by Molly Davis
“Enjoy the bounce! Enjoy the movement! Enjoy the beat!” yells our own BloomBars resident samba teacher, Zezeh, over the Brazilian parade music. She shifts from one foot to the other, raising her arms one at a time, as if displaying festively beaded Carnival wings.
It’s 6:30 on a rainy Thursday night, and as the drums speed up, so do the moves. The class looks a little worried as the tempo rises, but they do their best to emulate their teacher’s cheerful, beaming confidence. This may be the only exercise class in D.C. where the instructor demands a smile from her students. And as Zezeh explained to me afterward, it’s no small detail.
“If you don’t smile, there’s no breathing,” she says, adding, “That’s why you smile. You keep the energy going.” The samba class is a workout for both body and mind with lightning-fast footwork and repetitive, high-energy moves that employ the muscles in your hips, arms, torso, and legs.
At one point, Zezeh stops the routine in order to explain in detail how to execute a move that involves a synced 360-degree swivel of her hips and upstretched hands.
But it’s not all about the work-out. She designed the class as a cultural excursion as well, and on this particular night she played a variety of musical styles, taking students from the more melody-driven songs of Bahia to the drum-and-whistle parade beats of Rio de Janeiro.
“First I had the concern that if I want to be teaching, I want to be sure that people really get it,” she said. “It’s the same as being in Brazil. I don’t want only the technical. I want you to learn the emotion, your body to listen to the music.”
Zezeh is from Sao Paulo, and she learned samba as a child, watching her mother and aunts dance. She wants to make the learning experience as natural for her students as it was for her. On some nights — like tonight — it’s all about the moves, but on other nights, she focuses on the cultural aspects of samba.
She teaches at two other places in D.C. — MamaSita Movement & Wellness Studio in Takoma Park and Bossa Bistro & Lounge in Adams Morgan — but she says that her classes at BloomBars are unique in terms of the close connection she’s able to make with her students.
But another, more surprising, difference is the positive effect of working without the usual trappings of a dance space.
“I love it sometimes, the way that we don’t have a mirror, because it makes people less self-conscious,” she says. “Because one of the issues about people learning dancing is too much self-consciousness, and sometimes they let it go more when they don’t have a mirror.”
That loss of self-awareness, that total surrender to the steps and the music, is what Zezeh says is the most important.
