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Alvaro Restrepo, a
Colombian dancer and choreographer, could have pursued his career anywhere in the
world–in New York, where he was trained, or in Europe, where he first made his mark.
But in 1993, he decided to sacrifice all this to introduce modern dance to Colombia–where
the discipline was barely known–and to teach it to disadvantaged children between
10 and 15 years old. He teamed up with Marie-France Delieuvin, programme director
at the National Centre for Modern Dance in Angers, France, and their joint endeavour
has produced astonishing results.
In 1997, four years after sowing the seeds of the new art form in Bogotá and
Cali, they launched Project El Puente (“The Bridge”), which reached Cartagena a few
months later. The city where Restrepo was born 42 years ago is a historic tourist
centre featured on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, but
it cannot hide a darker side: two-thirds of its 700,000 inhabitants live below the
poverty line.
Restrepo and Delieuvin’s bridge is two-way. It has led a pair of dedicated performers
to the outskirts of one of Cartagena’s most wretched slums, while also linking the
project to professionals in Europe and Latin America through festivals and exchanges.
In 1997 and 1998, Restrepo began a programme of “awareness training” that reached
480 children at Inem College in Cartagena. He eventually ended up with a smaller
group of 90 young dancers striving to hone their skills in a discipline that touched
the very roots of their cultural and personal identity. After a few months, through
a kind of natural selection that left only those determined to take part in a creative
project, 22 of the children qualified for membership in the Experimental Troupe of
the Academy of the Body. They were crossing the bridge, travelling from one side
of the river to the other.
From outcasts to performers
Driven on by their poverty sticken backgrounds, the chosen boys and girls–now
more mature, with deeper voices and changed bodies–are often tempted to shirk off
school to rehearse their new dance projects everyday in the beautiful colonial-era
cloisters of the 16th-century San Francisco convent, lent especially to the troupe
by a religious foundation. Its wide, empty courtyard is flanked by the Centennial
Park and the city’s modern convention centre, while the old neighbourhood of Getsemaní
lies just behind.
Without the free classes at the Academy, these children–most of whom come from the
city’s Nelson Mandela neighbourhood, home to families forcibly displaced by Colombia’s
civil war–would continue living like outcasts, scraping through life. But in the
three short years the Academy has been around, they have become teenagers and grown
from average pupils in outlying schools to performers of an art form, modern dance,
which once seemed remote and inaccessible. The children have also come to understand
that they could lead creative lives, ever since Restrepo, with unshakeable faith
and endurance, arrived in their midst and began mounting shows with them that have
started to attract public acclaim.
Besides training its members, the El Puente troupe has also attained high professional
standards, while some former members have become dance teachers in their own right.
The natural, almost inborn Caribbean sense of rhythm has produced dancers imbued
with a possibly more abstract and certainly more symbolic way of expression, yet
one which ultimately springs from the great traditions of modern dance.
Tours and troubles
With meagre resources and a makeshift organization patched up by the unflagging
enthusiasm of teachers and students alike, the Academy of the Body has staged two
arts festivals in Cartagena, in 1998 and 1999, and presented three of its own shows.
The troupe has also attended festivals in Colombia and Europe.
After their performances abroad, including one that took them to Paris in April 2000
and gave them a chance to marvel at wealth they could not dream of, the children
returned to the poverty of their tiny homes to grapple once more with life in the
slums. But this time they came back with the confidence of having started to do something
special in their lives.
It hasn’t all been a bed of roses. Despite the support of public bodies and private
firms, money problems still loom over the Academy. But the iron will of Restrepo
and Delieuvin is rooted in a dream, one that often overrides the reality that shaped
it. The dream lives on because teachers and students in Cartagena seem to understand
that the rewards of persistence are mightier than the pull of despair.
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