Edit: She Spent a Decade Making Other People's Art. Then She Made Her Own.

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Solange Hyppolite keeps a framed photograph on the wall of her Crown Heights studio — a snapshot from a 2015 music video shoot in Los Angeles. In it, she is mid-air, arching over a light rig, eight other dancers blurred below her. The artist she was working for is at the front of the frame, sharply in focus.

"Do you know who that is?" she asks, pointing at herself — the blurred one.

She laughs before waiting for an answer.

"Neither do most people. That was on purpose."

Hyppolite Arts has four studios across Brooklyn and Queens. Last year it served 2,400 students, ran 280 class sections per week, and booked $2.1 million in revenue. The waiting list for its flagship Crown Heights location — in the space that used to be a laundromat — runs 140 families long. Solange Hyppolite is 38 years old.

## The Daughter of Port-au-Prince and Flatbush

Hyppolite grew up in Crown Heights, the daughter of Haitian immigrants who arrived in New York in 1987 with two suitcases and a mutual resolve to stay. Her father, Renold, repaired appliances by day and played konpa drums on Friday nights at a Haitian cultural center on Nostrand Avenue. Her mother, Marie-Claire, sewed alterations out of the kitchen.

"My mother sewed so quietly you could almost miss it," Hyppolite says. "But the work was extraordinary. She had this way of knowing exactly what a garment needed — no pattern, no measuring tape most of the time. Just her hands and her judgment."

Dance entered Hyppolite's life sideways. At nine, she went to a birthday party where someone's older sister led a hip-hop routine in the living room. She memorized the full eight counts on the way home and performed them for her mother, who watched with an expression Hyppolite describes as "amused and slightly terrified."

By eleven, she was commuting to a community arts center three train stops away, taking ballet and hip-hop on alternating days. At fourteen, she auditioned for LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and Performing Arts. She got in.

"That school showed me what was possible," she says. "Kids who'd been training their whole lives alongside kids who'd never danced at all — from every borough, every background. And you were all together in these rooms doing serious, professional-level work. It wasn't about talent. It was about what you were willing to put in."

She graduated in 2004, enrolled at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's BFA program, and started to understand, for the first time, that dance could be a structure she built rather than a building she entered.

## The Industry

After graduating, Hyppolite stayed in New York and started taking commercial work — auditions, callbacks, more callbacks. Her first booking was a hip-hop video in 2008. The day rate was $350. She did twelve takes in a parking garage in the South Bronx and got home at 3 a.m.

"I called my mother from the train," she says. "I told her: I got paid to dance today. She cried."

Over the next eight years, Hyppolite built a reputation as a reliable, technically versatile choreographer who could move between hip-hop, afrobeats, contemporary, and waacking without losing the thread. She worked on three gold-certified albums' worth of visuals, two concert tours, a nationally broadcast awards show performance, and four major commercials. She was not famous. She was, as she puts it, "extremely good at making other people look good."

"Commercial dance operates that way," she says. "The talent is real and the work is real and it is completely, structurally designed to keep the choreographer and dancers invisible. The artist is the product. You are the infrastructure. I understood that. I told myself that was fine."

Then one day it wasn't.

The day came in February 2016 on a video shoot in Miami — a three-day job, the biggest she'd booked that year. A production assistant handed her a revised shot list halfway through day two. Her name had been changed to "Background Talent, Lead."

She'd been hired as choreographer. She'd built the opening sequence from scratch and staged every transition in the first two acts. On the official paperwork she was background.

"I didn't say anything," she says. "I finished the job. I flew home. I spent the following week reading every small business development resource I'd ever bookmarked and never opened."

## The Laundromat

In May 2016, a 900-square-foot laundromat on Nostrand Avenue — one block from where Hyppolite had grown up — went out of business. She called the building's owner the afternoon she noticed the sign in the window.

"I had $22,000 saved," she says. "Rent was $2,400 a month. I did not have a business plan. I had a number on a piece of paper that asked one question: how many students at what monthly rate equals more than $2,400?"

She signed a lease, stripped the coin-operated machines out herself over a long weekend, and opened Hyppolite Arts Studio in September 2016. Nine students enrolled in the first month. She taught four classes herself, hired one instructor she'd known since Ailey, and bought used mirrors and a secondhand sprung floor from a closing studio in Park Slope.

"I called my father the night before we opened," she says. "He said: you are starting a business in the same neighborhood where we started a life. He meant it as a blessing. I understood it that way."

By December, she had 34 students. She raised the monthly rate by $20 and hired a second instructor. The studio broke even in March 2017, six months after opening.

## The Curriculum Question

From the beginning, Hyppolite was deliberate about what Hyppolite Arts would teach — and equally deliberate about what it wouldn't be.

"Crown Heights is a neighborhood where most families can't afford $200-a-month dance class," she says. "I knew that. My family couldn't have afforded it. So the question from day one was: how do I build something that serves this community at a price this community can actually pay, and is also sustainable as a business? Those two things can coexist. Most people assume they can't."

Her answer was a sliding-scale tuition model anchored at $85 a month, with a higher-rate premium track for families who could pay more. The premium track subsidized the sliding scale. It was not complicated. It required trusting that the product was strong enough to attract families who could afford full price while still serving those who couldn't.

"I had fifteen full-rate students by month four," she says. "They had other options. Established studios in the neighborhood, studios in Park Slope, online programs. They chose this."

The curriculum Hyppolite built draws from her own training: hip-hop, afrobeats, Caribbean folk forms, and contemporary, with West African dance added in year two when she hired an instructor with a background in Senegalese sabar. She made a deliberate choice not to center ballet.

"Ballet is a beautiful discipline. I trained in it. But in this neighborhood, for these kids, I wanted them to see themselves in the movement. There are a thousand dance traditions in the world and a lot of them look like the families in Crown Heights. I wanted to teach that truth early — before anyone told them otherwise."

## The Year That Changed Everything

In 2019, Hyppolite Arts crossed $380,000 in annual revenue. Hyppolite paid herself $60,000 — her first real salary — and was running a waitlist for three class levels. A second location felt inevitable.

She signed a lease on a 1,400-square-foot space in Bed-Stuy in October 2019 and opened it in February 2020.

Then March 2020.

"I closed both studios on March 13th," she says. "I had 212 enrolled students. I had two locations. I had eleven instructors, some part-time, but eleven people who depended on this. And I had thirty days of operating cash."

She offered every family a complete pause — no charges, no penalties, no questions. Thirty-six families responded immediately: we want to keep going. We'll pay.

She converted to online classes in two weeks, filming from her living room with a borrowed camera and her laptop propped on a stack of hardcovers. She held live Zoom classes six days a week and built a library of on-demand content for families who needed flexibility.

Within a month she had 62 online students. Some were in Brooklyn. Some were in Atlanta. One family — a Crown Heights family that had moved abroad the previous year — was in London.

"They paid in British pounds," she says, and smiles. "I laughed about it for a week."

By August 2020, she had 109 active online enrollments generating just over $7,600 a month in recurring revenue — more than either studio had individually produced before the shutdown. She'd deferred rent on both locations through direct negotiation with her landlords and covered instructor pay through the online income.

"That summer taught me something I didn't know I needed to learn," she says. "The community I'd built wasn't attached to the physical building. It was attached to the work. The space is where the work happens. The community travels with you."

## Scaling Past the Studio

When in-person classes resumed in fall 2020, Hyppolite returned to both studios with a waiting list that had grown during closure. She opened a third location — a 2,100-square-foot former retail space in Astoria, Queens — in June 2021. A fourth, in Bushwick, opened in January 2023.

The online program didn't wind down with reopening. It became a permanent and independent revenue line: 680 monthly subscribers at $70 a month, most of them families who moved away from New York or discovered Hyppolite Arts through word of mouth and don't live near any of the four studios. They are, effectively, a national student body for a Brooklyn dance company.

"I used to think scale meant more locations," Hyppolite says. "Locations are expensive and fixed and require everything. Online enrollment scales at near-zero marginal cost. I was slow to understand that fully. I understand it now."

Revenue in 2025 came in at $2.1 million. Hyppolite Arts employs 22 instructors — all paid hourly with benefits and professional development stipends — alongside a studio operations manager, a curriculum director, and a part-time outreach coordinator whose entire job is identifying kids in Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy who can't afford class and connecting them to sliding-scale spots. That role is funded by a $40,000 annual contribution drawn from full-rate families who opt into a "community fund" line item on their enrollment form.

Seventy-three percent of them do.

## The Photograph on the Wall

Hyppolite's father, Renold, died in 2023. He attended every recital during his lifetime. At the last one, December 2022, he sat in the third row while 140 students performed two back-to-back showcases. He wore a suit.

"He came backstage afterward and shook hands with every instructor individually," she says. "He introduced himself: 'I am Solange's father. Thank you for what you do here.' Very formal. Very deliberate."

She is quiet for a moment.

"He came from a country where art was survival. Where music and dance and story were the things you held onto when everything else was being taken. He understood what this place was without me having to explain it. He didn't need the revenue numbers. He could feel what it was doing."

The photograph from the 2015 video shoot stays on the wall at the Crown Heights studio. Hyppolite says she keeps it there for the students — most of them between six and seventeen, most of them not yet thinking about where their training might lead — to see it on their way to the floor.

"I want them to know what this industry can look like," she says. "I want them to know it early, before they get there, so they're not surprised by it. And I want them to know there is more than one way to build a life in this art form."

She looks at the photograph. Herself, mid-air. Blurred.

"You do not have to be background talent. You can build the room."

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