How Gigi & Allison Are Building reclaim & rise With Werk
What dancers from past generations didn't know they were waiting for.
"When people kept saying 'I needed this' — we knew we had to run with it."
– Gigi Torres,Co-founder, reclaim & rise
It started, as the best things often do, over food and drinks.
In August 2023, Gigi Torres and Allison Vicencio-Nguyen – friends for decades, both leaders of the dance world, met for brunch at their friend's restaurant, Sampa in Downtown LA. They found they were both quietly frustrated by the same gap in the dance world. By the time the check came, they had the seed of something real. A few days later, Gigi sent the text that made it official: alright, when is our first meeting?
That was the beginning of reclaim & rise – a monthly dance experience built for the generation of movers who grew up in the dance community, stepped away for life, and are now ready to come back. No judgment, no ego, no audition energy. Just community, choreography, and the specific dopamine hit that only dance can give you.
Two Roads, One Mission
To understand reclaim & rise, let's understand the two people who built it.
Gigi Torres
Gigi has been in the industry for twenty years. She started teaching at 15, founded Essence, an all-female crew that ran for six years and launched names like April Rodriguez, Candace Brown, and Knicole Haggins, and spent a decade running dance programs across the country, mentoring over 1,000 dancers. Community building isn't something she does on the side. It's just who she is. She is also behind the artistic, creative, branding of reclaim & rise.
Allison Vicencio-Nguyen
AKA "Allibon" came up through competitive gymnastics and cheerleading before finding hip hop at UC Irvine through Kaba Modern, the team that made her want to go there in the first place. She eventually became a director of KM Legacy and Kaba Kids, spent years in New York and San Francisco building programs throughout Silicon Valley, and somewhere along the way worked at Airbnb and DoorDash pre-IPO. She's the operational brain behind the vision.
Gigi and Allison met through mutual friends at a Golden Spoon frozen yogurt shop where Allison worked. "I always knew who Gigi was," Allison laughs. "April was like, my friend Gigi's gonna come in. And I was like – okay, I know Gigi Torres now." It took another decade for that friendship to become a business partnership. But when the timing was right, it was undeniable.
The Gap Nobody Was Filling
The frustration that sparked reclaim & rise wasn't abstract. Both Gigi and Allison had lived it firsthand.
As a new mom returning to dance studios, Allison kept finding herself the oldest person in the room.
"I had so much fun dancing and being in a studio again... but I just didn't see myself in the folks that were also there. It was kind of isolating – feeling othered by my new identity, because I wasn't a training or competitive dancer anymore. I just wanted to do it with no judgment and have fun."
Gigi was seeing the same thing from the other side of the room. Teaching classes, she'd clock one or two people who mentioned they were getting back into it – surrounded by a much younger crowd chasing industry opportunities. Two completely different needs in the same space, and neither one being fully served.
"All of our people that we used to dance with are saying they wanna dance and they have no place to go. So we were like – why don't we just have a class?"
– Gigi Torres, Co-founder, reclaim & rise
Building the Format: How the R&R Experience Came Together
When reclaim & rise launched in March 2024, the format was two parallel classes running simultaneously:
"Throw Shoes Throwbacks"
an intermediate to advanced class built around iconic choreography from 10 to 20 years ago, the kind of pieces people recognized from early YouTube – an ode to the lost art of throwing shoes at a choreographer at the end of class to give props.
'Beginners Get Down"
a lower-stakes entry point for people easing in. Separate, but under the same roof. Inclusive by design.
It worked. But the magic really happened by accident.
At their third event, they brought in choreographers Bam Martin and Bianca Vallar to teach the two simultaneous classes. Bianca, after finishing her own set, mentioned she wanted to stick around and take Bam's class.
The problem: both classes ran at the same time. But instead of just shrugging it off, the idea hit – what if at the end, both classes came together for a full showcase?
They blocked a transition, made formations, put it together – and that was the birth of the format reclaim & rise runs to this day:
Intermediate and advanced dancers alongside beginners, each doing their own thing, coming together at the end to perform. No competition. Just one room, two levels, and a whole lot of energy moving in the same direction.
"The beginners get inspired by the intermediate and advanced, and the intermediate and advanced are inspired by the joy and hunger and enthusiasm the beginners bring. It's a two-way street. Whereas in other studios, there tends to be ego or competitiveness – that's just not the vibe we want to curate. We just wanted to bring back that feel of community – being hype with a team, getting that set done, full out, last run before performance."
– Allison
It's working. Their events now regularly sell out at close to 100 students. Alumni from Kaba Modern, Choreo Cookies, PAC Modern, Funkanometry, and more keep showing up – not to compete, but to reconnect.
The community was craving to be rebuilt. Gigi and Allison gave it a room.
For the Moms: 3 Things Allison Wants You to Know
Allison is a mother of two young boys, and she's not shy about how hard the postpartum chapter was, or how much dance helped her through it.
For any mom sitting on the fence about walking back into a studio, she has three things to say.
01 - Give yourself grace.
"Your body took nine-plus months to create life. It's okay if your first class back is wobbly. Your balance might be off. Your center of gravity is different. After my second baby, I jumped into a heels class and I was falling all over the place. I needed to remember that my body just went through the hardest thing a woman's body could arguably go through. Honor the moment and be present."
02 - Find your community.
"Postpartum can be isolating. Finding a class, and the people in it, is what got me excited to leave the house, talk to adults, and move my body again. Having accountability buddies is everything. As a grown-up with professional responsibilities and mother duties, you can make every excuse not to go. But if you have your people texting you – you'll go."
03 - You can do the hard things.
"I've talked to moms who say 'my body can't move like that anymore.' And yeah – your body isn't the same. But you just did the most amazing thing a body can do. Arguably, you are stronger now than you were before. Dance is one of the best reminders of that."
Gigi's Journey: 20 Years of Following the Pain Points
Ask Gigi Torres about her relationship with dance over the past two decades, and she'll tell you it's never been a straight line. It goes up, it dips, it finds its footing again.
And the pattern, she's realized, is almost always the same. Something frustrates her. Something is missing. And that missing thing becomes her next move.
Essence started because of a breakup. She needed somewhere to put the emotion, got invited to choreograph for a show, called her girls, and ended up on stage crying on her 21st birthday.
"I looked to the left and right of me and we were actually crying on stage. And that was the feeling – I need to keep going with this."
When Essence wound down, dancers moving into industry work, becoming moms, going their separate ways – Gigi felt the absence of it like a gap. So in 2012 she launched Establish Her Empire, a dance training program that eventually grew to 50 programs over ten years, mentoring dancers who wanted deeper training and stronger community.
"Nobody really had programs back then. We were filling a need."
The through-line across all of it: Essence, the programs, reclaim & rise, is – community.
"If I go up or down, it just brings me back to who I am and what I love to do, which is dance."
Building it, holding it, sharing it. That's the work.
Running It on Werk: From Spreadsheet Chaos to One Platform
For the first year and a half of reclaim & rise, they ran everything the hard way. Google Sheets. Square. A separate email marketing platform. Multiple tabs open every time they executed an event. "I hate this," Allison would tell Gigi after each one. "We've gotta find something." But between building the business, showing up for the community, and raising two toddlers and working a full-time job, it kept getting pushed. Next month.
Next month.
Next month.
Then Gigi ran into Jessie at a Lakers game. Jessie pulled up Werk on her phone, and walked Gigi through it. The next reclaim & rise monthly experience was on Werk.
Trusting a platform with it took a leap. For someone with a background in high-volume operations at Airbnb and DoorDash, that's not a small thing. Allison likes having her hands in the data.
"The first event I used it, I was like – this is a whole new world. I let go of my spreadsheets. Everything lives in Werk now."
One platform for everything: ticketing, email, data, check-in. No six different tools, no tolerance for chaos required. As reclaim & rise keeps growing, with sold-out events and a waitlist that shows no sign of slowing down, having infrastructure that scales with them isn't a nice-to-have. It's the whole thing.
Here are their 2 favorite Werk features:
Easy Event Management & Check-In
Before Werk, Allison was the person frantically cross-referencing spreadsheets at the door while people waited. "Everyone would be like – leave Allison alone, she's checking people in." Now check-in is handled, the data feeds where it needs to go, and Allison is free to actually be present with the people who showed up.
"Now we get to produce the event instead of just trying to fill everything out. It's a completely different headspace."
Seamless Student Experience
For Gigi, who has spent years watching dancers struggle with too many clicks just to sign up for a class, the simplicity was everything.
"It's click the link in bio, click the LinkTree, find the waiver, sign the waiver – it's too much. With Werk, they just go in and buy. That's it."
Their students noticed immediately. The first time R&R used Werk, messages started coming in: this is amazing, the new platform is so cute.
Dreams Do Come True if You Make Them
reclaim & rise launched from a brunch conversation and grew in the gaps between spreadsheet tabs and late-night group chats. It keeps going because two people decided to stop waiting for someone else to build the thing they needed... and built it themselves.
"Great things happen when you can't stop thinking about it. When it's not just a dream, but something you're talking about, acting on, building."
– Gigi Torres
Gigi and Allison are two of thousands of dance event organizers building their business as Werk Pro Members.
If you're ready to do the same, join Werk today.
