Curtis Seldon and Cherazad: The Creators of Urban Kiz

Every dance has a beginning, and Urban Kiz traces to a single Paris partnership: Curtis Seldon and Cherazad Benyoucef (her name also spelled Sherazad), credited as the first dancers to fundamentally change the way kizomba was danced.^[1]

Curtis Seldon

Curtis Seldon was born in Congo on 21 June 1986 and arrived in France at the age of three.^[2] He grew up inside a festive world of music and dance, steeped in a mix of African rhythms — his father produced several African artists, among them the celebrated Congolese star Papa Wemba — so rhythm and performance surrounded him from his earliest years.^[2] He came to kizomba as a dancer in 2011 and, by his own account, gave up everything else to live from his passion, throwing himself into it body and soul alongside his partner Cherazad.^[2] That immersion mattered: the people who reshaped kizomba in Paris were not casual social dancers but committed artists who treated the dance as a craft to be rebuilt from the ground up.^[2]

A Paris laboratory

Curtis and Cherazad were not working in isolation. In 2013–2014 Paris had become the hub where a small group of dancers — Curtis, Enah Lebon, Moun, and Karole among them — developed a distinctly modern aesthetic shaped by electronic and urban-influenced music.^[3] Their shared innovation was structural rather than decorative: an open embrace, a stronger arm connection, and movement along linear pathways instead of the circular, grounded flow of traditional kizomba.^[4] Through those lines they threaded syncopations, accelerations, decelerations, and sharp directional changes — a vocabulary built to match the speed and complexity of the new ghetto-zouk and R&B-laced tracks they were dancing to.^[4]

What changed on the floor

Where traditional kizomba flows in smooth, grounded circles, the Urban Kiz that Curtis and Cherazad built moves in clean straight lines, with a more open embrace and a stronger connection so the couple can stop, accent, and reverse direction precisely.^[4] The result was less a faster kizomba than a new grammar of movement — one designed around the breaks and drops of electronic, hip-hop-inflected music rather than the steady, romantic sway of zouk-love.^[4]

Naming the dance

For its first years the new style had no agreed name, and disputes over its identity came to a head in 2015.^[1] The resolution unfolded over a single week: on 4 May 2015 Eddy Vents publicly shared discussions from the Luxembourg Kizomba Congress recognizing the style's creators; on 10 May 2015 the name "Urban Kiz" was formally introduced by Eddy Vents, Moun, Enah, Curtis, and other influential figures; and on 15 May 2015 Urban Kiz was publicly unveiled through workshops, events, and shared media.^[5] The compressed timeline shows how small and tightly connected the founding scene was — a handful of named people able to settle the identity of an entire dance in a few days.

Codifying and spreading

Once named, the dance moved fast. Teaching reached Dublin, Réunion, and Paris in September 2015, and Curtis and Moun were teaching in Valencia by that October; in March 2017 the first Urban Kiz World Open presented the style as something separate from kizomba.^[6] That same year Curtis took a further step toward formalizing it: in June 2017 he launched an Urban Kiz Teachers Training Certification, in which twenty-five couples took part in structured instruction focused on how to teach the dance — one of the earliest efforts to set consistent technical and pedagogical standards for a style that had grown almost entirely by example.^[7]

Why it matters

In just a few years, Curtis and Cherazad's reinvention spread from a single Paris scene across the global kizomba world, splitting off into its own discipline with its own teachers, festivals, and competitions.^[6] Urban Kiz is now danced worldwide — a modern branch grown from kizomba's Angolan root, and traceable, like few social dances are, to one identifiable partnership and one identifiable city.^[1]