Five months ago I was just setting out on the adventure of a lifetime and wrote this piece in a quiet cafe overlooking Lake Michigan while procrastinating on my written thesis. I had just finished up a graduate degree (Master of Fine Arts in Dance) and was trying to figure out exactly how I got to that cafe. I wasn’t quite sure where I would end up at the end of all this, but I must say I couldn’t be happier. Enjoy!

———————————

About a year ago, I mentioned to one of my Zouk mentors I might be interested in being a traveling Zouk artist for a while if I could find someone who wanted me as a partner. He told me it was a hard life and not to do it. Today, I am enjoying an espresso in Traverse City, Michigan, #3 out of 11 stops on an international tour I have managed to book for myself as a solo artist. This is one of a handful of professions that glamorizes living out of a backpack, not having an address, and sleeping on floors, but thus far I’ve never been without a shower when I needed one, so I’d say things are going pretty well!  

My Zouk journey began about 24 hours after I returned from my final audition for Master of Fine Arts in Dance programs as a contemporary dance choreographer interested in Blues dancing. Literally. January 30, 2016 was the day I committed myself to attending every social and class available to me in New York City. At the time we had Igor and Christina, Ry’el and Jessica, Aline and Charles, Leo and Catherine, Jeremy and Shelby, and Hisako and Getulio all teaching classes alongside a constant train of visiting artists from around the world who would teach workshops and dance at our weekly socials. By Canada Zouk Congress 2016 my love of the dance was signed. By September 2016 it was sealed as I co-founded the Brazilian Zouk Dance Club at the University of Michigan with Nicole Gómez. By January 2017 it was delivered as I completed teacher training with Laura Riva to design an 8-week foundations curriculum for our community. I also learned to DJ so we could have Zouk socials. (It’s hard work, guys. When you’re at parties, always appreciate your DJs, especially if you like their set!)

When I started graduate school I studied Blues dancing for my research and Zouk because I needed a hobby. As I spent more and more time on Zouk related activities, it became clear I would need to pick one and go all in. Needless to say Zouk won my affections and I designed an international Zouk tour for my summer thesis research project. I attended the Canada Zouk Congress (where I participated in Renata Peçanha’s teacher training program), Paris Brazilian Zouk Congress, Embodying Weekender in Rotterdam with Willem Engel, and BraSilesia in Katowice, Poland. Between festivals, I stopped by Amsterdam, Utrecht, Warsaw, Prague, Manchester, and London for local classes, socials, and Zouker picnics. I stayed with dancers I met through friends and on the dance floor, was invited to teach a workshop, DJ’d a 15 minute set, ate the most AMAZING FOOD, and relaxed over espresso in some of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. I journaled a lot, adventured a lot, got lost, sometimes felt surprisingly comfortable, and sometimes felt deeply unsettled.  I learned a lot about dance and the world, but mostly about myself and that community was more important than counterbalance. I also learned to tell people I met that I was “coming in from Canada,” which technically was true since I flew across the pond from Toronto…

I topped up the summer by attending North American festivals including Zouk n’ Play (where I attended the ZenZouk teacher training program) and Zouk MX (where I had one of the most transformative experiences of my life as both an artist and human being thanks to Xandy’s intensive and the people who chose to participate in it). In the fall, I continued my training by traveling nearly every weekend. This was both wonderful and also a terrible idea since my job was to be a graduate student in Michigan and I spent most of my time either not there or recovering from sleepless weekends, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. When I was home, I had the opportunity to design weekly special topics workshops and try them out on my local zoukers. This helped prepare me to teach drop-in workshops in Chicago, Ann Arbor, New Jersey, and NYC, and develop programming for weekenders as a solo teaching artist in New Haven (Zouk for Fusion dancers) and Chicago (Zouk for experienced Zoukers and crossover dancers). In addition to teaching three fundamentals cycles in the Zouk Dance Club, I also taught two intro to Zouk courses in the University of Michigan Department of Dance. As a member of the Fusion dance community, I was invited to teach workshops at local, regional, and national Fusion events in Ann Arbor, Chicago, and NYC. Needless to say, I had time to get sick of teaching fundamentals and then fall deeply in love with them.

In winter 2017, I started receiving invitations to teach weekenders and workshops in summer 2018. As these invitations accrued, I began inquiring with contacts from my travels in the UK (in March I returned from another trip during which I was invited to teach a workshop in Bristol) and designed a teaching tour of the Midwest, Western Canada, Great Britain and Scotland with the gaps filled in by North American congresses. In addition to invitations and inquiries, I was recommended by friends to organizers and I followed up diligently with everyone. In one case, a follow styling video was shared in an international facebook group and when I was invited to teach should I be in town I messaged the organizers and said if they were serious I could make that happen. And after making all of these connections, I followed through on my words with my actions. (Many scraps of paper were sacrificed in the making of this schedule.)

I began teaching because I loved Zouk, wanted weekly socials to attend and Zoukers to dance with, and was already an experienced dance teacher who enjoyed teaching. Within about a month of starting Zouk praticas in Ann Arbor, I realized that this venture would never succeed if I started all my sentences with “I.” There was no money to be had in any of it, although I was lucky that time spent in extra curricular dance activities could count as credit toward my dance degree. The Zouk Dance Club (now ZoukMi) has since become a fixture of the Ann Arbor social dance ecosystem because we learned that building a Zouk community is about creating a space for people to come together and find joy, friendship, and an escape from their daily grind. Fortunately for me, my Zouk babies love practicing, so not only are they sweet humans, but they also dance beautifully!

Being a Zouk teacher (or any teacher) is a LOT harder than it looks! To succeed you have to absolutely love fundamentals, repeating yourself, and thinking on your feet. You have to be extremely patient and humble enough to correct yourself when you make mistakes (and you will make lots of them) or learn more effective ways to do things you’ve previously taught. Conveniently, teaching weekly fundamentals classes, working on my non-traditional dance role, solo training in Zouk, and cross training in ballet and contemporary dance may have been the biggest factors in helping me improve as a follow. (Full disclosure: I’ve been training in concert dance since I was 2 years old.)

If you had asked me a year ago what I would be doing this summer it would not have been this. I thought I would be back in New York fundraising and rehearsing to re-stage my thesis performance. If you ask me now whether I would want to be doing anything else I would say absolutely not. I have big ideas and big dreams for myself, but I learned years ago to stay open to all opportunities as they come along. Frankly, I couldn’t be much happier than I am right now.  Well, maybe if I had a fresh stroopwafel from the guy at the entrance to the Albert Cuyp Market in Amsterdam to go with this espresso…

—————————-

Skipping forward to the present and thinking back on what my mentor had said about this being a hard life, yes, it absolutely is. I burned out after about 5 weeks last summer and was up against that wall most of this summer. I had to learn how to eat well and cross train without the stability of a home base, relish the downtime I had during long travel days, manage imposter syndrome, and be humble. There are many people whose lives have been devoted to Brazilian Zouk and they will always be my teachers. However, if we want the zouk community to grow (and wish to slow down the proliferation of YouTube students), we do need more teachers. To be transparent, I would not be here without the dance and travel experience aquired as a result of a substantial amount of research funding from my university and the extensive opportunities I had to develop as a teacher in a local community. While unexpected from the outside, from the inside, I seem to have aquired a skill that is letting me explore the world, spread the zouk love, and break even.

For more information, check out my teaching reel and Zouk demos playlist and follow me on Facebook and Instagram!

Teaching Reel: https://youtu.be/7mpJkyFiQWY

Zouk Demos Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLicdkvtePWvDJ2fjlOuxb55bGoE039Pdr

facebook.com/sydney.charisse.1

Instagram: @sydney.zouks