If supporting a feminist nonprofit by exercising with punk-inspired dance moves to the music of bands like Blondie or The Clash sounds good to you, mark your calendars for this Saturday at noon. As a fundraiser for the nonprofit she co-founded, Girls Rock Campaign Boston (affiliated with the national Girls Rock Campaign Alliance), Hilken Mancini will be reviving her old Punk Rock Aerobics class for an afternoon. For people who are intimidated by gyms, it’s a perfect way to get a little exercise in a fun-oriented context. Plus, there’s a wild history behind Mancini’s Punk Rock Aerobics concept that I’ll get into below.
If you haven’t heard of Girls Rock Campaign Boston, they offer week-long programs during the summer for girls and gender nonconforming youth aged 8-17 where they get to rock out in a supportive community, start bands, and perform with their bands at an end-of-week showcase (which in recent years has taken place at Brighton Music Hall). They also have a similar program for adults called Ladies Rock Camp and have been partnering with primary schools during the school year. With strong support from the local music scene—many of Boston’s best artists volunteer with them during the Summer—the organization has already made an impact. In fact, at least one artist on Allston Pudding’s “Best EPs of 2018” list is an alumnus. In anticipation of this Saturday’s fundraiser event, I reached out to Mancini to discuss the history of Punk Rock Aerobics and how the concept ultimately led her to form Girls Rock Campaign Boston in 2010.
Around 2000, Mancini and her friend Maura Jasper were spending a lot of weekends hanging out. They’d been initially brought together by the band Dinosaur Jr.: Jasper was friends with the Dinosaur crew from their days studying at UMass Amherst in the late 80s and had done a lot of visual art for them including the album covers for their first three records; Mancini connected with Dinosaur and Jasper in the early 90s after she started the band Fuzzy with Winston Braman, who had been part of that UMass Amherst circle. (Jasper ended up doing the album art for Fuzzy’s 1994 album). By the beginning of the aughts, Fuzzy was inactive, having been cut from their major label, and Jasper was living in New York, but she and Mancini remained close. Jasper’s frequent trips to Boston gave the two of them plenty of time to catch up. At some point, they came up with the idea of a “punk rock” aerobics class, initially as a joke.
“We were trying to get in shape or just be healthier because I was approaching 30,” Mancini recalls, “and we would walk around the JP pond… We were like, ‘Oh, we would take an exercise class if they played cool music,’ and we were coming up with this funny idea, and we’d walk around the pond and talk about it. But it was just an art project joke idea.”
By coincidence, they lost their jobs simultaneously in March of ‘01. By the summer, Jasper had moved back to Boston, and the idea became a serious project they pursued. “I felt like it was meant to be,” Mancini says of the serendipitous timing. “She called me at work and was like, ‘I just got laid off,’ and I was like, ‘Dude, guess what—I just got laid off.’”
They got certified as aerobics instructors, and by August the moves they choreographed were the basis for twice-weekly classes at The Middle East Downstairs. “We liked the idea of doing it in a rock club,” Mancini says.
Within the next year, after establishing Punk Rock Aerobics in Boston, Jasper convinced her that if the project was going to become sustainable for them, they’d need to start bringing Punk Rock Aerobics to New York where they could get more media attention and maybe a video deal. “She was right. So we would work all week at our day jobs, and then get on the Fung Wa and go and teach these classes in New York at rock clubs only.”
The New York Times was among the publications that picked up on it in 2002, and by the next year they were a hot new fitness trend associated with New York drawing international press. A book deal soon followed. Punk Rock Aerobics: 75 Killer Moves, 50 Punk Classics, and 25 Reasons to Get off Your Ass and Exercise hit shelves in January of 2004.
The book’s numerous guest appearances included Mary Timony (Helium) and J Mascis (Dinosaur Jr.) modeling the exercise moves “Jumpin’ Jacked-ups” and “Face-Down Butt Lift” respectively. Jasper and Mancini, who co-authored it, punctuated the exercises with humorous interviews with rockers mostly about their relationships to fitness—Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), for example, claims in one interview to “walk through the woods of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, listening to recordings of Sylvia Plath” for exercise.
After the book came together, the duo burnt out on Punk Rock Aerobics, though there were still lingering talks of a video deal. Around ’06 or ’07, Mancini reached out to a nonprofit she’d recently discovered about the possibility of having proceeds from a potential video benefit them—it was an organization called “Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls”. Launched in Portland, Oregon, in August of 2001 (coincidentally the same month that Punk Rock Aerobics was launched in Boston), it was the original “Girls Rock Camp”, and their organization’s model was just starting to spread across the country and beyond.
The Punk Rock Aerobics video didn’t pan out, and Jasper was focusing on other projects, but at the invitation of Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls Mancini went to Portland to volunteer. There, she’d do Punk Rock Aerobics for their youth program and lead assemblies. “And then it became something I really looked forward to doing every year,” Mancini says. “I went to Portland every Summer, and then I turned 40 and was like, y’know what, Boston should have one.”
In 2010, Mancini launched Girls Rock Campaign Boston with longtime friend Mary Lou Lord, and Nora Allen-Wiles, whom she met in 2007 when they were both volunteering for the Portland organization. Since then, Mancini’s held the infrequent Punk Rock Aerobics class to fundraise for GRCB. As Punk Rock Aerobics has been in semi-retirement since the mid 2000s, this Saturday is a rare opportunity to be a part of something with a remarkable story while supporting a great organization. You can find more details about it here or here.