Zouk Nation

Shani Mayer

Nicholas Bambo — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:35:03 +0000

Shani was born in Israel where she started studying dance and has trained in Ballet, modern, Jazz, Samba and Salsa . In 2006 she traveled to brazil where she saw Zouk-lambada for the first time , this instantly started her passion for zouk . Shani is currently teaching in Los Angeles and has brought many great teachers to teach workshops in Los Angeles including Mary Hodges (BA), Leon Gordin (ISRAEL) and Rich aka Scottish Guy (BA). She hopes to help introduce Zouk to the West Coast.

Interview with Marcia

Nicholas Bambo — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:03:10 +0000

She has a critically acclaimed album and is responsible for two of the largest hits in the Brazilian Zouk dance scene, “Um Chance,” and “Vida,” in the past several years, and yet very few people would seem to know her name. But with the release of her upcoming new album, “Reloaded,” it would appear that is all about to change. Join me as I sit down with Marcia, one of Zouk’s hottest rising stars, to talk about her life growing up in Germany, the challenges one faces breaking into the music scene, and her new album. Click here to read the full interview.

Tania Onca

Nicholas Bambo — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:50:22 +0000

Tania Onca, creator of LatinZouk, has been teaching and performing LatinZouk and other Latin Dances for many years. Having studied music and being trained in various dances (including ballroom) from early age on, Tania is not only renowned for her dance technique, but also for her musical interpretation and creativity with dance and music. Her dance style is passionate and expressive while at the same time elegant and graceful, which has also earned her the nickname ‘Onça’ (Jaguar). People always say they love watching her dance ‘to’ the music and enjoy her creativity as a dancer and a highly innovative and well regarded choreographer. Tania’s dancing and teaching skills have been very influential in many places, like in the UK where some of her students are nowadays teaching Zouk/ Lambada.

Driven by Tania’s background with Latin Dances, over the past years Tania and her dance partner Marcelo have developed a new style of Brazilian Zouk/Lambada which they perform and teach and which they call ‘LATIN ZOUK’ due to the influence and inclusion of elements from other Latin dances such as Argentine Tango, and others.

Tania has been invited to perform and teach Latin Zouk and other Latin Dances at numerous events all over the world (Europe, South America, Africa, Asia) including many dance congresses. Together with her dance partner Marcelo she is even responsible for establishing or re-introducing the Zouk scene in some countries. Tania’s students always praise her impressive knowledge of both, dance and music as well as her dedication and ability to explain the details and convey her knowledge when teaching, thereby making her a very highly rated instructor, wherever she teaches.

Marcelo Estilo

Nicholas Bambo — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:48:14 +0000

Marcelo Estilo, creator of LatinZouk, has been a Brazilian dance performer and instructor for most of his life. He has been part of the development of Lambada / Zouk in Brazil since the 90s. In Brazil he has performed and taught Lambada Zouk in many of Brazil’s most renowned and well established dance places and on request of many dance schools has toured Brazil teaching and performing Zouk Lambada, Axe, Samba, Forro,… Due to his passion for dance and to promote Zouk / Lambada and other Brazilian dances, he has travelled to many countries, starting with Argentina in the 90s, where he performed in well known places such as Maluco Beleza or Mais Um and since then many more places across the globe. He is also regarded as one of the world’s top Axe dancers and choreographer who due to his talent and skills has performed on stage with some of Brazil’s most famous and internationally known singers such as Ivete Sangalo, Harmonia do Samba, E o Tschan, Olodum and Araketu in addition to numerous TV appearances. Whatever kind of dance, Estilo always brings to the dance floor amazing energy, style and a hip swing to look out for! Together with his dance partner Tania Onca he promotes Brazilian dances worldwide, performing and giving workshops and in some places together they are even responsible for establishing or re-introducing the Zouk scene there. Driven by Tania’s background with Latin Dances, over the past years Tania & Marcelo have developed a new style of Brazilian Zouk/Lambada which they perform and teach and which they call ‘LATIN ZOUK’ due to the influence and inclusion of elements from other Latin dances such as Argentine Tango, and others.

Alen MacWeeney Interview, Part 2

Nicholas Bambo — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 03:34:26 +0000

The second part of my interview with Alen MacWeeney, whose Brazilian Zouk Photo Exhibition opens this Thursday, February 25th at Lava Gina in the East Village.

Part II

NB:	You and I originally met last summer when you came upon us dancing in Central Park. In the two years we’ve been dancing in the Park many people have taken our photos and they always promise to send us copies, but they never do. You were the first. On top of that you came back to shoot us the following week. What is it that attracted you to the dance?
AM:	Well, initially I thought it was this wonderful dance taking place in the open near Bethesda Fountain, where there were, I can’t quite remember, eight or twelve couple dancing in the summer in the most free and liberated way of dance that I’d ever seen. (It just seemed that both the men and women were so,) it was a very sensual kind of dance, but it also had a formality that was very appealing because it went through these movements, but those movements were also completely subject to the feelings of the people dancing and how they could just break the rules and do anything. And those that did do that, they were doing whatever they chose, they were in a world of their own. And the fact they could just do this in a dance, the women they had to kind of completely be submissive to the men in the dance, in most cases, or to the passion that seem to be in the men when they were dancing. That they did this with such great pleasure, and the people were having such great fun. And between that and the sound of the music which is very sweet, I was just completely captivated.
NB:	Do you have a history of photographing other kinds of dances?
AM:	No, none. None at all. I used to photograph very still photos of people. Whether it’s portraits or fashion, but they’ve always been involved in emotion and certain kind of passion that I either create or try to invent in the subject.
NB:	The way you took photos of the group originally, when you first started shooting us, is very different from the way you’re shooting now. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that has evolved?
AM:	At first it was the scene, to do a picture of the whole scene of the ten, twelve couples dancing. And then, I thought well I’ll go in more tightly on some couples. And then I found that it really depended a lot on the time of day how I did that, because at certain times, when I photographed in the evening, and you always danced I think it was on a Sunday evening at around six, six-thirty, the light was really getting nice and soft, but it still didn’t carry, to me, the kind of emotional quality of the dancing and so I went in tighter. Going in closer I thought I’ll get this across. But that was very difficult focusing because there’d be so much movement going on I’d keep losing focus on who was in the picture. So the best pictures seemed to be done when it was almost dark, which is really my preference in time of day for photographing, when it’s almost twilight and the shadows and the details in shadows have kind of gone black. So you’re basically looking at highlights of people, where the light is striking a face, depending on the attitude of the face, whether it’s back or up or down conveys another level of emotion. I found that the best time of day, but it was also the most difficult time because with the motion of the dancers it was hard to capture that shot. So then we went inside to the club, to Lava Gina, and then I decided I would have to light it because this club is as dark as the black hole of Calcutta. We set up lights with the help of Vincent, my assistant, and I photographed there for a couple of nights. Much, in some ways, to the distress of other people. The flash was annoying. Which I can well understand, but I wasn’t about to be deterred by a couple of objections. I think those were the most successful pictures.
NB:	What are some other challenges you’ve faced when photographing a zouk dancer?
AM:	The thing of course is the drama, the man leaning over and the woman lying back with her hair flying around, and she leans back, always back, in what looks like an act of submission, that of course is the most appealing to the camera. It might not be actually happening but it just may be part of the dance. The other part is how much the people actually enjoy the dancing. They love dancing. Everyone that I spoke to at Lava Gina really loved dancing. And all kinds of people. One man Adrain, we nicknamed him the bullfighter, El Torro, has actually changed his name I think.
NB:	Yes, he now goes by the name, Adrian Atorro.
AM:	He conveyed a kind of emotion that the best of acting couldn’t have done better. He really was immersed in it so thoroughly and so believably, this wasn’t an act, this was him. Even though he’s a systems analyst by trade. I found that some time the detail was the thing that was the most appealing. The expression on the man’s face, or it could be the woman’s face, the way a hand was on a body, the sweat, the pleasure of it all, is really what the dance is about.
NB:	I read that that for your book “Irish Travellers, Tinkers No More,” you spent, something like, five years among them, getting to know them and shooting them. You’ve also spent a lot of time with our group getting to know us, to where it’s safe to say that you’re looked upon as being part of the family. My question is, how important is it for you to know the subject before you can shoot them?
AM:	Well, I think actually its very important, but I never know how to begin or what I would like to do. I mean, when I was starting out, I thought I was going to be more like a civil right photographer, or a human rights photographer. And though I am interested in that, I never know how to begin a project, and I never had any real intention of, when I started with the travelers or the tinkers in Ireland, of doing a whole project about them. That just evolved of its own accord. And I’ve very much felt the same way about Zouk. I didn’t really think I was going to photograph every week, or try photographing every week, depending on the weather, and it has happened and I’ve enjoyed it very much and I’d like to go on doing more.
NB:	It sounds like you don’t really chose your subject. Something organic happens and eventually the subject sort of takes off on it’s own.
AM:	That’s right. And I think that’s the better way because in a sense I have deep suspicion of photo opportunists.
NB:	What is a photo opportunist?
AM:	It’s like somebody saying everybody is talking about Indian prostitutes along some road in Bombay, and they go off and do their project. Or they go do a contained war like there was in Belfast in Northern Ireland. People would go to photography school and then go shoot their action pictures in Belfast. It was like a portfolio piece. I don’t like to do things where I see the outcome. I’m not doing it to see a specific outcome, I’m doing it because it’s interesting. And I can’t see a better reason to do something than to do something for the simple reason that it looks really interesting and I’m sure other people would be interested in it if they saw it to. I just think I’m really interested in the purpose of people’s lives. I mean, what else is there? To be curious about other people’s lives and what they want to do and how to express what we can’t express other ways. And I think that this dance does express something I’ve never seen before expressed in a dance other than by professional dancers. This is pure dance. Pure amateurism, pure professionalism, or whatever you’d like to call it. But it’s a devotion to something. Whether one person wants to go and say the rosary every twenty minutes or somebody else wants to dance, but you Zouk dancers really love dancing.
NB:	You’re talking about passion.
AM:	Yes, passion. And this dance has that passion.
NB:	Is there ever a point when you’re done shooting a subject, to where you feel as you’ve met the challenge, the vein has been tapped and there’s no more gold left to mine and it’s time to move on to the next subject?
AM:	Yes, it does happen.
NB:	How do you know?
AM:	I don’t really know. As George Bernard Shaw said, “Plays aren’t finished, they’re just abandoned.” And I think much the same ways, they will be abandoned because either circumstances forbid something more to happen, or I won’t be able to do it, or I’ll have too much time constraints and it’ll just stop. But I’ll feel I’ve gone beyond just looking in as a voyeur on something that’s curious.
NB:	So in your mind there’s always potential to revisit a subject.
AM:	Yes, I just photographed somebody a few weeks ago that I had photographed when she was like twenty and she’s now in her mid fifties. I think time is the only thing that’s really interesting in photographs, how you feel about this and that and what happens twenty, thirty or forty years later.
NB:	The opening of the Zouk photo exhibition at Lava Gina next week in the East Village, out of the hundreds of photos you taken of the group I’m curious as to how you decided which ones would be exhibited?
AM:	Well that actually was very difficult, to where I wish I could have put up more. I couldn’t afford to print more and it wasn’t big enough a place to have more. Choosing the seven, originally it was going to be six but I really wanted it to be eight, they were just done on the basis of what I thought most expressed the dance, although in variety. It was very difficult to chose. I’d put one up on the wall, then I’d take one away and I’d change it. It’s an issue of balance, does this do enough one vertical and the rest horizontal. And also, what’s surprising about it that people don’t expect to see? The two women lying horizontally over the arm of Jeremey was kind of an amusing picture, so that kind of counteracted the very serious emotion of the man from Washington with a hat.
NB:	Dahyu
AM:	So it’s an issue of what helps the other, rather than what might kill the other if I put in two pictures that were too close together. There were many. I could have done twenty pictures. I think the photograph of you, Nicholas and Addy is like a poster for Lava Gina, a poster for Zouk. I mean you are absolutely passionate, serious and looking down on Addy who has thrown herself back. It couldn’t be more perfect. Then we have the bullfighter leaning with passion toward Kristina who has that very pale skin. It’s a combination of everything, his clothes, his attitude, hers. If I could explain it I wouldn’t be taking photographs.
NB:	So, if I understand you, the exhibition should be viewed not as a series of individual pictures, but as a series in which each piece supports the other?
AM:	Yes, and also stand on their own as a kind of a symbol of the dance, or one part of the dance without ever showing what a full dance is. It is the fragments that make up the whole. And it is how those fragments play off each other that make the thing seem, well, curious, or I don’t understand this, I want more.
NB:	So intrigue is a big part of it.
AM:	Yes, surprise, intrigue and you don’t ever have a full answer.
NB:	What type of impact do you hope this exhibition will have, what do you want people to come away with?
AM:	I think it’s a great form of liberation for people. It has everything that young adults, or medium age or even old adults desire. We all want affection, love, warmth, emotion, and a feeling of desire toward each other. And this somehow this dance brings it out in people. And it’s not limited to one person must always dance with the other person, like a boy and girlfriend. The dance ends, they switch they change around, and they just go ahead and dance so more. It’s basically a very simple thing. Dance. Music.
NB:	Is it safe to say that you are going to continue photographing Zouk dancers?
AM:	Yes. Without a doubt. Wherever they may be.

Alen MacWeeney Interview, Part 1

Nicholas Bambo — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:25:40 +0000

This Thursday, February 25th marks the opening of the Brazilian Zouk Photo Exhibition at Lava Gina in the East Village. I recently sat down with Alen to discuss his life, some of the challenges that a photographer faces working in the digital age, and his recent fascination with Zouk.

Born in Dublin, Alen MacWeeney began his international career at twenty, in Paris, as Richard Avedon’s assistant. Across a half-century, he’s become especially known for his ability to artistically photograph interiors, countrysides, portraits, and even people’s inner lives. His work has appeared in LIFE, The New Yorker, Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, GEO, Fortune, Harper’s Bazaar, Smithsonian, Esquire, American Photographer, G.Q. His pictures are in many private collections and in the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the George Eastman House, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and others.

Part I

NB:	The Ireland today is very different from the Ireland you grew up in. I wonder if we could start by talking a little bit about what it was like when you were a boy.
AM:	The Ireland I grew up in was much emptier, much fewer people living in the country than now. It was very dispersed. I was the only photographer walking around the streets of Dublin. People would wonder what I was doing now and again, but most of the time people left me alone. But I’d never see another photographer, where as now every other person is a photographer or if not photographer they’re a model. If they’re not a model, they’re the parent’s of the model of the photographer looking at them.
NB:	What initially attracted you to photography?
AM:	Well, I was faced at the age of 13 looking at the future and I had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to be an Air Force pilot, I thought I’d do that, I thought that would be interesting, or my parents thought I should go into hotel management. And that certainly didn’t appeal to me. And I became with another friend in school very interested in photography. And at the age of, I guess, 12 or 13 we were the youngest members of the photographic society of Ireland and we would enter competitions. These were very formal competitions so we went from the C group to the B group to the A group, which was the advanced photographers. And then we entered photographs in the Irish Salon of photography and they were exhibited, and that was quite a great coup for us to do. We would take pictures at night time of cars moving and make patterns in the film and process the film in our bedroom, underneath the bed clothes, loading the film into a tank, developing it and printing it. From that I thought, well, this is really difficult and I think I’d like to try this. And I got more interested in photography and more magazines and books on photography came into Ireland.
NB:	I’m curious as to how you made the transition from an amateur photographer, someone who was just taking photos for fun, to a professional photographer?
AM:	I worked initially for a photographer that had been an old time photographer using a daylight studio with a skylight for lighting and a chair that we would photography subjects would be something like a dentist chair with a headrest so they couldn’t move. He was now moving into the newer age where he was taking pictures of school children putting them into little frames made in Japan and selling them back to the families of the children. And I was processing this film in a damp basement, and processing the film in a couple marmalade pots. And doing that for a while and then I got a job at the Irish Times, a national newspaper. And then after about a year I was made a photographer. So I was now at the age of 16 thinking I’m going to go off on murders and interesting projects. When the actual fact I was usually photographing something like the annual general meeting of the rotary club, which had about as much to do with personal expression as snagging turnips.
NB:	I understand there is a connection between you and Orson Welles.
AM:	I photographed Orson Welles. Someone had said to me that if you do a photograph of somebody well known I’ll get you a job at Vogue in London. So Orson Welles was in town, and I took up my courage, phoned his secretary and went down to a photo shoot. And being the egocentric kind of individual he loved the photographs that I showed him and ordered big, big prints which he put up all around his dressing room and then gave me a commission to photograph something else for him.
NB:	Eventually you came to be an assistant to Richard Avedon. How did that come about?
AM:	It had to do with the fact that I didn’t feel I knew enough about the kind of photography I wanted to do. I was very impressed by the fashion photographs of Richard Avedon. And I did fashion photographs in my time. I did fashion portraits and theater photographs. Very much similar to what he did when he was at a young age. So when I was twenty I wrote to him. To my surprise it took me a lot of time to compose this letter. And I think I spent six months in fact composing this letter with various people helping me and me saying no, no, that’s not what I like, I don’t want that at all, that’s horrible. And anyway my letter impressed him, but my photography did not as he wrote back. So I met him in Paris for an interview and I was employed there and I stayed there when he did the Paris collections in 1961. That was the year Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union. We went to the Ballet Russe, and it was very exciting. I appeared in actually one of many of his pictures as a stand in, model or a cameraman or something.
NB:	How long did you end up working for him?
AM:	I worked for him for a year and he was sort of really a mentor to me, as was another person named Marvin Israel, who was a painter, but also the Art Director of Harpers’ Bazaar. And I also studied with Alexy Brodovitch in New York.
NB:	So you originally come to New York to work for Alexy Brodovitch.
AM:	I originally came to New York to work for Avedon. And after that year of working with him, I said, well, now it’s my time to start out on my own, again. So I returned to Ireland with an idea of photographing the people, the men and women who ran the Catholic church in Ireland, which, looking back on it, I wish I had really done because it was possible at that time to photograph the nuns, the priests and the monks in their habitats. And I did do some. I went to Glenstal Abbey and photographed there, but I was twenty one or twenty two now, and it required to many letters of introduction, and there was too much red tape. I couldn’t get a grant from the Arts Council, which I tried, and so I took to the streets and started photographing on the streets of Dublin. By now I had shifted my allegiance from Richard Avedon, whom I still admired greatly, but I didn’t really want to pursue a life of fashion photography and the kind of commercial photography that he did even though he was brilliant at doing so. I was more impressed by the photography of Robert Frank, and that was really essentially street photography.
NB:	How does street photography differ from the kind of photography you had become used to shooting under Avedon?
AM:	Avedon’s photographs were directed in the studio to create an image or a style or something of a mood about a woman or a man or both. But they were very much directed pictures. Street photography is a synthesis of many things happening. It could be the relationship of one thing on another and perhaps a third. For example many of Franks photographs would have one person, one thing playing against another and the third might be the observer. So it was much more involved. But to do this in the street you don’t interfere, you can only take the picture.
NB:	Your role is the non-partial observer.
AM:	Yes, you can’t suddenly say, “now turn around or move closer.” And in a way it becomes very difficult. You become much more like a hunter or a fly fisherman trying to capture something. And you can’t capture anything beyond what your own maturity in your mind’s eye can see. Where as in directing a picture, you can exceed what your mind’s eye has because the person your photographing is, essentially, as much a part of having the photograph come out as you are. You’re not just taking a photograph of something or someone. They are participating with you and it is their reaction to you and the camera in a setting that causes the picture to become alive. On the street you have to do it all on your own and see it and capture it, so you have to be, essentially, in the right place at the right time and be able to do it. And it’s not a matter of you having the camera loaded and be ready to take a picture. You have to be that way all the time, so in a sense your concentration has to be extended, not from a couple of hours, but over a period of your life, over a period of days. So from that, I then came back to America because I thought it was the place for photography. It was the perfect medium. It was mechanical, it was quick, it was, at that time, cheap. Cheaper than being a sculptor and having to buy big stones every time you want to do something. And it was a thing you could do alone. Unlike filmmaking, where you need a team of people working with you, still photography still has that quality where you are kind of like a poet with a camera.
NB:	Are you a loner by nature?
AM:	No, not really. I much more like company. But I think it’s essential to be alone to do photography. I mean, you can’t really do much if you’re constantly chatting, interacting.
NB:	You’ve been shooting long enough that you’ve had to make the transition from film to digital. Was it a difficult transition to make?
AM:	It was a forced issue on me. I wasn’t really taken to digital photography. I liked the darkroom, I liked processing my film. Well, I didn’t really like it, but I thought it was an interesting experience and I would be very frustrated. It would be under exposed or over exposed. I’d be cursing this way and that. I’d make prints. The process in the darkroom of being alone with the photograph you’ve done, they do become like your babies. I mean, that’s just silly, but they are like your babies and you sort of nurture this one or that one. You make a print, it doesn’t work out, you try the other way, you make a different print. The whole process is the process of making a picture, it’s not just sending it off to the camera shop to get a print made. You see something but you can add a lot more to it in the way you emphasize it or the way you control it rather like a piece of music. The conducting is done in the darkroom. And so when I went to digital it was simply because I had lost my darkroom, and someone showed me a little digital camera that I really enjoyed taking pictures because ideally it was very small and produced really pretty good pictures.
NB:	What kind of camera was this?
AM:	It was a Cannon G9. I used it on jobs. And every picture I took came out, which is unlike with what happens with film. Then the building in which my darkroom was in was sold, so I had to put the darkroom into storage, where it’s been for the last couple of years. At that point I became more fixed as a digital photographer.
NB:	Do you have a preference between the two, film or digital?
AM:	I would prefer film, It has a more luminous quality to it. And I prefer black and white over color. Color has a problem, it’s so transitory. It doesn’t have the same meaning. Black and white has everything. It has the meaning of black and white, day and night. It has everything in those tones. Whether you’re preference is more toward dark or light, you can express much more through that than you can through color film. Because color film is just film, it’s just a color. You can adjust the color a bit, but you’re still stuck with this thing, what does green mean? What does blue mean? Whereas a painter can infuse the color with texture and other things that a photographer can’t. A photographer is limited to the technical results of that particular dye or color.
NB:	And yet, when you shot the Zouk dancers you chose color. What about the subject dictated it be shot in color over black and white?
AM:	That’s a good question. I did the Zouk dancers in color because if you photograph in color digitally you can change it back to black and white and you have a better range of tone shooting in color. And also I think in some ways color is much more sensual than black and white, in the color and tonality of skin. And with Zouk being dancing so sensual and erotic it seems to suit color. It also seems to suit the fact that we were in a little club, Lava Gina, a great name. It carries the weight of emotion and passion in a way better than black and white, people’s bodies sweating, dancing.

In Part II of the interview Alen and I discuss some of the challenges he faced when trying to capture Zouk dancers on film, and the decisions that had to be made in the staging of the upcoming Brazilian Zouk photo exhibtion at Lava Gina.

Mea-Lynn Wong

Nicholas Bambo — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:46:31 +0000

Mea-Lynn, born on June 4, 1993, started showing off a little of her talent at the age of 8, when she gave her first performance at a playback show at her elementary school. She was in 3rd grade and gave a performance to Shakira’s song “Ojos Asi.”

She won the 3rd price, and did not hesitate to try again after a couple of years when she was in 6th grade. She gave a performance, along with a couple of friends, to Daddy Yankee’s song “Gasolina.” However, this time, she and her friends, took the grand price home.

After that performance, Mea-Lynn had not been very active with dancing, until she joined her brother, Ryan, in the Zouklovers Curacao group in late ‘06. She was very shy at first, she was not showing her full potential.

However, little by little as she started to loosen up, she started to impress everyone in the group with her beautiful hip movements, and great Zouk flow. Since then, she just became better and better.

She became, together with Fayolah, Kimberly, and Chandrika, the top 4 Zouk dancers in Curacao. In addition to Zouk, she also explored her grounds with Salsa, Merengue, and Bachata.

Now that she is the official dance partner of Ryan, Mea-Lynn is on her way to become a top Zouk dancer. She is eager to keep growing and expanding her dancing horizon.
Mea-Lynn for sure will not fail to impress other dancers with her beautiful dancing grace.

But right now, just like her brother, she is ready to bring Zouk to the USA!

Ryan Wong

Nicholas Bambo — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:44:55 +0000

Ryan, born on November 19, 1989, always liked dancing, but it wasn’t until he took his first Salsa class, when he was 14, that he noticed that dancing was his true love. Fortunately, it wasn’t just a love, but also a talent.

From Salsa, he quickly got a grasp of other latin dances such as Merengue, Cha cha and Bachata. He has given several Salsa performances, and even got the opportunity to dance for the Queen of Holland during the Kingdom Games in ’05.

However, it was in Jan ’06 when Ryan discovered the dance that he is most passionate about, Zouk. He got his first lesson from Pasty, an internationally known Zouk dancer from Holland, and then he immediately asked for more classes.

There were no Zouk classes in Curacao yet; however, ex-Zouklover Holland, Chandrika Floridas, moved back to Curacao and started her own new Zouk group and accepted Ryan as a member of the “Zouklovers Curacao.”

Ryan joined and together with Chandrika, Fayolah and Kimberly (his two main dance partners), Ryan introduced Zouk to Curacao.

After putting Zouk on the map in Curacao, Ryan unexpectedly moved to Los Angeles. There, he further explored his dancing skills with Hip Hop, Dancehall and Waacking.

All his dance experiences contributes to the dancer that he is today. With love and passion, Ryan dominates dance floors with his unique body movements and musicality.

Ryan Wong, now situated in Los Angeles, is ready to bring and share his all time favorite dance to the United States, Brazilian Zouk!

Brazilian Zouk Photo Exhibition at Lava Gina

admin — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 01:17:49 +0000

This Thursday, February 25^th, 2010, marks the official opening of the Brazilian Zouk Photo Exhibition by Alen MacWeeney at the Lava Gina, World Music Lounge in the East Village. This exhibition is the first stage of what is hoped will be a much more larger exhibition later on down the road. The exhibition is free and scheduled to run from February 25th to March 25th.

Brazilian Dance Party at Lafayette Grill & Bar

Nicholas Bambo — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 19:06:26 +0000

Zouk Nation proudly presents, monthly Brazilian Dance Parties on the last Friday of every month starting this Friday, February 26th at the Lafayette Grill & Bar. At 9:00 pm a free Zouk Lambada lesson will be given by Stephanie B. to be followed by Zouk Lambada and Samba de Gafieira dancing until 1am. This month special guest appearance by world renown Samba de Gafieira instructor Anderson Mendes. Admission only $12 and a one drink minimum.