Photographed By Bill Ecklund
This past January, dance studio teacher Jasmin Pantoja learned a new dance step, that is, stepping into the role of studio owner. The instructor at the former Move It Studio, in downtown Lancaster, became the space’s new owner. She renamed it Mambojaz Studio, reflecting her deep love for Latin dance and her cultural heritage.
Much like her grace on the dance floor, the move was a natural transition in a life immersed in dance and music. Pantoja was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, to parents of Puerto Rican ancestry. Her father was a musician in a salsa band in the 1970s, and her mom, she remembers fondly, loved to dance. “She never took dance classes or anything like that, but she loved to dance. The music would be playing, and my mom would be twirling,” Pantoja recalls, “and we would be twirling together.”
When Pantoja was 9 years old, she began taking dance classes at the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club. It was there that she fell in love with dance, learning all of its forms, including jazz, modern, salsa, mambo, hip-hop, ballet and African. It was also there, learning and performing until she graduated from high school, that she studied and worked with Maria and Eddie Torres, legendary figures in the world of mambo, and performed with Tito Puente and in the National Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City.
Live a life in dance and you learn that dance often mirrors the life you live. If dance has its bursts of spirited energy, it also has moments of stillness, the pause between steps. Pantoja has lived them both, and it was after high school that she stood still before her next move. In this transition time, Pantoja stopped dancing, got married, moved to Lancaster, became a stay-at-home mom and faced the challenges of both uterine cancer and lymphocytopenia, a condition affecting the white blood cells. The medications caused her weight to reach almost 300 pounds.
Slowly, she began to recover and find her way back through social dance, rediscovering the Latin dance community she missed so much. The catalyst that changed her life was a request to put together a 45-minute Latin dance program at the 2022 One World Festival. One of the festival’s biggest donors is the Lancaster County Community Foundation—where Marie Cleaves Rothacker, the former owner of Move It Studio, just happened to work.
“She approached me afterwards,” Pantoja says, “and she was like, ‘Who are you? Where have you come from? Why don't I know you?’ Because she knows so many people in the dance community out here, [but] she didn't know who I was.”
Rothacker asked if she would be willing to come to the studio and teach a class. Pantoja took her up on the offer, and her classes quickly grew bigger. Soon, she and Rothacker began talking about Pantoja becoming the owner of the studio.
The other driving force that led her back to her life’s passion was the death of her father prior to being asked to take part in the festival.
Photographed By Bill Ecklund
"Live A Life In Dance & You Learn That Dance Often Mirrors The Life You Live."
“My dad ended up in the hospital suddenly, and he never came back out,” she says. “One of the last conversations I actually had with him, we were talking about dance. He asked me, ‘Why aren't you dancing anymore?’” When Pantoja explained to him that she couldn’t find anything for herself in the Lancaster area, he urged her on: “‘Then you need to make a home for yourself.’” A month later, she got the call to participate in the festival, and, as she says, “the rest was history.”
Now the owner of Mambojaz, Pantoja hopes that adults in the community never find themselves in the place she was when she told her father why she wasn’t dancing. She wants them to know that there’s a community of dancers here, and it’s thriving and welcoming. “I want to make sure that health and movement and fitness are here for all ages, all levels, all types. There really is something for everyone here,” she says. To that end, Mambojaz will be part fitness, part pure dance, keeping the most popular fitness classes while adding more dance classes for adults, more Latin-based dance, and performance recitals.
Pantoja’s “something for everyone” inclusiveness has a deeper dimension tempered by her own experiences in dance. “I’m a plus-sized girl … I feel like being more thick is more accepted now,” she says. “And I felt that Latin dance was always a little bit more forgiving with being curvy. And I think that’s another reason why I connected with it,” she adds passionately. “I’m just really hoping that this is some place that can grow and continue to be a home to any adult who feels that movement is something that they would love to do, but didn’t think they could do. I want them to understand that, whatever it is that they choose, whether it's fitness classes or it’s dance classes, that they can come in as they are, and we’re here to accept them the way that they are. … We’re not here to change them. We’re just here to make them stronger.”
Photographed By Bill Ecklund
One thing Pantoja doesn’t dance around is her belief in the power of community and friendships born in the studio, in a sense, the way it speaks to the whole person, to mental as well as physical well-being. “People utilize movement and dance and fitness … as a way to let go of a lot of things that they go through in life,” she says, “and sometimes, this is the outlet that they need, whether it’s through the movement or even just through the friends and the people that they meet.” She adds, “There’s something special and so much more intimate about coming to a small studio space and really feeling like part of a family.”
Mambojaz Studio
33 N Market St, Suite 200, Lancaster | mambojazstudio.com
