We had the good fortune of connecting with Etienne Carreira and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Etienne, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
Myself, my brother (Guillaume Carreira) and our partner (Kareem Gwinn) Felt we had a duty to pass on the knowledge we have attained over decades of breaking and competing to the next generation of B-boys and B-girls. It was only natural that we open up our own breaking, dance studio.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Our business is a dance studio in Las Vegas called Alchemy Breaking Academy. We teach the art of breaking. We are one of the the few dedicated, breaking dance studios in the nation. What sets us apart is that our company is made up of three world class, professional dancers/world champion B-boys that have switched our focus from our personal breaking careers to being the best coaches/mentors/business people we can be. We have attacked these new roles with the same intention and discipline that lead us to success within our personal breaking/dance careers. Alchemy Breaking saying is “we are the new gold standard”, and we stand by this. We currently have 2 students on the US Teens Olympic breaking team, 2 world champions, and 6 national champions. We got here by focusing on the development of our students.

We opened up as a program (not a studio) in July of 2019. When we stated the program myself and my brother were both working for Cirque Du Soleil in two of their shows on the Las Vegas strip, we would teach classes on our days off and on the weekends. We subleased space from different dance studios. When everything shutdown in early 2020, we had about 20 student. We didn’t want to lose any progress with our students, so we did online classes 1 hour a day, everyday. We also stopped charging student until we could resume in-person classes. We did this because it was a very uncertain time financially for most and again we didn’t want to lose any progress. Because of this, when we were able to go back to in-person classes we retained 95% of our students. We then decided not to go back to dancing at night and went all in on the studio. We opened doors of our own studio in September of 2021.

It was not easy to build a business in the middle of a pandemic. I attribute our success to the passion we have for this dance and culture. We have tried a few business ventures through the years and they have all failed. Mainly because we were doing them just to make money. There was no passion behind what we were doing so there was no persistence to push through the hard times.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Whenever anyone comes to Las Vegas, they want to go to the strip. There are countless restaurants, clubs and bars to visit. As a local, I don’t go to the strip much, but you can’t go wrong with seeing a cirque show or the Jabbawockeez. The things I would suggest to check out are things like the downtown scene, Golden steer steak house ( an iconic steak house full of Las Vegas history) and the Mob Museum down town.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
We couldn’t do this without the support of our families, our students parents, and ultimately our incredible breaking community.

Website: www.alchemybreaking.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alchemybreaking/

Nominate Someone: ShoutoutArizona is built on recommendations and shoutouts from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.