Tavia & Tamara Spice Up Dancehall for the Ladies with Brukwine

Autavia Baily and Tamara Marrow, better known as Tavia and Tamara, are well accomplished dancers with a natural edge for Dancehall. The New York City based dancers/choreographers have an extensive resume appearing in commercials, movies and dancing for musical acts such as Faith Evans, Eve, Rihanna, Beyonce, Missy Elliot, Diddy, Mary J. Bilge, Whitney Houston, Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, Jennifer Lopez and many more. As Dancehall instructors for well known dance studio Broadway Dance Center in New York City, the dynamic dance duo became acquainted through dance auditions and ended up touring with Dancehall super star Sean Paul before creating their own sexy Dancehall class strictly for the ladies called Brukwine.

After finding a video clip online of the steamy class I had the pleasure of taking Brukwine a few weeks ago. The semi – dark room, boombastic speaker sounds, the heat — from working up a sweat — and scantily clad ladies gave the class a real dancehall session vibe. Did I mention you dance in heels the entire class? The sold out class was not only fun, but I got to see, first hand, the Brukwine movement in full swing as other ladies were decked out in Brukwine shorts, hats and tanks. It was a stress free fun environment that any dancehall lover would enjoy. The synergy between both Tavia and Tamara was evident and they have clearly set themselves apart in introducing Brukwine to the world with a clear vision for expansion, one class at a time. (Videos & Full Interview when you jump to the next page)

Tell me about your background and how you both stared dancing?                                        Tamara (Grandparents are Jamaican): I started dancing at 4 years old. I’ve always wanted to dance and made it my career.
Tavia (American): I’ve been dancing all my life, but decided to make it my career after high school I moved to NYC and haven’t looked back since.

How did you meet?
Tamara: We met in the dance industry.  We had the same agent, so we would see each other at auditions and we danced together for Sean Paul for years.

When did you dance for Sean Paul?
Tamara: We’re the girls in most of his videos “Temperature” “We Be Burning” “Give it Up to Me” you usually see three girls and we’re two of the three.

How did that come about?
Tamara: Our agent contacted us that an artist needed dancers. Sometimes you have to audition for things and sometimes it’s a direct book. This was a direct book. It actually wasn’t supposed to be a long job, we thought it was one show for Showtime at The Apollo. That one job, turned many years of touring with him.

Tell me about your touring experience?
Tavia: Majority of our work was with him, we toured over 80 different countries. Even when we had breaks we’d dance for other artists.

Tamara: I don’t think I was prepared, it’s something that if you’ve never experienced you may not understand. It was great, but the other side of it was that it’s A LOT of work. Hard on your body. You do a show and go straight on a plane to the next city or get on a tour bus which you’re on for a day. You may only have an hour to get off and get changed for the next show, so it’s a never ending cycle of shows. It’s continuous.

Tavia: We had an amazing time. We got to travel so some amazing places more than once that we probably would have gotten the chance to and being the kind of artist he was, we got to travel to countries most artists don’t get to travel to.

Tamara: Sean Paul is the kind of person that likes to explore wherever he’s at. So we’ve been to Dubai, Egypt and other places in Africa several times. If we had any free time, the people from the country would sometimes take us around or plan events for us. I remember one time in Africa, they had a ceremony on the wild. So we always got to have that experience.

How did you transition into teaching?
Tavia: We take classes a lot, in between touring and performing, just to keep up your skills as a dancer that what you have to do. I  (and Tamara) took a lot of classes at Broadway Dance Center. The ower asked if we wanted to teach a Dancehall class there and we were like “Yeah”. So that’s how we started teaching Dancehall becuase there wasn’t a Dancehall class there and we started our teaching collaboration there.

How do you explain the great synergy between you guys?
Tavia: We’ve always had great energy, being on the road together. So it was natural as teachers/choreographer

Tamara: it was a natural progression, because it’s not something we jumped into. We had studied the genre and had been in it for some time so we started teaching at the right time.We developed as dancers and teachers; we made sure we knew what we were teaching and what kind of message we wanted to convey as teachers.

Tell me about how Brukwine came about?
Tamara: The style is more us…the feminine side, it’s us.  We went to Taiwan to teach dancehall workshops there, but we wanted to do a special class. So, this was already our style, so we decided to step it up, add heels. At that point we didn’t have name, but the class took off so well in Taiwan that when we came back to the states we said “Ok, we gotta make something of this”. We saw the energy, how it made everyone in the room feel and it was a style that was natural to us. Being feminine and sexy. We waited a few months to do our first class and that when we decided to give it a name (Brukwine).

How did you incorporate the apparel?
Tamara: We didn’t have it at first. About a month in we made them for ourselves and then people started asking for it, so we took it a step further.

You also teach hardcore Dancehall classes, how would explain the difference between that and Brukwine?
Tamara: BDC is a more professional environment for people who want to be professional dancers or people who are just comfortable with that environment, our feedback there is good too. The feedback is different with Brukwine because this is truly our own class. We rent the space and such; it our own thing. Such a variety of people take this class, they come and dance, workout and sweat. For a lot of women it’s an opportunity for them to put on heels and feel sexy and maybe in their regular life they’re afraid to do that or there would be no other outlet to do that. Brukwine is a place you can come and feel comfortable. No one judges you and it’s a place where you can let you feminine side out and get sexy. I think it’s a release for a lot of women.

Tavia: Also, it’s an enclosed environment, where you can just come and have a good time the environment plays a lot into it.

How do you guys coordinate moves for the class?
Tavia: We want to make sure that if you’re someone that loves to dance, a professional dancer or experience this kind of class for the first time or you just want to workout, we want to make sure that we keep that in mind. we want everyone to be able to enjoy it, so we keep that in mind when choosing the music and the moves. that’s how we go about choosing the moving and the vibe.

Do you guys plan on taking this class on the road?
Tavia: We’re definitely going to start traveling and teaching Brukwine all over the world, not just the US. We have Mexico coming up soon.

I know you ladies were up for a dance award, tell me about that?
Tamara: DanceJA, big in the dancehall world and they now have a school. It’s brings the dancehall community together, especially with the launch of their website it really helped to make it bigger worldwide. There are so many people that love dancehall dancing and the culture all over the world.

The awards that they do are yearly across so many different categories. We were just happy to be nominated for Best Female Dancers in the US. In August they’re going to hold a big ceremony in Jamaica and announce the winners.

Do you still do dance gigs and what can we expect from you in the future?
Tavia: We still dance and do gigs, but our main focus is Bruk Wine focus and we’re taking it all over the world! Everyone is really embracing it so we really excited to take it everywhere. Everyone is requesting it.

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