Beginner Lead Hell to Lead Heaven. My Zouk Journey from Zero to Hero in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

If you are reading this, you are either interested in learning Zouk, are past lead hell, or are currently in it. Just like Dante's inferno, there are different levels to Hell. Zouk always gets more pleasureable, the more you practice proper technique, and at the other end of hell, is lead heaven.

Now my experience learning Zouk took place in Sao Paulo, Brazil, which is the known Mecca of zouk in the world. Here everyone speaks Portuguese, few speak English, and so if you are learning zouk in some group class around the world, your experience will be different. I doubt it will be as excruciatingly painful as my journey, it could be similar, and I doubt anyone has learned as fast as I have.

I spared no expense on taking privates, asked everyone if they could dance or train with me, and danced with the best dancers nearly every single night for the last 22 months. I averaged 4 privates a week, 2-3 hours of training sessions per day with 1-2 people a day, and danced every social Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday, averaging 4-5 hours of additional social dancing a night.

Final thought, your personal hell will be a correlation to your mindset, but I deeply believe we are all human and share similar feelings of shame, fear of rejection, and develop our own mindsets to continue in the face of adversity. The below is my best recollection of a reasonably growth minded person with a strong conviction to learn zouk no matter what, regardless of how I felt at the time.

0-2 months in (deepest hell): It took about a month for me to dance with people and realize that I should stop asking new good people to dance with me. Unless someone was physically attracted to me, it was hard to get anyone to dance with me a second time. After about a month, people knew I wasn't good at dancing zouk and wouldn't really make eye contact with me (in fear I would use that eye contact to ask them for another dance).

I felt very alone and was taking more and more privates to get more training time as no one would accept my offer to train. Most times I asked people to dance they would tell me their feet hurt or that they were resting, when someone did accept a dance from me it would usually be 1 song, 2 on average, and at most 3 songs, with a prompt "obrigado" the second the song switched. I would often sit on my hands and watch the amazing dancers, comparing myself to them and feeling like shit. It was hard to dance after I sat down and got in my head about how bad of a dancer I was, and no one there knew who I was or would talk to me. I felt completely alone at the socials, completely invisible. I had a few people I knew I could dance with but they were also of an abysmally low level. Hence, the only people I could dance with were complete beginners, people that would be fooled by the confident way I asked them to dance "Quer dancar?," and teachers I was paying for privates.

I imagine this is the point where many people would reasonably decide that they would want to quit Zouk as it is a lonely, shameful, and painful process.

While dancing I was keeping the count or thinking about my steps; the best moments of my dance happens during the privates, not at socials. I was constantly drinking alcohol to numb the pain of social rejection and felt like I didn't have any value. I created a 3 shitty dance rule: I couldn't leave until I asked at least 3 people a social to dance with me and I set the expectation to myself that it would be bad.

Upon reflection, I don't think that I really needed to take so many privates. I did not know what made a good zouk private or what I should really be focused on learning (basics and foundations > movements). If only I had known who spoke English and was willing to train with me the stuff I learned in my privates, I would have asked them and gladly paid them - but at this level with rock bottom feelings of self worth, zouk skill level and zero Portuguese knowledge, it was pretty much impossible. I think could have gotten to the next level of hell a little faster if I had this.

2-4 months in (very much so in hell still): Ok, at this level, 3 months in I was able to do a toalha. But did it feel good? No. Did my dance feel good? No. I was so hung up on learning a bunch of movements, my zouk dance was just a bunch of moves that I strung together, hoping to last for 3 songs. I did not appreciate yet the joys of the hug, or just enjoying movements. I had yet to understand the zouk feeling and had no ability to enter a flow state. But I had enough moves in my bag to last for 2-3 songs on average per follow.

At this stage, no one was really excited to dance with me. I could still physically feel the cringe when I disconnected in the dance. I still used my arms to execute my moves. I had no idea how to keep a relaxed frame. I was stepping all my steps. I was still taking privates from 3-4 different teachers a week. Still ignorant to the importance of training and that's because I was not yet good enough where people would actually make the time to train with me.

Here's my hot take: no one wants to train with a shitty lead. Maybe if you're in a group class and you have a friend and you are treating them to lunch. Zouk is an immensely pleasurable activity, and none of this is experienced with a lead that just does a bunch of moves. IF you disagree with me, you probably have yet to experience zouk englightenment, zouk heaven, zouk nirvana, "Narnia" if you will.

I would still be thinking about my moves and basically nothing I did was an original movement, everything was learned from a private. My idea of a good dance was basically lasting 3 songs. I think if I was more confident in how to do an embrace properly (I made poor initial professor choices), I would have enjoyed zouking more. My extensive bachata background also made me a bit more movement focused and the idea of enjoying movement was still foreign to me.

By this stage and at this level of my dance journey, I had several people I knew I could ask to dance and they would accept. I had to keep them on a rotation as, again, they weren't excited to dance, but were willing to give me a "charity"(community building) dance. There are around a thousand active zouk dancers in Sao Paulo. At this stage of hell, I still had zero confidence in my dance and didn't want people to know how bad I was. Again, not everyone thinks like me, but there's only so much rejection a man can stomach a night, every night for 4 month straight, you know?

4-6 months in (getting a groove, not heaven, so still hell): At around this point I started to revisit my basics. To not just learn moves, but understand the components of these moves, like how to actually do the boom, first tic, second tic. Here I started to ask for more help, and switch my existing professors who would sell me bandages instead of medicine to heal the wound that was my dance. Many of the professors perhaps don't know how to teach, but honestly I got really lucky to have friends who cared about me and my journey and would advise me to consider more training in my basics. I relented and listened and as a result. My dance started to improve.

Here is where instead of focusing on moves, I was focusing on technique. Here I could start to feel my partner more, feel the timing, and enter into a state of flow. Still I would be thinking about how to do the technique, but at least I was thinking about the right things. As a result, while going to socials, after about 3-4 hours of dancing I would be able to enter a flow state of sorts, but with every dance having a few breaks of connection, which would feel terrible. It would take me a while to learn to be gentle with myself and accept the breaks of flow.

With the new focus on technique, most people would dance 3 songs with me, and up to 5 songs. But I still felt insecure about my dance, many of my dances felt repetitive and the same, and whenever I would do one of my tried and true movement sequences from my past privates, I would lose the flow. My dances still felt like a bunch of sequences put together, I was still very much so using my arms.

Around this time I started finding some really good professors who could quickly diagnose my level and the next biggest domino for me to solve to improve my dance. I started asking the right questions on how to do technique, such as frame, weight transfers, tension, lines, body positioning.

Also people would comment on how much I was improving. Some hells are self imposed, I did start to put in more effort in communicating in Portuguese, saying "Tudo Bom?" (All good) to people- this helped me feel less invisible.

I did a similar immersive journey with bachata and salsa in mexico city, but felt after a month or so I was about this good in terms of feeling. Upon reflection, 6 months to feel this level of good is a bit excessive and with proper training and guidance it could have been done in 3-4 months. That's why I think zouk improvement (or any skill) is some function of (quality of knowledge) X (hours diligent training).

It's also worth mentioning though that the bachata feeling level of pleasure is at the time of this writing is about 1/5th, the level of pleasure one feels in zouk (as a lead). Also important that I spent about 1500 hour dancing bachata sensual, and almost 4000 in Zouk. But even still, just based on the fact that people usually dance 1 song in bachata, close embrace isn't commonly done in bachata, the scene often doesn't mix songs, and the speed and constant need to step- I am saying that overall it's IMPOSSIBLE to feel the depth of amazingness that is zouk in bachata. I'm not saying that it's better, but it's different, and I am taking about spiritual, emotional, and physical sensorial pleasure. I will die on this hill.

6-9 months in (entering zouk purgatory): Not quite hell. I could have some long dances, and recreate the flashes of heaven that got me so keen on learning zouk in the first place. Now I had started to develop a zouk body. I am a wavy zouk dancer. But I used to be stiff dancer. Now I could look people in the eye and ask them to dance and they would accept. Now I could play with different movements and occasionally make new ones up. My dances kind of looked cool, but they didn't feel nearly as good as I know they can now (I did not know this at the time).

I could offer a good enough dance for all, but not good enough that any of the truly skilled dancers would offer me another dance. At this level I could comfortably do all the universal basics and zouk syllabus movements, plus an assortment of cool moves. I could flow, but my head movements were severely lacking. You could describe my dance as formulaic and still a series of movements attached to each other. I was using less force now to execute movements.

To the untrained eye, it might appear that I am an advanced dancer, doing cool movements, but I would still lose time, and wouldn't be necessarily comfortable. Most people do not train zouk as much as I did. At around 9 months, I could offer a decent dance and so people would willingly accept my offer to train and actually show up to train with me. This was CRITICAL to my growth and accelerated my growth as I could train more, and ASK FOR FEEDBACK (something not done/nor possible/nor wanted) at a zouk social. While privates are not as expensive as in America, they aren't free, so being able to get feedback while training my privates material was a huge growth factor to improve my comfort and to generate better questions to ask at my next private.

I was also able to grow my social circle here and talk about other zouk feelings. It's at about this stage that I started to smoke weed to "boost my creativity" and make zouk feel better, but it was really just me masking my still existent feelings of inferiority, and I hadn't realized that it was technique that I was still lacking that would make zouk feel better all the time, even when sober.

Originally, I came to brazil because I want to be the smallest fish in the ocean with all the space to grow to be something truly great, than be a big fish in a tiny pond. While at this stage you might consider me a sizeable fish in most ponds, I was still pretty much teeny weenie compared to the level of dancers here.

I entered a jack and jill at the biggest local dance school and got 2nd place at the newcomer category if that means anything. I was having loads of fun. But overall I measure progress in how my follower feels and my whole theory is status and value in zouk is a direct correlation to your skill. Yes there's pretty privilege as in all communities / society, and yes we all have value, but being a skilled zouker in zouk makes you more valuable.

I think most people who learn/study/practice zouk are stuck at this level of purgatory. It's still way better than bachata, but it's NOT nearly at the level of pleasure one feels when they get to the next level.. lead heaven..

Part 2 coming, stay tuned..

Zouk is life,

-Mo

p.s. someone asked me if it was so gruelingly difficult to learn zouk, what kept me motivated? my first exposure to zouk was with my bachata sensual teacher who showed me zouk and it blew my mind 🤯 i had to learn to recreate the feeling, and basically after 6 more hours of privates, i decided to buy one way tickets to brazil to learn zouk in earnest (obsessively).