Planet Funk Academy

I am pretty up and down about this place. I started taking my son here to the hip hop dance class on Saturdays and he looooves it. It’s a great drop in class and he has had a blast. I wanted to keep it up but the communication at this place is unreal! As in… NONE! On their website it says to check their facebook page for class updates. Fine, I go check it out. I doesn’t say anything about Saturday class being canceled. So we load the car and drive to go to class. THREE times and the doors are locked. No one is there, so therefore, no one is also answering the phones. I have commented, sent messages, and asked several times on the Facebook page about the classes. No response. I have also called twice now and asked for someone to call me in regards to the class. No response. It’s pretty disheartening that this is the way they run their business. If the class is no longer, some type of communication would be nice. As a note, we were not the only people showing up for these days when no notice of canceled class. Clearly we are in the same boat.

Planet Funk has a very nice dance facility – probably one of the nicest dance facilities I’ve seen in Houston. They specialize in hip hop dance classes. The people in the classes are of all levels and backgrounds – beginners, old moms, gay guys, cougars, young teenagers. The environment in class is not competitive. Those are the good things about Planet Funk.
Now for the cons… there is only street parking available (don’t you dare park on that driveway, that’s for the owner and he even put a sign with his name). I’ve taken maybe 4 – 5 classes here and out of that, there were 2 times when the instructor did not show up and they had to look for a last minute sub… which ended up taking 20 minutes and thus class was already ¹⁄₃ over. No refund or other class offered. At $ 15 for a one hour class, the price isn’t great but it’s not bad either. And if you just take a class that says «hip hop», the style can vary depending on the instructor. So if you want to take a booty shaking class, you may be disappointed if your instructor specializes in pop ‘n lock. But regardless, all the instructors there CAN dance.

The dance scene in any city is always full of infighting, so I’ve heard every opinion going of Planet Funk. Personally, I found the studio clean and well-​appointed (the floors were in great condition), and the instructors are… typical. (You know — a little bit of losing count, some fuzzy instructions for complicated moves, probably some kind of crazy bandana or ESP (extremely stylish pants).)
You can take real dance classes here (mostly hip hop/​urban/​the kind of thing you see in music videos), audition to be part of their company, or stop by on Saturdays for the dance/​exercise class, which is mostly just a fun dance class with no stressful individual attention (they will correct you, but there is no across-​the-​floor demonstration, just some small group demo). Wade Robson did/​does master classes here when he’s in town. It’s a fun fitness alternative to dragging your ass around the loop at Memorial Park another time.