DANCE FOUND ME BY ACCIDENT
MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS LATER,
I’M STILL FOLLOWING WHERE IT LEADS.
Dancer. Teacher. Traveller. Mom. Professional over-thinker of movement.
Somehow, all the different parts of my life keep leading me back to the same things:
presence, intentionality and connection.
Jhony • NYC @autentico2018
Dance came into my life completely by accident.
In my senior year of high school, I was vice-president of student council and helping organize Harmony, our multicultural show, when I was asked to fill in at the last minute for a Latin dance routine. I said yes, with more than a little trepidation.
Then I stepped onto the stage—and I instantly fell in love.
I couldn’t have possibly known back then how much that one decision would shape my life. More than twenty years later, dance has given me some of the most incredible gifts—friendships, my daughter, adventures around the world, and countless moments I couldn’t have imagined when I first stepped onto that stage.
The journey between then and now hasn’t been a straight line. There have been years when dance was at the centre of my life and others when it faded into the background. But somehow, I always found my way back to it.
I went to my first dance festival in 2006 and started teaching the following year. But bachata wouldn’t find me until 2021. And even then, it took another five years before I began thinking about building something of my own.
Until very recently, dance was simply something I loved. I never had a plan to make anything more of it. I certainly never imagined that one day I would be building a curriculum and a community of my own.
But when people started asking me to teach a workshop on body movement, something inside me just said: Go for it. So I did. One workshop led to another, and somewhere along the way, a vision began forming.
As it turns out, I love teaching. And I think I’m kinda good at it. Teaching brings together two sides of me that might seem completely unrelated. Outside the dance world, my background is in corporate law and business operations. I’m analytical by nature and endlessly curious.
I approach movement the same way.
I want to know why a movement works, what creates a particular feeling, and how the smallest change in timing, weight, or intention can completely transform it. I can happily spend an unreasonable amount of time taking something apart just to understand it better—and then find a hundred different ways to explain it so someone else can feel it in their own body.
But for all the analyzing I do, I don’t dance because I love analysis. I dance because it’s the one place I get to not think at all.
It’s where I can lose myself in the music, connect deeply with another person, and be completely present in the moment.
Dance has also become inseparable from another lifelong love: travel. I have now travelled—and danced—on every continent (except Antarctica, but it’s on the list). I love discovering new places through their dance communities: learning from new teachers, finding myself on unfamiliar dance floors, and sharing unforgettable dances with people I might never have met otherwise.
And then I come home—to my daughter and my pup, my career, my community, and a life that is every bit as full off the dance floor as it is on it. The things I value across all of these areas are remarkably similar:
Presence, intentionality, and connection.
Maybe that’s why dance has stayed with me through every chapter of my life. It isn’t just another part of the way I live. It is the embodiment of it.