House of Jit

House of Jit is a group of artists specializing in the Detroit-born dance style, known as “Jit”. House of Jit was founded in 2019, by three dancers who share a passion for carrying on the legacy of a dance phenomena deeply rooted in the city’s identity. Our work has helped keep a dance culture, crafted in our own neighborhoods alive and relevant, allowing us to plant seeds to create new opportunities for our future generations to thrive in. Over the years, we have held Jit workshops to spread awareness nationally and internationally in France, Bolivia, Canada, Los Angeles, and New York. Several dancers from our collective have been featured at events, such as: Red Bull, Footlocker, Snipes, the NBA, WNBA, Forbes Magazine, and on the television program So You Think You Can Dance, which has helped preserve a dance that has origins dating back to the 1970’s.

House of Jit’s mission is to share Jit with as many diverse populations as possible, which helps to foster a widespread awareness of this underrepresented and largely unknown Detroit dance culture. Using Detroit Jit as a vehicle to unite people of different socioeconomic backgrounds, we continuously share the heart of the city through our movement, one step at a time. Through initiatives that help connect a new Detroit to six decades worth of home-grown culture, we seek to give back to the community that helped birth and sustain a dance form that is instrumental to Detroit’s rich history of cultural production House of Jit has offered community engagement projects with non-profit organizations and has won grants in the field of dance/performing arts, such as the Kresge Fellowship and the Joyce Foundation. Recently, House of Jit produced a concert-length production “Rhythm of the Feet,” bringing artists throughout the Midwest and East Coast together, highlighting different rhythmic styles based around footwork. Looking to the future, we hope to obtain a dance studio/community space. As such, offering Detroit Jit classes to the greater Detroit community will not only help preserve this dance form, but offer the opportunity to help artists wanting to broaden their practice on a professional.

House of Jit reason for pushing the culture and our next phase.

The next phase for House of Jit is providing a studio space that offers dance classes for Detroit-birthed styles, for curating events that promote artistic growth, and engaging in service projects to benefit Detroit’s community. Two issues present challenges to bring this project to fruition: Detroit Jit is slowly deteriorating in the city because the current generation of youth focuses on current trends of music and dance (i.e., TikTok), which is why this project is so vital. Further, raising the capital for a studio entails finding a space, ideally downtown Detroit, that has accessible parking as well as proper infrastructure to house a dance studio. The current revitalization of downtown is a positive advancement for the city of Detroit. However, most of the new businesses on Woodward Avenue and other locations are corporate, leaving little room for Detroit-based culture and commerce to compete and thrive within the city where the dance form was born over 40 years ago. Ford and its methods of mass manufacturing left Detroit behind in the 1970s; however, Detroit Jit never left the city. Thus, the Jit is more than just a dance form; it is a testament to the spirit and dedication of the people who never turned their backs on the city, even in an economic crisis. Detroit, not the suburbs, deserves a studio space, offering a safe and welcoming environment for people of all ages and backgrounds to learn about the history and soul of Detroit, through the footwork of the Jit.