To all of our wonderful Zouk lovers and dance friends! 🙂🤗

What a beautiful weekend! 💃🕺🌟❣

We'd love to express our appreciation to everyone who took part in our Cloud9 Mid Year Ball & Zouk Championship 2024. ✨✨💃🕺💖

Thank you everyone for your amazing support in being a part of our event, for your wonderful smiles and energy, and for the kind words of encouragement & gratitude..... We loved every moment of it❣️

A big shout out and huge gratitude to our beautiful Internationals, Pedro & Cibele, Otavio & Sara, and to our National artists from around Australia, and for the 1st time for this event, from New Zealand!, for adding so much value to our event. ✨

Sara, Otavio, Cibele, Pedro - we love you and was super special to be able to spend the extra time with you all in the leadup to Mid Year Ball, as well as over the weekend. You are just beautiful humans, and was a privilege having you here❤️

Our dancers also all LOVED you so much, and we have had awesome feedback about the joy and incredible talent you bring to us, and how lucky they felt to be able to enjoy this all in person. 💖💖💖💖

Jiten, Riana, Stephy, Jojo, Jack, Alana, we so appreciate you guys for your ongoing support and the beautiful souls and fun personalities that you bring with you to share with our attendees each time, and which is just as important in our eyes as your inspiring dancing and passion for Zouk and sharing the knowledge. ✨

Matthew & Tayler, thank you for joining us for your first time teaching at Mid Year Ball, and we see the hard work and dedication you are putting into your craft, and it's wonderful that you can share your experience and learnings with our dancers. ✨

Teresa Lauago, an extra thank you for making the trip all the way from Auckland!, and to experience our Ball for the first time. ✨🙏

We missed Dharshana this time, as together they've been a wonderful addition to Brisbane Zouk Festival, but Teresa, it was great to have your lovely personality and smile grace us over the weekend, and to enjoy your workshops. ✨

Our attendees just loved meeting and learning from you all, and we loooove the energy, fun and kindness, and the thought you put into your workshops, as well as just your interactions in general with our dancers. ✨💃🕺🤗🙏

We have received so much awesome feedback about how much our dancers loved every workshop and the friendly feel of being able to have great dances with our artists on the weekend. ❤

And a BIG Thank you 🙏, thank you 🙏, DJ's! For keeping the parties going and taking us through a journey on the dance floor. You guys are awesome. 🤗🌟 - DJ AJELLA (Anand), DJ Grevo Official (Matthew), DJ Panda (Jimmy), DJ Krankit (Damian), DJ Tayler, DJ Doug, DJ Devv, DJ Habibi (Amin) ❤🎶🎵🎧🌟

Another part of our event, which is slowly growing and evolving - the Zouk Championship (Showcase) and Zouk Strictlies (Freestyle) Competitions - we love all our brave and awesome competitors for taking part and hope you learn something from it and had a blast doing it! 🚀 🏆🏆🏆

Thank you to Pedro & Cibele and Otavio & Sara for taking on the additional role of judging, as well as giving that little extra personal feedback to our Showcase competitors.✨🌟

As well, a special thanks to our prize sponsors, Zouk Central NZ ✨✨ and Brisbane Zouk Festival. ✨✨

To all the Showcase competitors as well as our Performers on Saturday, we were super impressed and so appreciate each one of you putting in the hard work and training, and coming to entertain the crowd and to add that extra special and inspiring segment of the night. ✨🌟🔥

Our audiences loved watching you on Fri & Sat, and what a wonderful crowd response!! 👏👏

You all did such a spectacular job - Congratulations! ✨🌟 👏

Also, a quick acknowledgement and shout out to our dynamic MC Matthew during the competitions and showcase, 🤩🌟 as well as to Duncan on the Saturday for channeling his inner 'Austin Powers' and bringing us a little 'twistie' ;) crowd participation 🤩🌟

We'd love to give a special thanks to our own Cloud 9 performance team as well for their dedication in training, and for their wonderful teamwork. 🤗 We loved working with you and are very proud and happy about the end results on the night. 👏💖🤗

And an extra mention and thank you to the brave and committed dancers from our June 4-wk special classes with the Internationals for taking on the added challenge and joining the Advanced Choreo designed especially for us by Cibele, Pedro & Sara, to perform at the Ball. You guys were fire! 🔥🔥👏

And our shows finale.... Otavio & Sara, thank you for bringing and sharing this amazing performance with us! 🤩 Was super incredible seeing you in your element, and the room was definitely a few degrees warmer by the end! 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Our massive appreciation to our Photographer, Bob McGahan ❤️🤗 , he devotes so much of his time to being there with us all (always wearing that big smile we love), and in enjoying and patiently encouraging our dancers to put on their best, silly, sexy, classy, cuddly poses, for some awesome pics to look back on! 😆😍🤩🎥

And our Videographers, Roman Balìtskiy & Marlon, thank you sooo much for capturing the inspiring workshop demos and special moments on the dancefloor for our dancers to be able to enjoy, remember and rewatch far into the future. 💖

Also, a special note of thanks to Cassandra the Chiro for making the effort to set up onsite and for being available with her wonderful chiropractic and healing treatments.👐💖Cass is a longstanding supporter of our events, and we really appreciate having her healing skills on hand for our dancers. 🙏

To our beautiful volunteers; Matty (extra awesome man✨🕺), Amatula, Rosa, Dragan, Dylan, Camille, Kim Joyce, Doug, Roushini, Duncan, and Steve Hazleton who pitched in with our decorations, - we relied on you to look after things, and without your friendly selves greeting our attendees, your contributions in helping with everything throughout, as well as the set up & packing up, we just wouldn't be able to bring our event to you all! 🌟🙏

✨Buddy pass - a thank you to the wonderful Leaders who contacted us to put their names up as 'Buddies' so that we could match them with a Follower. 🙏 This is our 4th year that we brought the buddy pass to our events and we just saw how it worked wonders on the weekend with a pretty near perfect ratios of Leaders to Followers, ensuring everyone have an amazing time at the workshops and parties. We apologies if that caused a bit of stress to our lovely Followers but we believe it's essential and benefits everyone. Thank you for your understanding and again to all the 'Dance Buddies' for their flexibility and consideration of our Leaders and Followers in being matched. ❣️

Thank you to ALL of our awesome Attendees, all the dancers from our community who love Zouk and made the effort and time to join us this year. 💖 & To our interstate dancers, kudos in making the extra investment in time and resources to be here - we see and appreciate this immensely. 💖

Weekends like this just bring to us a continuous reminder of how grateful we are for our wonderful community of dancers, artists, DJs and just every one of you who is a part of it all ❤. We appreciate you all so much for your support and for your beautiful energy! 🙂🙂

Let's keep smiling as we look back on the weekend, and look forward in anticipation of bringing everyone together again (but with a different kind of special 💖), at Brisbane Zouk Festival in November !🕺💃🥳

THANK YOUUU!

✨💖✨❤️🙏

Big Love & Our Hugs ❤ 🤗

Behrouz & Sibell and the Cloud9Zouk Team