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The Ogarocious Amazon Storefront! I’ve been getting a lot of questions about my content creation gear, the tech I use for dance travel, and also the products I recommend in the Ultimate Dance Event Survival Kit.

Well they are all in one place now! Scan the code or click the link!

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Current State Of Mind

It’s been a month since I wrote my last newsletter and things have been a whirlwind. I had 5 weekends of back to back travel. My body can definitely feel the physical and mental work from teaching that many weekends back to back. The cities I recently traveled to were Kansas, Austin, LA, Guadalajara, Roanoke, Denver, & then Atlanta.

Shout to Sara from KC, Alex from Austin, Rosa from Guadalajara, Breccia from Roanoke, Devon & Rachel of the Denver School of Social Dance, and Crystal, Nicole, & Gaby from Atlanta for hiring me/co-organizing with me in all of those weekenders & intensives!

Nothing is all good or all bad.

The good side of all the travel is I got to see old friends and make new friends off and on the dance floor. I got to teach A LOT and it’s was interesting to notice my teaching improve in small ways that really I could only tell since I’m the only that’s with me each trip.

There were small improvements in delivery, word selection, analogies, strengthening of existing concepts, new combinations of existing concepts, and more!

I’ve also been very happily using Mario samples to keep laughter in the class and “gamify” my classes with the students as they are “leveling up their kiz”. [Insert Mario Mushroom sound].

The way I structure my classes provides the students with a TON of opportunity to create options with their exits and entries in certain MSPs (moves, step, or patterns). I thoroughly enjoyed watching the students explore, connect, work through stumbles, and laugh & learn together.

The not so glamorous side has flight delays, travel planning logistical overwhelm, many hours surrounded my people in airports yet still feeling alone, like a loneli-wanderlust-ness, frazzled sleep schedule across staying up late across different time zones, achy body (feet, hips, and back), productive drag as in trying to find a good productive spot to work in in each new place, missing cuddles, finding ways to recharge physically and mentally on the road, etc.

I’m very grateful for the ability to be able to dance, the ability to have a strong enough following over a decade to still pull off financially viable weekenders through my teaching. I also realize I don’t have unlimited time or energy, I can only be in one place at a time, there are only so many hours in a day and trading my time for income isn’t the way to better financial stability.

Part of the reason I didn’t make time to write the newsletters was because of the travel and the demands of brain space that took and the other part was pouring some hours in the next feature of WCWD which is artist booking portals.

As an organizer and as an artist when you get a booking there are certain pieces of information that are good to have from the jump. Bio, promo photos, promo videos, traveler info, preferred airports, accommodation preferences, diet info, and payment info!

Before I created the was using a Notion page that had a lot of my info which was nice, however it typically required a Notion learning curve, and was pretty text heavy, and yet another link to track.  So with the power of coding I was imagining what this would look like if I could roll out a feature that be used by all artists and help lots of organizers.

The road to build this out wasn’t easy as I’ve never done it before and there were several roadblocks and annoying errors I didn’t quite understand along the way, especially around making it password protected. So after long days of teaching and travel, I was staying up late and waking up early tweaking the codebase to get all the parts of the code to work that making it easy to understand from the user experience standpoint.

So I’m proud to see the Artist Booking Portal feature out live into the world to help organizers and artists streamline their booking process across the world! Check out me walking through the feature in this video!

Excited to get back to regular newsletters and trying to find a balance for it all!

Thanks for opening another newsletter! Have a great week!

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Song I'm Currently Jamming To

Feelings (You Make Me Wanna Clubbin) - Taylor Gasy

Recent Content

• [BLOG] How To Use Musical Gears To Improve Your Musicality
• [CAROUSEL] Ultimate Dance Event Survival Kit - Part 1: Tech
• [FB REEL] Urbankizouk Flow with Alina 006 - Part 1
• [IG REEL] Private lesson flow with Syrita.
• [IG REEL] Diagramming some kiz steps.
• [FB REEL] Emphasizing intention and direction.
• [FB REEL] Covering a simple turn into a saida entry.
• [FB POST] PSA for male leads and their pockets! Comments are good as well lol
• [FB VIDEO] Demo with Ninja to “One Man Can Change The World” by DJ Chad
• [FB VIDEO] A video from a novice Brazilian J&J dance with myself and Wendy.
• [IMAGE] Connected calendars across WCWD.
• [IMAGE] The easiest hook step to lead.
• [PODCAST] 111: Interview with William Araujo
• [CAROUSEL] Carousel of the 14 communication channels of a dance class.
• [DANCE VIDEO] Me dancing urbankizouk at Elevation Zouk Festival.

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Photo of the Week

I have so many photos I need to edit from my recent travels, here’s a group photo from a class I taught in Guadalajara, Mexico!

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Dance Meme of the Week

None this week.

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Cool Video I'm Watching

The Unfair Advantage That Double My Side Hustle Income by Jeff Su

Upcoming Travel

See my artist profile at wherecanwedance.com, any artist can create one for free!

2024

02/15-19: Urbankiz @ The Los Angeles Bachata Festival 2024 - Los Angeles, CA

02/23-24: Neokiz Weekender in Guadalajara - Guadalajara, Mexico

03/1-3: Neokiz Weekender in Roanoke - Roanoke, Virginia

03/9-10: Neokiz Weekend Immersion: Workshops + Party - Denver, CO

03/31 - 04/3: Victoria International Kizomba Festival (Hosting the J&Js)- Victoria, British Colombia

03/15-17: Neokiz Intensive - Atlanta, GA

04/19-21: Lucas & Thayna - Dallas Zouk Weekender - Dallas, TX

05/3-6: Neokiz Weekender in Edmonton - Edmonton, AB, Canada

05/17-20: Kizowna 2024 - Kelowna, BC, Canada

07/20-24: 8th Annual Neo Kizomba Festival - Austin, TX

10/24-27: Zouk Conexao Festival - Atlanta, GA

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Question Of the Week

For the artists and organizers out there, how do you handle the exchange of the booking information between each other?

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Answer of the Week

None this week.

Past Newsletters

You can view past newsletters here.

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‍Dope Dance Resources

• A cool project to create a global directory of dance events for dancers, artists, and organizers!
• A tool for artists and organizers to streamline their booking process with artist booking portals!
• Find out how you can thrive at your next dance event with the Ultimate Dance Event Survival Kit.
• Find out how you can organize your dance journey with the Dancer’s Training Journal 1.0.
• Level up your kiz online with Mr. Neokiz!
• Learn more about the Ultimate Musicality Course For Dancers to level up your musicality!
• Get the 16-count phrase mapping worksheet download for free!
• Join me at my urbankiz festival in Austin, July 18-22, 2024!
• The WhereCanWeDance.com Podcast - Check out my dance podcast!
• Check out my Amazon storefront to catch all the gear I use to do everything I do in the dance world!

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Thanks for reading!

Thoughts and feedback on the newsletter or on anything covered within are always welcome, just hit reply. The thing I love most about writing this newsletter is follow-up interactions with readers.

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Feel free to forward this to other friends in your circle!

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Charles

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