PUBLIC ART IN
THE AMERICAS

Introduction

Mirko Lauer:
Peru’s Fine Art
of Flag Washing

John Pitman Weber:
Out of the Studio,
Into the Streets

José Luis Soto and
Isa Campos Castañeda:
Mosaic Opening Night

Dora Andrade:
Brazilian Movement Gives Girls Dignity

María Galindo:
Bolivian Debtors
a Creative Force

Coco Fusco:
Now Playing:
Exotic People

Michael Schnorr:
Border Works
Tie Local to Global

María Esther Francia:
Uruguayan Youths
With Unruly Tastes

Slideshow:
Mosaic of the Americas

Books

Home: AMERICAS.ORG   September 2001 

 Brazilian Movement Gives Girls Dignity

Dora Andrade is a dancer, choreographer and teacher. In 1992, she founded the School for Dance and Social Integration for Children and Adolescents (EDISCA) in the northeastern Brazilian port city of Fortaleza, aiming to reach disadvantaged girls. Since then, Andrade and her staff, now 36 strong, have changed the lives of 800 students (including a few boys) ages 6–19. Last year, with funds from Brazil’s government and organizations such as Washington, D.C.–based Ashoka, the school moved into a new building. Andrade spoke with Shannon Walbran, a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Rio de Janeiro.

Some of what I’ve learned about my dance students is hard to believe. I discovered, for example, that a student and her seven siblings were living all together in one shack. When the rains came, they slept standing up in ankle-deep water.

EDISCA auditions girls from the poorest neighborhoods. The students attend dance classes and get access to regular meals, our on-site medical clinic, our staff psychologist and literacy tutoring. In Brazil, dance is a huge part of our lives; at EDISCA, it serves as the magnet and the method to help each student achieve his or her human potential.

We employ the best teachers and techniques because our kids deserve it. In social action programs, dance usually comes long after vaccinations, soup and blankets, if at all. EDISCA girls feel honored and special. They learn that they merit more from life and they learn how to seek it out.

Dance gives our students dignity. We demand so much from them: long rehearsals, strict discipline, perfect attendance not only here but in their regular schools, where they go for half the day.

A dancer learns how to use space differently. Dance is a way to become an educated human being with a developed sense of aesthetics. Dance means viewing the world using a framework of physical grace, maintaining a healthy body, and enhancing powers of creativity and imagination.

Classical ballet was designed for a certain European, elongated body type. Since Brazilians come in many shapes and sizes, we offer both classical and contemporary movement. We always use Brazilian music, usually original compositions, in order to respect our culture and our people.

We put on two major shows a year, and we’ve taken our Corps de Ballet, a group of the 50 most expert dancers, all the way to Italy and Portugal. Our performances are the highest quality, really professional.

The pieces I choreograph reflect the Brazilian reality that most people don’t want to see. For example, one day I was in a hovel at a landfill. I saw three pre-school children whose noses were running so continuously that the mucous left a trail of open sores down their bellies. I met parents almost half my age, women so dulled by despair that they could hardly speak. I met a 9-year-old girl who was already sexually active in exchange for food.

Our ballet Jangurussú tells the story of that landfill and the people there. Most EDISCA students at least have a roof over their heads, albeit a leaky one. Our kids used Jangurussú as a rallying cry to collect food and blankets for the landfill families.

Koi-Guera decries the loss of identity and the ethnocide of indigenous peoples. Duas Estações (Two Seasons) presents the Brazilian Northeast in all of its heartbreaking agro-economic pain. But my ballets strive to show the positive sides of the situations as well. We present people who are handsome in their solidarity, strong for resisting adversities, and victorious for having faith that better days will come.

Shows benefit the dancers, families and the general public by educating them about social issues and by introducing them to the theater. Ticket prices are reduced, and the shows are packed. Parents who’ve never set foot in a formal performance space are awed into silence by the velvet curtains, the ushers. And, yet, when their dancer appears on stage, they leap from their seats and cry out, “That’s my daughter!”

EDISCA ballets teach without words, and people come away much more moved and educated than if they had seen a television news documentary. Dance communicates straight to people’s hearts without the intermediary of words. Our young people who portray the hardships of migrations, droughts, ethnocide and living in landfills are themselves just steps away from those realities and indeed would be falling ever closer if not for dance.

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