DansaBrasil - celebrating 10 years of lambazoukin' Barcelona

It was a gorgeous sunny Thursday morning two weeks ago when I boarded a train in Alicante on the southwest coast of Spain. I was leaving my little Spanish spring holiday behind me and dragging a surprisingly heavy trolley bag. The air was still cool and people were going about their usual daily routines but I had a certain special smile on my face: I was on my way for some all-day-all-night zouking in Barcelona at the DansaBrasil 2015!

DansaBrasil congress, also known as Congresso Internacional de Lambada/Zouk en Barcelona, had been long on my list of "must-visit events". Being already at its 10th edition (!!) it's quite a historic event in the zouk scene and for many European so called old school zoukers it has been their first zouk congress. Though on this particular jam-packed weekend there were a lot of options for us zouk dancers; while many of us enjoyed bank holidays on Friday 1st of May, the congress organisers around the world also wanted to bank on this. Events in addition to DansaBrasil that same weekend were the Prague Zouk Marathon, L.A. Zouk Congress and the Zouk Fusion congress in São Paulo.

But my (harder than ever) choice was made - I was not going to miss the 10th anniversary of DansaBrasil!

Zouk in Japan - the surprising latin & Brazilian dance hub!

Believe it or not, you can do lots of latin dancing in Japan, even zouk! And not just in Tokyo but in various locations in the country. I was excited to visit some other cities beyond Tokyo in my quest to find out how is Japanese zouk and extended my time in Japan a couple days just for that :) Tokyo dance scene information follows right below, scroll down for Osaka and Kyoto!

Burning the floor in Tokyo

I didn't know anything about the Japanese zouk scene but am lucky to have friends around the world who used their contacts to find some places and parties for me! There are in fact a few monthly zouk events where the local dancers gather up. I was in town for the “first Saturday of the month” party, also know as Utage zouk, ar the G-Box dance studio in Ebisu. I arrived there on time, at 8.30pm when the party started. There wasn't a whole lot of people then but soon enough the place filled up and was packed with 30 or more dancers from about 9.30pm onwards!

Zouk in Rio - setting the Brazilian zoukeros on fire!

One of the things I was looking forward to the most on my trips was to get to zouk in Brazil. I managed to fit an actual congress on my travel plans – the 3rd international zouk and lambada congress in Rio de Janeiro, organized by Renata Pecanha. The congress had four nights of parties and three days of workshop and my plan was to clock in as much dancing as possible.

The workshops were held at the choreographic centre of Rio, located in Tijuca (quite easy to reach with the metro but still took almost an hour to get there unless you lived there which was the middle of nowhere really). The teachers were mainly Brazilians, some familiar names for me, and there were four levels: beginners, intermediate, advanced and professional. I ended up taking mainly the advanced level workshops, some intermediate and some professional, and was pretty happy with them. The leaders taking part in the workshops were very good which made it surely a lot easier for me. Unfortunately I’m sure I missed a lot of info since most classes were if not entirely then at least 90% held in Portuguese. But I learned the sequences none the less. It’s hard to say which I would think were the best ones… Mafie Zoukers’ were maybe the most complicated sequences but I tend to like the technique workshops more (sadly no ladies’ styling classes!).

Workshops workshops workshops...

Leonardo Neves and Layssa Liebscher

The hot Helsinki zouk and samba festival

Last weekend we had the Second Helsinki Zouk and Samba Festival: 8 hours of fantastic zouk workshops by Freddy Marinho and Andressa Castelhano, a Brazilian couple that currently teaches in Moscow. Really enjoyed their style of dancing and teaching - plus it was also the Rio style zouk which I'm more familiar with :) Took one of their samba de gafieira workshops as well. That was a bit tricky and not at all like the samba (no pé) I'm used to but was fun to try it!

We also had two zouk parties so definitely got my zouk dose for a couple days! ...But again I'm craving for more!

Learning to follow.. As Andressa said: "On the dance floor you have to obey the man. And elsewhere, the man has to obey you!"