Rhythm & Motion started out in the late 1970s as an exercise dance class in a middle school gymnasium in San Francisco, with a charismatic New Orleanian instructor named Consuelo Faust spinning Devo 45s on a record player and practicing her slogan that “anyone can dance.” 

That meant you didn’t need a leotard with matching leggings and a headband or the physique of a dancer. Just the soul of one. 

“She really worked hard to upend the arrogance and elitism that most people associated with a dance studio back then,” said Janet Roitz, a San Francisco dance teacher who worked with Faust for 35 years. “She did not believe that there was a certain body type or skill level that was allowed to express itself through the art of dance.”

From those earliest classes in 1979, advertised by flyers on telephone poles, the Rhythm & Motion Dance Program invented by Faust evolved into a mom-and-pop business that is still going in the city after 46 years, with classes offered at a Mission District studio every day, even Christmas. 

Faust herself led classes for 25 years and served as executive director until she mysteriously started losing strength and agility in 2011. But she was determined to keep going, to prove her motto that “anyone can dance,” even someone in the grip of what later turned out to be Parkinson’s disease.

She made it through the 35th anniversary of Rhythm & Motion, an all-day celebration of her concept at its headquarters, ODC Dance Commons on Shotwell Street. She then made it through the 40th in 2019, smiling and radiant as ever. 

But by the 45th she was incapacitated and living at an assisted care facility in the Excelsior, where she died on May 28. Faust was 72.

“The reason why Rhythm & Motion is still going is that it was never about the body perfect in a leotard,” said Thor Anderson, Faust’s husband and co-owner of Rhythm & Motion. “People wear sweats and comfortable workout clothes, and a culture grew around her classes so that people had a communal experience in these classes. That’s what set it apart.”

Rhythm & Motion opened the same year that Jane Fonda launched her Workout studio in Beverly Hills, en route to a multimedia megalopolis. Faust had some star power of her own, as a classically trained ballerina who performed in several professional companies and was featured in a gallery exhibition of photos of dancers. She also had a brief career as an actress, including a leading role as a dancer in Rob Nilsson’s art house film “Heat and Sunlight,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1988.

“Rhythm & Motion followed the craze of Jane Fonda workouts and Jazzercise, but Consuelo’s vision was not to have everyone look the same with the same type of bodies but to really have it drop down into community focus,” said Wayne Hazzard, who started teaching there in 1983 while working his way up as a professional dancer with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and the Joe Goode Performance Group. He could always schedule his teaching gigs around his dance rehearsals and performances because Rhythm & Motion offered classes all over town all day long.

“Consuelo allowed you to imbue the class with your personal style and fold it into the methodology of Rhythm & Motion,” Hazzard said. “I see her as this central hummingbird who always was vibrating at a level to bring this beautiful energy into all the classes.” 

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Rhythm & Motion had 58,000 class visits by more than 5,000 people a year. It is now at 45,000 visits by 3,200 people. 

One participant was Paul McHugh, a burly Chronicle outdoors reporter who was in his element paddling a kayak in Class IV rapids. In 1986, he took Faust’s class just to see whether he could survive it long enough to describe it to readers — and perhaps draw even more people who didn’t know they were dancers until they got to Rhythm & Motion.

His first-person report began:

With a visceral yelp — “Breathe!” — Consuelo Faust leaps off the stage and plunges into a crowd of gyrating fans of her Rhythm and Motion aerobic classes.

Even at rest, Faust, 33, projects the vitality of a professional dancer. In a class, that energy becomes a palpable force, a whirlwind that impels gyms full of people beyond their imagined limitations and out into aerobic euphoria.

“People love to be driven if they know you’re doing it with a sense of humor and an ultimate sense of compassion,” Faust told McHugh at the time. “People come because they like that charge. Otherwise, they could do it with videotape at home. Giving people a sense of joy in movement is my addiction.”

That addiction overflowed into her own stage performances. Faust toured nationally in a San Francisco company called Tumbleweed Dance and Music Collective, and also founded two companies of her own  — Leap Forward and Consuelo Faust and Dancers.

“She was beautiful, and what she did was what we called ‘dance theater,’” said Cathy Hebert, a fellow New Orleanian who co-founded Rhythm & Motion and performed with Faust in Leap Forward before returning home to Opelousas, La. “We had themes and concepts and we loved the process of creating. Some people just like to perform, but we liked the process of getting to the stage.”

Consuelo Abaunza Faust was born Feb. 6, 1953, in New Orleans. Her father, Dr. Richard Faust, was a well-known surgeon of Basque heritage, and her mother, Mary Kellogg, was from a family that had been in Louisiana going back to when it was a territory. Her parents divorced when Faust was 7 and the youngest of four. Her mother and a sister opened Maple Street Bookshop near the campus of Tulane University, and Faust grew up helping out there as a sales clerk and gift wrapper.

Faust studied at the Lentz School of Ballet while attending Henry W. Allen Elementary School and McMain Middle School. But she rebelled against the conservative norms of the South; she and her mother were two out of a grand total of three protesters at a rally against the Vietnam War, in the mid-1960s. 

She attended boarding school in Woodstock, Vt., where she worked hard to lose her deep Southern accent. At Woodstock Country Day, she was introduced to modern dance, but after one year she transferred again, to the Barlow School in upstate New York.

She graduated in 1971 and was accepted to Bennington College in Vermont but never enrolled, choosing instead to go west and dance. After a brief stop in Eugene, Ore., where her mother had opened another shop called Book and Tea, Faust continued on to San Francisco, arriving in 1972.

She started teaching modern dance while she was a member of Tumbleweed, an experimental company that employed ropes to swing around the stage, and did much of its performing at Minnie’s Can-Do Club, a bar on lower Haight Street. She spent four years in Tumbleweed before going out on her own with Leap Forward, which made the jump from experimental to political dance.

One of Leap Forward’s first performances was to “Take This Job and Shove it,” the Johnny Paycheck radio hit of 1977. By the late 1970s, she’d changed the name to Consuelo Faust and Dancers, and they became mainstays at the Mission Cultural Center. There were seven in the company, but they were paid by the performance, which meant they all had a second job — including Faust, who worked at a paperback bookshop in the Castro.

“All the dancers were exhausted from their day jobs,” Anderson said, “so she figured, ‘Why not make the day job something that we love to do?’” That marked the start of Rhythm & Motion.

In 1984, Faust met Anderson, who was one of those beginners who had to work up his nerve to attend a dance class, at the urging of a friend. He was in the back row wearing baggy gym clothes. Anderson was a videographer and approached the instructor about making a basic instructional video, a project they were still working on at the time of her death.

Another work in progress was a fixer-upper in Bernal Heights, which they bought after they married in 1987. That project was slowed by the birth of two daughters, Madeleine, in 1988, and Theodora, in 1992. When either daughter came by the dance center after school, Faust would get up from her desk and go downstairs to the studio, and the two would join the Rhythm & Motion class in whatever they happened to be wearing. 

“It was never about her being in a hierarchical situation,” said Madeleine, 36, a graduate of both Lowell High School and Mills College who is a massage therapist living in Montara. “It was always collaborative, and I was proud of her because I would see how much joy and meaning people were getting out of what she created.”

Theodora, nicknamed Thea, was a dance major at Mills College. She was on a solo adventure in New Zealand when she was killed in an automobile accident in Napier, New Zealand. It was May 24, 2016, the day after her 24th birthday.

After that, Faust redirected her focus to meditating, gardening and walking, which continued until Parkinson’s slowly eroded her mobility. The dance program she started lives on.

“Consuelo’s life was a gift to everyone who met her,” said her husband, Anderson. “She was able to transmit her love of movement and dance to her teachers, and to her students in every class she taught.”