Welcome to the Head Movement Project
A note on what this is, what it isn’t, and why it exists
I love Brazilian Zouk. And head movement has been one of the most humbling, frustrating, and genuinely fascinating journeys of my dancing life.
If you’re a Zouk dancer, you probably know exactly what I mean.
Because what most of us discover is that head movement is not something you learn in a workshop and walk out with. You collect pieces. A tip here, a correction there. One teacher tells you to relax your neck. Another tells you to engage your core. Another says it comes from the ribcage. Another says just let go. They’re all right, but often it doesn’t land the way you need it to or when you need it to. And so you keep going, keep collecting, keep going down the long road of integrating this skill into your body.
Not because the teaching isn’t out there. It is. There are incredible teachers across the global community sharing hard-won insight into this. But the knowledge is still experienced in fragments. It lives in workshops, in occasional advice, in conversations that don’t get recorded. You get a piece at one congress, a different piece 6 months later that seems to contradict it, and then 3 years after that, both pieces suddenly make sense at the same time (which is also just a reality of the process).
That’s the journey. What head movement actually looks like from the inside. We see the finished product. We see incredible dancers do things with their bodies that look like water, but don’t see the years of figuring it out until we learn it firsthand. The breakthroughs that disappear. The thing that finally clicks at 2am at a social when you weren’t even trying. The injury that set you back. The teacher who said one sentence that changed everything (that you didn’t understand until randomly months later).
I’ve also spent a significant part of my Zouk journey managing chronic pain. Not something obvious or dramatic, just the quiet reality of a body that loves a demanding, complex dance while I continue to figure out how to keep showing up for it. I’ve been in classes where a teacher said something true and useful that my body simply wasn’t ready to receive, and watched many other dancers in the same position. I deeply know the nonlinear mess of it from the inside. What it feels like to work this hard and still feel like the map is missing. And I want to change that.
What this is
The Head Movement Project is a living research inquiry into the art and science of head movement in Brazilian Zouk.
A genuine, documented investigation combining personal experience, somatic research, movement science, and conversations with artists, teachers, and movement specialists from across the global Zouk community (and beyond) to look at what the body knows and needs, including going into the contradictions, the gaps, and the things that haven’t been addressed, or shared, or figured out yet.
My body is the first research subject. I’m not arriving here as someone who has this all figured out. I’m a serious student with a penchant for investigation who got obsessed and decided to document everything publicly.
What I bring to this
I have a background built on the body: healthcare, forensics, somatics, neuromuscular work, psychology. I think about how bodies learn, change, respond, and hold history for a living. And I still found myself standing in head movement classes, struggling with the same things over and over, watching other dancers ask the same questions in what feels like silent isolation despite being in the same community.
I’m not Brazilian. I don’t carry the Lambada-Zouk lineage in my body the way the teachers who grew up in that tradition do. What I can offer is synthesis — connect what exists across domains that rarely speak to each other, and hopefully make it more accessible.
What I want for us
The thread that runs through nearly everything I do is our relationship with our body. How we understand it. How we listen to it. How we advocate for it. How we keep it safe while doing what we love.
I want us to understand our bodies differently. To move differently in our own skin. To feel less like we’re failing and more like we’re configured and that configuration can be understood, supported, and developed.
I want to go upstream.
Downstream is the neck pain you manage, the modification you make after something goes wrong, the decision to push through and hope for the best, or to accept that this is just how it is. Downstream is where too many us dancers live, for too long, without anyone naming it or questioning the conditions that make it feel inevitable.
Upstream is building the capacities that make the beautiful, risky, expansive movements sustainable from the start.
Surgery shouldn’t be the teacher. The post-injury or post-pain modification shouldn’t be the only pathway to good technique. If a neck that has healed knows something a neck that has never been injured doesn’t, then the uninjured neck deserves that knowledge too.
My hope is simpler than it might sound. That a dancer who is struggling right now finds something here that helps them understand what’s actually happening in their body. That someone who would have gotten hurt doesn’t. That the years of fragmented, contradictory, nonlinear figuring-it-out gets a little shorter, not for the sake of speed, but so you’re not sitting in pain or confusion any longer that you may already be. That the thing that feels so elusive starts to feel, if not easy, at least more navigable.
What I’m trying to build is a place where the knowledge that already exists, scattered across disciplines, teachers, researchers, and healing bodies, starts to find each other. So that more dancers can access it before they need the diagnosis, before they need the modification, before they need to stop.
That’s what this is for.
What this isn’t
This is not an insider’s history of Brazilian dance culture. I don’t carry that authority and I won’t pretend to.
This is not a replacement for learning from teachers who carry the living tradition in their bodies. Please keep taking classes and learning from the people who have dedicated their lives to this.
This is not a culture of corrections or debates. I’m not here to tell anyone they’re doing it wrong. I’m here to add, to connect, to build something that makes the whole picture clearer.
The limits of what I know
The Brazilian Zouk community holds decades of accumulated wisdom that lives in people’s bodies, memories, and conversations that were never recorded. What exists here is limited to what has been published, filmed, written down, or shared in a form I can access. The embodied knowledge that hasn’t been formalized is largely absent, and that absence is real and worth naming.
If you know something I don’t (especially from bodies that carry this knowledge in ways no research paper can capture), please share it.
The invitation
This project gets better when more voices join.
If something here seems inaccurate — speak up, specifically and kindly, with the story or source behind it.
If something seems incomplete — tell me what’s missing, what isn’t named, what experience doesn’t fit.
If something resonates — tell me what it connects to in your own body or your own teaching.
If you have a story that illustrates what’s described, or complicates it, or breaks it — please share. This only holds if it maps to real bodies.
The spirit here is a commons. A place where dancers, teachers, bodyworkers, and more can contribute and together build something more accurate and more useful than any one person could build alone.
I hope you’ll join me.
— Lauren