Professional Dance Training and Social Empowerment

Three years ago, we decided to believe that we could create a project that aimed to form and empower bodies that tell stories and that bring, in their dances, trajectories of memories that often do not reach spaces in the professional field. The teaching of Technique, Composition and Practice of the Sylvester Technique aims to enable the continuity and free maintenance of a training program in Dance Technique, where the priority is the community of Salvador. With the approval of the Professional Training in Dance and Social Empowerment project, by GlobalGiving, we already have real results, when, for example, we heard from many students, reports about the functionality of the preparation and monitoring that they started to receive and that led them to go through auditions to be part of a professional dance company and also to attend the University and become teachers, as in the case of students Igor and Ícaro, who are already acting as such in the program itself.

The project is benefiting approximately 60 participants from different local communities who, in addition to theoretical-practical classes, receive didactic material. The selection was carried out through the application of a questionnaire before the month of January – with the next application in August, since these are the months in which new students are admitted. Weekly classes take place over two days in the evening, lasting 1 hour and 30 minutes each.

The first immediate results of this initiative, at the moment, are the training of two monitors, students of the project, - Ícaro Sanchez and Igor Vogada - who will be future multipliers of the Silvestre Technique; the entry of the project's student, Talit Pereira, in the Professional Technical Course in Dance of the Cultural Foundation of the State of Bahia and the student Thayná Gonçalves, selected as a member of the Recôncavo Ballet, a region of the state of Bahia.

It is gratifying and exciting to hear the stories of overcoming and self-esteem, which are shared during the practical classes, in which the group becomes a family in which everyone supports and cheers for each other and for the collective when they conquer the professional spaces of dance, perceive and recognize changes in their social positions in a more assertive and qualified way.

Thank you all for your support!