HYDE PARK — For Marylee Bussard, saying goodbye to Chaturanga Holistic Fitness has been bittersweet.

Bussard closed her studio Nov. 30 after 15 years in the Deco Arts Building, 1525 E. 55th St., where she and her small, devoted staff led exercise classes on the third floor. In the end, the demands of running the space — and recent personal challenges — made it difficult for Bussard to keep the space open, she said.

It has been a surreal experience for the Florida native, who spent the first quarter of her life pursuing a music career before pivoting to health and wellness — a shift that helped Bussard with her own physical challenges, she said. 

“I’ve got a connective tissue disorder that has a lot of other systemic things that come along with it,” Bussard said. “So I was always the person injuring myself or just having weird things happen.”

Bussard came to Chicago to study Brazilian music at the Old Town School of Folk Music after finishing her undergraduate degree at the New College of Florida. She played in a band for several years before realizing her true calling. After several years at the now-closed Three Pillars Wellness Center on East 53rd Street, she decided to strike out on her own, bringing some of her fellow instructors along.

Bussard spent weeks building out the studio space, picking up tips and tricks from DIY videos on YouTube. She painted the tangerine walls and hung the art adorning them. She assembled and stained the cubbies and arranged the Pilates machines.

“There were lots of IKEA trips and lots of late nights assembling stuff,” said Bussard. “It was me in the middle of the night, but I did get a lot of help.”

Those same Pilates machines now have for-sale stickers on them.

In the early days of Chaturanga, the studio had more than 100 classes a week, with Bussard leading the bulk of them.

“When I think of the very beginning, who was on the schedule?” Bussard said. “It was me. I was teaching eight Zumba classes, and five people showed up.”

But weren’t many fitness studios in Hyde Park at the time, and the few that existed were on the more expensive side, so the number of customers — and teachers — eventually went up.

“If you build it, they’ll come,” Bussard said. “People just floated in.”

Bussard wanted to create a diverse, inclusive community when she opened Chaturanga — and she did. The studio’s affordable and acccessible classes drew clients from all over, spanning generations and income brackets. For a time, classes were so packed, there was overflow into the hallway, Bussard said.

Dozens of University of Chicago graduate students and young professionals volunteered in exchange for free classes. Bussard added training programs for Pilates and Zumba instructors, with some clients eventually joining the staff.

She still keeps in touch with many of them. And she’s lost count of the customers who connected with one another throughout the years, bonding over merengue rhythms.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Bussard went virtual, offering classes over Zoom. Many of her customers followed, allowing her to weather the pandemic better than most. But as she began to return to in-person classes, obligations outside the business became too great.

“I was raring to come back,” Bussard said. “And then I had a house fire.”

“It was such an ordeal that I just could not be here,” she said. “That’s kind of the challenge: When it’s a small business, you’re so much part of it, and then you can’t be part of it.”

Bussard recently took a full-time job working for the software company whose products she used to run Chaturanga. 

“So now I’m actually just working with small businesses like Chaturanga all over the world, literally,” she said. “I get to talk to customers with yoga studios, Pilates studios and gyms. So it’s worked out really well.”

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