Dance for inclusion: the ballet that jumps the social abysses of Peru

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Suddenly, towards the end of a warm but cloudy afternoon, Lucía Viacava, a 15-year-old girl with cerebral palsy due to an accident at birth, was able to write on the screen of an iPad, with her own hands and thanks to the Proloquo2go application, the words “Today I'm going to the ballet”.

Her mother, Hilda Buller, looks at her tenderly;

Layra Marcas, her dance partner, smiles.

Minutes before, she practiced some exercises using a wooden bar that she has in a room in her house, ready for her dance practices and therapies.

She looks at us and manages to articulate some nebulous words that her mother deciphers.

“She said she likes him,” explains Buller.

From the depths of her body, and perhaps her heart, she wants to tell that she enjoys, dances and lives.

everyone's dance

Both Lucía and Layra are part of El ballet de Maricarmen, a solidarity initiative by the experienced dancer Maricarmen Silva, who was part of the National Ballet of Peru.

She started it around 2017 after teaching at the Brígida Silva de Ochoa school, located in the Lima district of Chorrillos.

There, as she tells it, she realized that those classes were not enough.

“I realized that I could teach ballet, but that many of the girls did not have a way to get a costume to practice it, and that they also had other needs,” says Silva, who decided not only to be a teacher at school, but to go further. there.

She managed to build this dance collective, under a central motto: “It doesn't matter who you are, or where you come from, we are all equal.”

Layra Marcas during a ballet class.Sebastián Castañeda

Lucía, who now participates in a choreography where her classmates surround her with veils, can testify to this.

With her gestures, with her knotted words, with her sweet gaze.

She is now surrounded by her friends, and she also dances, she seems to come out of her body a little more, to the rhythm of a version of 'Hallelujah', the legendary Leonard Cohen song, sung by a woman.

“She was in ballet classes before, when she was younger,” says her mother, “until a teacher told her that if she couldn't stand up, she couldn't dance.

I was upset, but I got Maricarmen's contact and here she is.”

Silva remembers that he had no problem accepting it.

Girls and boys with down syndrome or physical and intellectual disabilities have passed through her classes.

Today he has a student with this last condition, who is one of three men in a group of about 80 students between 4 and 16 years old.

The classes are offered in the Parish of Fátima, located in Miraflores, a residential district of Lima, but girls come from Chorrillos, San Juan de Miraflores or Villa El Salvador, mostly poor districts.

But also from Miraflores itself, which produces an unprecedented situation in Lima, where discrimination hurts: María José Rodríguez, who lives in Túpac Amaru, a poor area of ​​Chorrillos, dances together;

Caterina Vlasica, daughter of a doctor who lives near the parish;

Nicole Chávez, who lives with her sister Keith in the San Genaro area, at the top of a hill;

Ashley Távara, a Venezuelan migrant;

and Victoria Arévalo, who resides in Villa El Salvador.

Lucia Viacava, a student with cerebral palsy, attends a ballet class.

Sebastian Castaneda

Here we perceive a kind of miracle of inclusion, so difficult to live among the social abysses of Peru.

The social origin, the school where they study, the color of the skin does not matter.

They all dance together, share their lives, their efforts, and have even traveled abroad.

This year, they have decided to go to Spain to participate in the summer course at the Barcelona Dance Center.

Dream and do

“If you can dream it, you can do it,” says Silva, who to carry out this task has the support of the Oli Foundation and the joint efforts of the students themselves and their parents.

In an ecological logic, too.

They continually collect inorganic waste and recycle it en masse at the Brígida Silva school, where the adventure began.

Silva and his entire community are attentive to those who, instead of throwing paper and glass (or Tetrapak) into the trash, give them to them so that 'El ballet de Maricarmen' can make its brief contribution to the circular economy and at the same time be self-financing.

They also hold raffles and collect used clothes or toys that they then sell on a busy and popular corner in Chorrillos.

Recycle-reuse-dance-include, a hopeful circuit for a city full of turbulence, which itself reaches or surrounds it.

In the atmosphere where several of the dancers live, crime, family violence, and drug trafficking are rampant.

The class of 'El ballet de Maricarmen' in the Miraflores district in Lima.Sebastián Castañeda

Another comments that she has classmates, 15 or 16 years old, who already have children.

But she is clear that dancing and being disciplined will allow her to enter another frequency.

Many of her neighborhoods are considered 'brave'.

In Layra, which is Pamplona Alta (district of San Juan de Miraflores), the funeral of a criminal was carried out with gunshots in the air.

According to Silva, ballet is, in addition to being an art, “emotional therapy,” a way of locating oneself differently in the world.

“They change and at the same time their families change a little, as I have sometimes been able to see,” she says.

At the beginning, in some homes there was resistance, especially from the parents, although later they understood and felt the change.

The same thing happened with some of their friends, who made fun of them or even bullied them for refusing to go out partying to go to the ballet every day.

“When I dance it's like I feel sparks in my body, I feel freer,” says Nicole, from her modest home in San Genaro where there is no drinking water.

Integrate, walk, dance

At this point in class, Lucía grabs the wooden bar and does contortions that defy her disability.

Her mother explains that she realizes everything, that she feels the music and understands it.

And she has even proposed pieces of music for some ballet sessions.

One of them has been a scene from

Tinker Bell,

the animated film called Campanita in Spanish.

With Nicole's sister Keith, she has done ballet duets, which have been performed in All Dance competitions.

This dance brotherhood has achieved numerous achievements, including 42 awards at the All Dance World held in Orlando, Florida, in 2023.

Nicole Chavez, in her home in the San Genaro area in the Chorrillos district in Lima.Sebastián Castañeda

Against all odds and even contempt, Silva carries out this school that somewhat heals the wounds of the body and soul, and the social wounds, which are not few in this country.

“This experience is like a firefly that enters a dark cave and begins to light up,” he says after telling the girls who are rehearsing: “stretch, open and stretch, down…”.

In the center of the dance floor, Lucía has once again been surrounded by her companions, who seem to lift her off the ground with their veils.

The music continues to sound between the plasticity of the movements, between the sweat of what has been danced and what has been suffered.

Her figures are reflected in a mirror, as if a painting by Edgar Degas were being painted live while a faint light enters through the window.