KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Two Kansas City women who are moms and neighbors now have followers all over the globe all from deciding to start dancing in their garage.
They dance like no one is watching while hundreds of thousands are. I sat down with them to ask them how this all got started and to try to dance along with them!
“We’re neighbors but it wasn’t until the 2020 lockdown that we actually formed a friendship,” Shuffle Mama Anna Blanc told me. “Christina and her husband were leading socially different workouts for our neighborhood.”
“I said, ‘Anna would you learn this dance with me?’” Christina Reynolds told me when I asked them how they got started.
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Four years later, as The Shuffle Mamas, they have over 300,000 followers on TikTok. Then they say they joined Instagram a few months ago where they now have more than 500,000 followers.
“I’m confused, we’re literally shocked,” laughed Reynolds.
“I think there’s maybe something about our age group is on Instagram for more 30s, 40s, 50s,” Blanc says. That’s where I found them before I knew the lived in the Kansas City area!
They showed me the basic steps and it took no time to understand why it’s so fun.
They say they had no real dance experience when they started and began studying other shufflers online who have now become friends.
“The whole EDM world, electronic dance music world, is very supportive and accepting. And there's a lot of love, so I think it's a very safe context to dip your toe in.” Reynolds says.
And Anna and Christina have become closer friends through it all.
“There’s something bonding about learning something brand new with someone you don’t know very well. That vulnerability,” Blanc told me.
Now they’re business partners too, even launching an online introductory class to shuffling and say they have people taking their class from all over the world.
“And to get to share that with other women has been such a gift. I feel so grateful,” Blanc said. “We started filming just so we could see ourselves because we didn’t have a mirror.”
“But then I was like, you know what? Let’s put it on TikTok!” laughed Christina.
Besides polishing their dance skills, not a lot has changed since they started in their garage.
“We literally just got a tripod recently,” Blanc told me. “We could have never made this happen on our own. It's kind of like authenticity drives it from the beginning, just being real, being ourselves.”
“We are laughing the whole time when we're dancing," Blanc added. "I mean laughing at ourselves and joking. It's a blast. Every single time, it's a blast.”
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