Stillness is not a natural state for Kristin Sudeikis, a 47-year-old choreographer who began dancing at the age of 3. But a recent occasion demanded it of her.
On a Thursday afternoon in early January, Ms. Sudeikis was standing still inside Forward Space, the studio she owns in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, as lighting and sound tests took place around her. She was preparing to film short exercise videos that will be released on Oprah Winfrey’s website, Oprah Daily, in February.
The next morning, Ms. Sudeikis was back in that same windowless room, about the size of a large garage. But the atmosphere was less serene. Forty other women had crammed into the mirror-walled space to take one of her loosely choreographed dance-cardio classes.
To the beats of Beyoncé and Missy Elliott songs, Ms. Sudeikis led the women through a vigorous 50-minute routine from an elevated platform. Occasionally, she jumped into the crowd, directing its members as they furiously channeled their inner backup dancers before their 5-foot-7 instructor, who has sandy-blond hair.
Among the women was Alexandra Niakani, an owner of the restaurants Ernesto’s and Bartolo in Manhattan, who left the studio soaked in sweat. She has been coming to Forward Space regularly since 2019, the year after it opened, to dance with Ms. Sudeikis, who is now one of 18 instructors at the studio. Its classes start at $40 and can incorporate techniques from contemporary, house, jazz and even theatrical dance.
Ms. Niakani, 33, comes to Forward Space as much for her mental health as for any physical benefits, she explained. “Life is so uncontrollable, and this allows you to shed some of that stress and anxiety, and really shake it off,” she said. “I come out as a different person.”
New York has become crowded with boutique fitness businesses, and the concept of dance as exercise is not novel. Fans of Ms. Sudeikis and Forward Space say that her studio is appealing for some of the same reasons as others, including that it offers a community — one that has attracted people like the model and entrepreneur Molly Sims, the actress Abigail Spencer and the television journalist Gayle King of CBS, who is also an editor at large at Oprah Daily.
But for many of Forward Space’s mostly female fans, it has a bigger draw: Ms. Sudeikis, whose magnetism rivals her passion for dance. While her Forward Space classes involve various styles of movement, they are defined less by any genre than by a certain vibe, which invites comparisons to an old saying: Dance like no one is watching.
In the dimness of the studio, people with varying levels of experience can move together at different speeds and harness the mindfulness that dance can offer — or the “internal connect,” as Ms. Sudeikis put it in an interview. “There’s a personal, but almost universal, desire to connect back to ourselves, and to do it through music and movement, which is the most primal,” she said.
Brooke Baldwin, a television anchor formerly of CNN, said that Ms. Sudeikis was “one of those people you want to be near.”
“She’s not of this world,” Ms. Baldwin, a longtime Forward Space fan, added. “Not of this plane.”
Dr. Megan Poe, 51, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Brooklyn, was in the recent class with Ms. Niakani. Dr. Poe, a former adjunct professor at New York University, met Ms. Sudeikis in a yoga class before Forward Space had opened. She later invited Ms. Sudeikis as a guest lecturer to her class. Dancing, Dr. Poe said, affects neuroplasticity, or “the ability to rewire ourselves.”
“Visionary,” “revolutionary” and “living legend” were all terms she used to describe Ms. Sudeikis, who also has a dance company, Kristin Sudeikis Dance, and whose career has spilled over into the worlds of fashion, entertainment and sports.
Ms. Sudeikis has choreographed (and sometimes directed) music videos for the singer-songwriter Ben Harper, and for the band Mumford & Sons. Her dance company has staged sold-out performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She has taught movement exercises at the White House — during the 2016 Easter Egg Roll hosted by the Obamas — and has collaborated with brands including Nike, Chanel and Prada, for which she worked on a recent fragrance campaign featuring the actress Emma Watson.
Ms. Sudeikis, who lives in Brooklyn, also has a certain charisma in her blood. The actor Jason Sudeikis, 50, is her brother, and the actor George Wendt, who died last year and who was best known for playing Norm Peterson on “Cheers,” was her maternal uncle.
She grew up as the middle of three children in Overland Park, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City, Mo. Her younger sister, Lindsay Sudeikis, 45, is a spiritual counselor. Even as some in her family pursued careers in Hollywood, Ms. Sudeikis never set out to be a celebrity, she said. “I didn’t identify with that,” she said over tea at Ludlow House on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. “I only thought about dancing.”
Her brother, who performed Ms. Sudeikis’s choreography with Tina Fey in an episode of “30 Rock,” put it this way in an interview: “She’s here to dance.”
“It’s like she arrived with that understanding,” Mr. Sudeikis added of his sister. He was speaking on a call from London, where he was filming “Ted Lasso.” “It wasn’t to be famous; it wasn’t to make money. It was literally to dance.”
Both of Ms. Sudeikis’s siblings remembered the time when their sister, as a fifth grader, choreographed a performance starring seventh and eighth graders. Back then, Ms. Sudeikis’s after-school practices at the Miller Marley School of Dance and Voice in Overland Park could last several hours, ending as late as 9:30 p.m., her sister recalled.
At 13, Ms. Sudeikis won a summer scholarship to attend the Broadway Dance Center in Manhattan. “I always knew I’d be dancing once I came here,” she said, referring to New York City. “I felt like I’d been here before.”
Years later, when Ms. Sudeikis was a senior studying dance and kinesiology at the University of Kansas, she chose not to finish college and instead loaded her belongings into a truck and moved to New York. Michelle Opperman, 47, Ms. Sudeikis’s best friend since childhood, was also pursuing dance in the city.
“She always had her eye on the prize,” Ms. Opperman, now a health coach in San Francisco, said of Ms. Sudeikis, who worked as a bartender at Webster Hall in Manhattan as she pursued a dance career. She also worked as a nanny and taught dance classes at places like Peridance and Crunch Fitness.
It was at Crunch where Julie Rice, a founder of SoulCycle, took a class led by Ms. Sudeikis in the mid 2010s. In 2015, Ms. Sudeikis started teaching classes at the cycling studio. “Kristin’s ability to inspire is just so big,” Ms. Rice said. “I kept hearing her name,” she added. “I’m a former talent agent, and I was looking for new instructors.”
Through SoulCycle and Ms. Rice, who is now the chief experience officer at WeightWatchers, Ms. Sudeikis got her White House gig. “You can teach people to ride bikes, but you can’t teach that kind of magic,” Ms. Rice said of Ms. Sudeikis.
Starting a studio of her own after years of teaching at others’, Ms. Sudeikis said, had a lot to do with her audiences’ reactions to the dance shows she was staging during that time. “I was seeing more and more people who just wanted to dance,” she said. “Coming out to do the curtain calls, wherever you’d look around, you can see everyone wants to feel that.”
In addition to its SoHo studio, Forward Space has had a pop-up in the Hamptons for the last several summers (it is expected to return this year). More locations are on Ms. Sudeikis’s agenda, she said, along with a book project about “how we dance with life, and how life is a dance.”
With Forward Space, Ms. Sudeikis also wanted to provide professional dancers with a place to go between auditions and training. Rachel Warren, 40, an instructor and Forward Space’s vice president for operations, is one of several dancers from Ms. Sudeikis’s company who were founding members of the studio. Nicole Morris, 33, a dancer who has performed with Ms. Sudeikis, also worked with her at Forward Space in its early days.
When she danced under Ms. Sudeikis’s instruction, Ms. Morris said, there were “ways that I have moved that I’ve never experienced before.” Of Ms. Sudeikis, she added, “It’s the energy she creates in the room.”
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