Hello to our wonderful Zouk community :)
How is everyone coping in these challenging times?! We hope that you are managing as well as you can, staying safe & healthy, and keeping your spirits up.
We are missing the 'normality' of life, and having our regular social dancing parties and classes, big time. Missing the hugs, the smiles of the dancers, and the connection that Zouk brings to our lives. But this is all just for now, and for the right reason, and before we all know it things will get back to normal and we will be back together and dancing together again. :)
We have seen how our dance schools & leaders in our community took the leadership and made quick decisions to protect the health of our individuals despite the tough choice at the time. We are also seeing how many of our dance schools have changed the way they operate and taken things online to make sure we still keep dancing, improving and keeping the Zouk alive. At Cloud 9 Zouk, we think keeping the community alive is our challenge and everyone’s responsibility. How do we do this?! Well there are 2 sides which create our wonderful community: Our dedicated artists/schools and our passionate dancers. By supporting your artists & dance schools as much as you can through this hard time to help make sure they come out of this, so then we have a place to go learn & enjoy this beautiful dance once this ends <3 By also providing a supportive space for our dancers, for those of you who were using dancing as their happy place, and who crave the hugs, smiles and friends, for those who called the dance community their family… it is time to be keeping things even tighter, like a family! <3 So, we are going to bring something a little different to our scene to support our artists & dancers at the same time. We are calling it "Project Zouk". We are planning to go live every Tue & Thur as part of our "Zouk Connect video chat" from 6 pm for 1 hour for everyone to come and say Hello and check in and keep connected with everyone. To have a chance to share how you're going and the positive things that you're doing or have seen going on out there. Simply a supportive space for all of us to feel connected & a part of our wonderful community. As part of this, we are also planning to invite artists from our community here in Australia & overseas to join us, to get to know them better and to have them share their passion & knowledge with us. We will talk about some dance concepts and theories, and we will also be working on some common techniques each week. We are planning to provide a direct PayPal link for each artists for your wonderful donation to support them in this hard time. It will be a fun session to catch up with everyone and reconnect our community, as well as to get to know some of our artists and to learn something new.