40 years. It’s the brainchild of Debbie and Carlos Rosas, California-based aerobics instructors who found great success with their Bod Squad studios in the late ’70s and early ’80s. That was the era of “no pain, no gain” when trainers urged participants to “feel the burn” as they exercised.
But things changed for Debbie Rosas when she reached out to a martial arts teacher, a sensei, to learn about the belt system used to recognize the skill level of its participants.
“I had students who had been with me for six years and I wanted to celebrate their years of dedication,” she says. Things changed when she visited a dojo and followed the common practice of martial arts participants — going barefoot.
“My whole body woke up,” she says. “It was taking off my shoes that awakened me to the joy of being in my body. So that became the first principle of Nia, joy of movement.” She also adopted a belt training regimen for students who wanted to go deeper.
Today Debbie and Carlos Rosas have parted ways, and Nia’s headquarters is in Portland. Under Rosas’ guidance Nia has added other principles to the joy of movement. Participants are encouraged to get to know what works for them on the dance floor. “Your body, your way,” is an in-class mantra. “No pain, no gain” has no place in Nia.
Dancers instead seek what they call “dynamic ease.” Instructors demonstrate a range of ways to execute the steps. That helps dancers find their own sweet spots, moving in ways that don’t stress joints and tendons, or lead to injury. And each routine makes time for free dancing so people can move to the music however they want to. Classes include people of all sizes and ages. Some people participate from a chair. In Nia, it’s all good.
Chambers has been teaching for 11 years. And while her Pleasant Hill studio, nestled in the mall off Highway 58, might appear as a little bit of a backwater in the world of dance aerobics, her reach is global. Nia’s 1,200 instructors teach in 41 countries, and Chambers teams up with others to offer dance retreats in Bali, Costa Rica, and even Cambodia.
Also a choreographer, she has created Nia routines that are part of a catalog available to all instructors. Videos of the routines are also available online for those who don’t have access to nearby classes. “Alchemy,” the newest piece she co-created with Debbie Lee Van Ginkel, her Cambodia colleague, will be available in September.
Ensuring that each routine draws from dance, martial arts and healing arts, that it starts slowly, increases in energy and then eases off, and that the music supports and inspires the movements is no simple task, Debbie Rosas says.
“Normally what happens is when I see a body of work I have to go back and work with the choreographers,” she says. “Oftentimes they’re not listening to the music. The music is not bringing the moves to life or the moves are not bringing the music to life.”
But that wasn’t the case with the piece that Chambers and Van Ginkel created.
“This body of work is advanced in its musicality and the integration of the music with the movements. It’s a sophisticated routine that really pays attention to sound detail and movement detail,” Rosas says.
Chambers, who teaches eight hour-long classes in a six-day work week, fell in love with Nia when she first encountered it. A lifelong dancer, the realities of daily living — marriage and raising children — had pulled her away from the dance world. After a back injury, she heard about a class and thought it would be a good fit for her as she recovered.
“It was a Nia class; it was like a lightning bolt hit me and it was like ‘welcome back home.’ It was profound,” she says, “I felt connected and energized all at the same time, and after class when it was over I immediately wanted to do it again.”
Chambers is not Eugene’s only Nia teacher. There are several, including Dael Parsons, who has also been teaching for 11 years and has a studio just south of downtown. Like Chambers, Parsons was immediately drawn to Nia after her first experience of it.
“I took a class. I loved it. I took another class and that night I had a lucid dream that I was being born onto the dance floor,” she said.
It’s hard to say how many practitioners of Nia there are, but at the Eugene Y, the numbers are growing, says Beth Casper, vice president of community engagement. When the new YMCA opened in December 2023, it offered two Nia classes. In January the two classes attracted 130 participants. Since then the Y has added two more classes, and in June the four classes had attracted 221 participants.
Parsons has also seen the number of students in her classes grow, in part because during the pandemic she moved her sessions to a nearby park, and more people got to see Nia dancers moving to music. Parsons, a myofascial release therapist, says what’s different about Nia is its focus on pleasure.
“It’s radical,” she said. “This is a radical act to allow yourself to prioritize pleasure.”
Students, for their part, say they have found a practice that goes beyond fitness.
“Nia has so many layers to it that I appreciate,” says Susan Lesyk, who has been dancing with Chambers for a decade. “When we dance, I feel really energized, like my inner child is expressing itself with the freedom that kind of movement offers me. And then when we move into martial arts, I’m practicing ways of protecting my body from harm if I needed to, and then when we relax and focus on healing arts, I’m quietly listening to my body so there’s both energy and respect.”