Dancing king? That's him (not me)

Times

10-07-2025

It's a warm Wednesday evening and I'm in a dance studio in central London, focused entirely on moving my body to the opening bars of Wannabe by the Spice Girls. I strut forward. I freeze. I jiggle my hips. I freeze again. I shimmy to the right, move my hands coyly yet alluringly over my face and torso, then shimmy to the left, do a spin before — and this is the bit I've been really struggling with — going on to my tiptoes, moving my knees together and thrusting my groin in time to the 'zig-a-zig-ahhhh'.
I can no longer remember how many times I've been through this short routine. Ten? Twelve? A million? I'm very tired. My left calf is shaking and twitching like a nervous pet and I'm sweating so much that, glancing at myself in the studio's mirrored wall, I look like a jogger who has fallen into a canal. Fortunately, none of the 40 or so middle-aged women around me seem to notice or care. There is only one man commanding their attention, and it is the diminutive Brazilian in a Spice Girls T-shirt, baseball cap and very short shorts who is leading the class. He moves before us with the kind of snappy, sassy physicality I now yearn to possess, and we attempt to mirror his every step and sashay. He sings along to the lyrics with a faint lisp. He goes on his tiptoes, moves his knees together and rapidly thrusts his groin. 'Thig-a-thig-ahhhh,' he cries, his face ecstatic. The music stops. The room goes wild.
His name is Justin Neto. He is a celebrity choreographer with more than six million followers across social media, but more than that, he is a sort of sociological phenomenon. Women — and I cannot stress this enough — absolutely love him, but particularly women in their mid-forties and beyond, who flock to the classes he runs in Rio and New York City. That he is, for the very first time, in London to offer a week of classes at $60 (£44) a ticket is incredibly exciting. One woman, Emma, has come all the way from Blackpool to be here tonight. 'I'd follow him on tour around the world if I could,' she says, breathless and endorphin-sozzled. She had seen clips of him teaching classes on her teenage daughter's Instagram and was immediately drawn to him. 'He's fun. He's energetic.'
Alexia is a 55-year-old who lives in New York and attends his classes there, but is visiting London so thought she'd do a class here too. 'He's like an injection of joy!' she says. 'It's escapism. And for a menopausal woman, having to learn all the moves has been a huge help for my brain.' Two sisters, Anna and Pippa, love that Neto plays 'our music, Eighties music'. Back on the dancefloor, a woman in a vest that reads 'No pain, no champagne' absolutely throws herself into the Footloose routine. Having spent much of my twenties as the only person on the dancefloor not on MDMA, tonight, in my forties, I am one of the few people not on HRT. There is only one other man present. What you doing here, I ask? 'Date night,' he says, nodding towards his wife. 'Her choice.' She smiles and thumps him affectionately.
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Neto admits that he is still coming to terms with his rise to stardom. For all his exuberance as a teacher he is, in person, thoughtful and reflective. Growing up in the Brazilian city of Joao Pessoa, he had been a 'shy, insecure' choirboy. But the first time he saw the video to Britney Spears' …Baby One More Time his entire world changed. He pestered his mother to buy him her CD, attempting to convince her that Spears was a godly, gospel singer, and does a very good impression of his mother looking at him sideways with suspicion. But the main thing is he wangled the CD.
'Britney Spears was my No 1 diva, my first dance teacher ever,' he says, describing how, when he had the family apartment to himself, he would practise Britney's moves in the living room for hours and hours. His shyness and insecurity gradually left him. One day his father came home early and caught him. He shouted at his son, telling him that what he was doing was wrong. ''No!' I told him,' Neto says, chin thrust upwards. ''It is not wrong!''
And that was that. He became a choreographer and, after a brief false start hosting a show on Brazilian cable TV, found himself in New York teaching dance classes, but not attracting as many students as he would have liked. For his final class of 2020, he encouraged everyone to come and, rather than doing a strict, technique-heavy choreography session, they would dress up in festive clothes and have a laugh dancing to Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You. He posted the video online with no expectations. 'And it went viral!' he says, eyes wide. Similar videos followed, and did even bigger numbers. 'I had comments in Japanese. I never got comments in Japanese before.'
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Looking back, the appeal was not hard to understand. In a world emerging from a pandemic slump, there was something potent and magnetic about the carefree communality of it all, groups of people being joyous and active and in close proximity. Over the past decade social media has changed the nature of choreography, with online tutorials allowing people to practise and repeat the moves they see, but also by placing a greater premium on the projection of personality rather than perfect technique. This all worked to Neto's advantage. His classes swelled, particularly with women who might previously have felt intimidated. And when these women began appearing in his clips, they only helped to attract more fans.
'Because in the videos it was mostly middle-aged women and women who look like me,' a woman in bright trainers called Claire tells me. 'It's like a huge group-hug experience that only women really get. Men in middle age need to conquer a 'personal best' challenge, like a triathlon or marathon. Women need to get together in groups to laugh and hold each other up. And that's just what Justin's classes do.'
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Neto, for his part, is alive to this fact. He is protective of the women who come to his classes, and while he stresses that he is not a therapist — 'If you need therapy, get therapy!' — he is touchingly in-tune with his clientele. 'When you're crossing your forties and moving into your fifties, your mind has a lot of things to manage, and there can be lots of changes coming and lots of everyday stress,' he says. Some women place a huge amount of pressure on themselves at this stage of life. 'So the music, the sound, the vibration is a good way to heal some of those expectations. It's an environment with no judgment.'
The class finishes with a huge blow-out to It's Raining Men. There are hugs and high-fives, and people queue for selfies with Neto. He teaches more than a dozen classes a week and though he says he needs to slow down to save his knees and back, I'm not sure his fans will let him. There are just too many happy, red-faced women floating into the night.
'I think,' he says quietly, after they have gone, 'that I have found my mission.'