Marcia Percival, Latin Dance Australia
Marcia Percival was born in Fortaleza, one of the "hottest" places in Brazil and when she was a baby her family moved to São Paulo where she spent most of her life.
From the age of 10, Marcia undertook extra-curricular singing and jazz dancing study. At 13, now hungry for the "stage", she joined a female teenage professional singing and dancing trio with whom she recorded an LP. For the next 6 years the group made regular Brazilian television appearances in the best and most recognized children’s TV programs.
Lambada was born in Brazil when Marcia was 17 and one visit to a club resulted in Marcia's obsession. At 19, Marcia decided to leave the TV singing trio to pursue fashion design studies at university. She was dividing her life between study and social dancing. Sleep was not high on her agenda! In this period, Marcia was selected to perform lambada professionally at the shows of Beto Barbosa, the most famous Brazilian lambada singer at that time.
Consequently, Marcia was contracted to work as a professional dancer all over Japan for 12 months. Marcia performed in many cities in Japan. Soon after returning to Brazil, she was contracted again to work as a leader dancer in the Japanese entertainment agency.
Marcia finally returned to Brazil to complete her fashion design degree after 2 years in Japan. She worked for Forum (Brazil's number one fashion label) for 3 years and during this time, she treated dance as a social activity to facilitate her fashion career. During that time she became a very strong social dancer more specialised in zouk and samba axé.
Then she decided to travel during her holidays to visit places of dance, such as Puerto Rico, Bahamas, Miami, Punta De'Leste and Buenos Aires, where she gained a comprehensive knowledge of salsa and Cuban dancing. Marcia's last year in Brazil was completely filled with dance training, such as samba axé, pagode, salsa and zouk- lambada.
In 1998 at 26, Marcia decided to travel to Australia to learn english. Since then Marcia and her LDA instructors have taught over 30,000 students to dance salsa, samba, lambada-zouk, rueda, shines, bachata, cha-cha, ladies style, gafieira and other forms of latin dance in Sydney alone.
Now she is the founder and executive director of the Sydney Salsa Congress, Australian Dance Festival and the biggest and most prestigious latin dance school in Australia – Latin Dance Australia
“I believe that God is responsible for all of my achievements and I couldn’t be more grateful for all He gave me” says Marcia.