On a Thursday evening in a converted warehouse on Pine Flat City's east side, fourteen dancers are practicing pirouettes into hair-whips—a combination that would confuse a 1950s jazz purist and thrill a TikTok choreographer. The room echoes with the percussive snap of bodies dropping into second-position pliés, then rebounding into contemporary floor work. This is Groove Central's advanced "Jazz Fusion" class, and it is never full for long.
Three years ago, this 4,200-square-foot space did not exist. Pine Flat City, a municipality of 34,000 with one small community theatre program and no dedicated dance conservatory, had no professional-grade studio offering jazz training beyond recreational after-school classes. When Ava Martinez, a former Radio City Rockette, opened Groove Central in 2021, 47 students enrolled in the first month. Today, the studio serves 210 dancers aged six to sixty-two, with a waitlist of 34 for its teen competitive program.
Filling a Gap in Pine Flat City's Arts Landscape
Martinez moved to Pine Flat City in 2019 after her husband took a position at the regional medical center. She had intended to commute to teach at studios in the nearest major city, forty miles south. Instead, she found a steady stream of parents asking when someone with her background would open something local.
"I kept hearing, 'My kid wants to do more than recital ballet, but I'm not driving an hour each way for classes,'" Martinez said. "There was this whole population of kids who wanted technical training in a style that actually reflects what working dancers do right now. Jazz was the obvious hole."
The studio's curriculum is built around three tracks: Classic Jazz, which emphasizes Fosse-style isolations, turned-in knees, and precise musicality; Commercial Jazz, focused on performance quality and industry audition skills; and Jazz Fusion, where Martinez and her instructors layer in hip-hop influences, contemporary floor work, and rhythmic improvisation. Students in the competitive track rehearse up to eight hours weekly and have placed in the top five at three state-level competitions since 2022.
The Instructors Behind the Training
Groove Central's six-person teaching roster is notably credentialed for a studio its size. Martinez hired Marcus Chen, who toured with Ariana Grande from 2019 to 2022, to lead the Commercial Jazz track and a weekly "Jazz for Auditions" workshop. Denise Okonkwo, a twelve-year veteran of three Broadway ensembles including Chicago and Mean Girls, directs the musical theatre jazz program. Two additional instructors hold BFA degrees in dance; the remaining staff are local working choreographers with credits in regional theatre and music video work.
Chen's audition class, which capped at twenty students within hours of registration opening last spring, uses actual combinations he was asked to perform in casting rooms. Okonkwo structures her musical theatre track around the reality of ensemble work: learning to pick up choreography quickly, adapting to different choreographers' vocabularies, and sustaining eight-show-week energy.
"The difference here is that nobody is pretending," said Okonkwo, who moved to Pine Flat City specifically to join the studio. "These kids are training for an actual field. We're not doing cute recital pieces."
From Studio to Community Anchor
Groove Central hosts six major community events annually, including quarterly open dance nights that draw 80 to 120 attendees and a charity showcase each December. The 2023 showcase raised $8,400 for the Pine Flat City Arts Council's youth scholarship fund. Martinez also partners with two local high school dance teams for free masterclasses; both schools had previously lacked funding to bring in guest artists.
The Pine Flat City Arts Council has taken notice. Council director James Whitfield, who has overseen local arts funding for eleven years, said Groove Central's emergence shifted how the city thinks about dance infrastructure.
"Before 2021, if you asked me about dance education in Pine Flat City, I would have pointed to one youth ballet school and some park district classes," Whitfield said. "Now we have a studio producing competitive-level dancers, bringing in working professionals from out of state, and creating performance opportunities that didn't exist here. That's a genuine expansion of what this town's arts ecosystem can support."
What Students Say
For many families, Groove Central's impact is measured in access and transformation. Elena Voss, 16, started in the beginner classic jazz program at age 13 after elementary ballet classes left her uninterested. She is now a member of the studio's senior competitive team and is applying to BFA dance programs.
"I didn't know I could be serious about dance until I came here," Voss said. "The training is hard. You'll get corrected in front of everyone. But for the first time, I felt like I was being treated like a real dancer,
