Check Out Lorena Bravo’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lorena Bravo.

Lorena, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I started ballroom dancing in college on a whim. I I had always wanted to take dance lessons, but my family didn’t really have the money for extra stuff like that, so college provided the amazing opportunities to try loads of things that I had never had the chance to try before. I wasn’t very good at the beginning, but something about it captured me, and I was lucky enough to have an excellent teacher that showed me the way.
Fast forward 5 years, and I made the decision to switch career paths and become a professional competitive ballroom dancer. It was a very exciting time in my life, but as most artists can relate, not very lucrative. However, it was during this time that I honed my teaching skills, and more importantly, began to get a handle on what my future would look like post competing.
Since then, I’ve had the joy of working in multiple poisons, including teaching at AMDA, Chapman University, teaching dance to folks with Parkinson’s disease after training under the Dancing with Parkinson’s program, guest coaching many university ballroom dance teams, and becoming the head coach of the USC ballroom team. In the middle of all this, a former student of mine contacted me one day asking if I would be willing to help him with his first dance at his wedding. I was thrilled! What an honor to get to participate in such an important event!
That was how I started working with couples on their first dance. It mainly started as word of mouth, and then I started to really hone my practice and market specifically to that clientele. I am now actually working on an online version of my school to be able to reach people who might not have access to dance studios in their area. It can also be helpful to folks who are on a tight budget, but still want to include the transition of the first dance at their wedding and would like to look and feel comfortable on the floor.
I now get to work on a little bit of everything! I still get flown around to work with competitors, but I have a special place in my heart for those couples that experience partner dancing for the first time in preparation for their wedding. They are the type of student I spend the most time with.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Oh man, it’s been rough from day one! I began my professional career in 2008, about a month before the stock market crash. It was a TERRIBLE time to try to establish yourself as a dance teacher! Competitive ballroom dancing is definitely a luxury, and it was the first thing people cut off when finances got tight. This meant my own budget was very tight, which meant access to training and competitions was minimal. I managed to get through that, and then I tore my meniscus years later when I was finally starting to become well established. We were placing well, and I had finally started to build up my business. That took me out for a full year, which got me into all sorts of debt, and set me back pretty severely. I never fully recovered from that. I had to rush my recovery because I desperately needed to be able to work again, but that meant that I was struggling to perform as well as a competitor. It was right around this time that I got a job offer from Chapman University, and I started working with Parkinson’s patients, so I made the difficult decision to retire from competing. I knew it was the right decision, but in my heart, I just wasn’t done dancing.
I got about a year to acclimate to retired life and was working on building my teaching career when the Covid pandemic started. The entire industry was wiped out, and it was really about 4 months ago that I managed to really make ends meet again. The recovery for us in the ballroom world was very, very slow.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am currently a ballroom dance instructor. I competed professionally for many years, but now I have the joy of passing the beautiful world of dance to others. I teach all of the ballroom, latin styles, and most social styles, but when it comes to training competitors, my specialty is in the American and International Ballroom styles. However, I also specialize in preparing couples for their first dance. It’s about as different from competitive dancing as you could imagine, but in many ways, the principals are the same. You need to make the best choices for the dancers in your care, and that means understanding how they want to present themselves to their audience. When I’m working with competitive dancers, I need to know what their career goals are, and how they see themselves as artists. When I’m working with a couple who is about to get married, I need to know if they want to put on a show, or if they want to have an organic, intimate dance that is less about the fanfare and more about sharing a romantic moment with their friends and family. I’m good at both. it’s taken me a very long time to feel comfortable saying this, but I am very good at what I do. I am very proud of the fact that I connect with my students, whether they be young adults on a college team, people with Parkinson’s trying to connect with their bodies, budding professionals, little children in elementary school programs, or couples preparing their first dance. They all matter to me. I truly believe that dancing is good for the soul, and I want as many people as possible to get to try it. So many people think that dancing is something that they could never do, and that is largely due to the dance world as a whole often behaving in a very exclusive way. Whether it’s buying too much in to the notion of talent, or demanding particular body types, it’s easy for people coming in to dance as adults to be intimidated. I believe in my bones that everyone can do this if they want, and I have never, ever had a student that I couldn’t teach.

Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
I consider myself to be a risk-adverse sort of girl. I suppose that’s a strange thing to say when becoming a professional ballroom dancer was a giant risk, and to try to rebuild my business after the pandemic was another huge risk, but on some level those seemed more like logical choices, given my options at those times in my life. I guess what I mean by that is that I don’t like to take risks where I don’t really understand the mechanisms at work. I don’t like gambling. I don’t invest in the stock market because I don’t really understand how it works, and therefor I don’t feel qualified to make decisions about where to put my money. I would never move to a new city without a job lined up. Risk taking is pretty situation specific, at least for me, I think.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.weddingdancechannel.com
• Instagram: @weddingdancechannel
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/weddingdancechannel
• Youtube: @theweddingdancechannel1388
• Other: https://www.bravodancing.com

Image Credits
Alex Rowan was the photographer for the first picture: the one where I’m dancing in a silver dress. The rest were taken by friends and family.