Warsaw Zouk Festival Iago & Vanessa Playing with structures demo 4 Feb 2024

4 Feb 2024 · 3 min

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3:15

In this workshop segment from the Warsaw Zouk Festival, instructors Iago and Vanessa demonstrate a series of basic Zouk structures focused on lateral movement, simple and outside turns, and footwork swapping between leaders and followers. They begin with a lateral lunge and a simple turn, then reverse the traditional footwork so leaders execute the follower’s steps and vice‑versa. The demo progresses to an outside turn, emphasizing cross‑back positioning and varying turn counts for each role. Throughout, they introduce styling options—sliding, cheeky, knee‑driven movements, and body‑isolated accents—while using rhythmic vocal counts (e.g., “boom, chi, chi,” “wo chi chi wo”) to illustrate musicality. The instructors encourage participants to personalize the moves, adding “swag” or “boom cha cha” variations, and conclude with a direct lateral sequence before thanking the class.

Chapters

Recording. Hi! Thank you. All right, so today we work with simple structures, just lateral and simple turn, but we change the footwork. We invite the followers to do leader's footwork entire lateral and leader change to followers lateral. Okay, so we start with lunge and then I'm using my right hand, simple turn. Left go on the hips, swing right to go side diagonal down to be more ground diagonal down. And then the first one was just here. And here you can play. You can enjoy the way you want. Okay? Like Vanessa said, swag. Wow! And then to go up, just shake hands and raise the step. After that, we start to change. So again, simple turn. Now instead of going together, I stay on the spot. Boom, chi, chi. For the followers, same simple turn, same side. Leaders, here we're going to start to do followers' footwork. Lap it out, hand right there again to raise side. Lap it out.
Boom, chi, chi, boom, okay.
And stop. The level 2 was us doing an outside turn, so I step my left leg and I turn to my right. Cross back, cross position. Single turn for the followers, 1 turn for the leaders. Single turn for the followers, 1 turn for the leaders. 2 turns for the leaders, 3 turns for the leaders. Okay, okay.
And then for the followers, I give to you two options that I'm not showing here as a style to play. But remember, as a style, you can choose any part of your body to move the way you want to. Okay, so the first one was sliding, cheeky cheeky. And at the same time that I am sliding, I'm using my knees. Wo and tuk. Cha cha. Wo chi chi wo. The second one was wo bung. Chi chi. Chi chi.
Chi chi.
And wo chi chi wo. Chi chi wo chi. And here you can use more like a Boom cha cha boom or swag. Okay, good.
And we're doing directly lateral.
Boom cha cha boom boom cha cha boom boom chi chi boom boom cha cha boom. Boom cha cha boom, boom cha cha boom, cha boom. Good.
Thank you so much, guys. Thanks for coming.