31-year-old Julianne Hough has been on an epic journey of self-discovery, stripping down and learning new truths about herself from her first love: dance. Now she wants to change your life too.
At a spacious studio in Hollywood, a barefoot Julianne Hough is hyping up a group of
dancers auditioning to become trainers for a new workout method she’s created. Wearing shiny mauve leggings and a matching sports bra, she paces back and forth, doing her best to make eye contact with each person.
“We’re creating an environment that’s inclusive and where everyone is accepted,” says Julianne, eliciting cheers of Yayyyy! and I hear that! from the crowd. “That’s the world I want to live in.”
Dance has always been a part of Julianne’s life—she began competing at age 9 in her home state of Utah and went on to become a pro (and later a judge) on Dancing With the Stars. She landed her first lead acting role in the 2011 remake of Footloose, yet never really understood what dance gave her until recently.
“Dance is my superpower, and it has been my whole life, but I didn’t even know it,” she says. But others did. Before Julianne started choreographing what she calls her “high-sensory activated dance method,” she remembers people telling her they wanted to dance like her.
“What does that even mean?” she mused in an Instagram post earlier this year. “Do you want to do a high kick, pirouette into a split?” No. They wanted to dance without feeling self-conscious.
“I have no boundaries when I dance,” she says, now seated on a couch, snuggled up in a sweater and nursing a jug of lemon water.
For Julianne, dancing without limits is all about the mind-body connection. By creating her dance method, Kinrgy (kin as in family and kinesthetic, plus energy), she wants to encourage others to move freely and feel transformed.
Julianne’s own “massive transformation” started four months after her July 2017 wedding to professional hockey player Brooks Laich. Marriage was her big happy ending, she thought, but then she realized she wanted more. She needed to find her purpose. That purpose, it turns out, is helping lift others up through dance.
Her original idea for Kinrgy was straightforward: to create a class or app that would be like the SoulCycle of dance. But she ended up scrapping the idea; it didn’t feel substantial enough.
A meeting with Endeavor talent agency CMO Bozoma Saint John, who’d done Julianne’s method at a retreat and become hooked, was pivotal. She urged Julianne to think outside the box. “Let’s create a movement,” Saint John told her. “I was like, ‘I want to do that, but how?’ ” Julianne recalls. “You just do it,” Saint John replied. “The minute that happened, everything shifted for me,” says Julianne.
Expanding her reach—with plans for both a studio in Los Angeles and global events in which participants around the world will dance simultaneously—meant the practice had to be more accessible.
Designed for nondancers, the 45-minute method isn’t about perfecting the choreography—which does include moves such as “sexy lunges” and Magic Mike–like hip thrusts—but instead, moving in a way that’s nurturing to each individual.
And developing Kinrgy proved to be cathartic for Julianne, who says it’s helped her unpack some tough childhood experiences. “I’ve been de-layering all the survival tactics I’ve built up my whole life,” she says. “Now, I feel limitless.”
Her hope is that others will have a similarly life-changing experience when the method launches this year. “When I think about what I want to create, I want to help people connect back to their truest self. When that happens, they can relate to the people around them with no filter and experience the world how we’re supposed to experience it—in its most pure form, which I believe is love.”
Julianne recently got a crash course in the whole “no filter” thing in a different way, posing for the cover of this Naked Strength issue. “I didn’t want to do a demure shoot where I was trying to cover my body,” she says. “I wanted to do something where I was free.”
Though the America’s Got Talent judge says she’s never been shy when changing in front of other dancers, the photo shoot shifted her perspective. “Now I’m walking around naked all the time, and I love it!” she says.
- Photographed by Brian Bowen Smith
• Style Editor: Kristen Saladino
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