I cancelled my visit to the dance class. Well, the class itself was cancelled, but on the scale of things it really didn’t seem that important. The police had cordoned off the whole area, in the favela (shanty town) of Baixada Fluminense in the north zone of Rio de Janeiro, to investigate the deaths of 30 innocent people – men, women and children – who had been killed the previous evening in a random shooting spree. The main suspects – culprits, as it turned out – were themselves members of the police.
This was the worst ‘death squad’ massacre since 1993, when a group of sleeping street children had been shot outside a church in downtown Rio, and 21 people gunned down in the Vigário Geral favela. Vigilante death squads are often linked to local politicians and private security firms. They have been operating in Brazil since the 1960s, and consist primarily of police or ex police officers. With bitter irony, the killings in Baixada Fluminense, on 31 March this year, were reported to have been an act of reprisal by one such squad against an anti-corruption drive within the police force itself.
The previous time I was in Rio, exactly one year before, the city was witnessing a prolonged gun battle in the favela of Rocinha, Brazil’s largest slum. Rival drug gangs were clashing in a turf war, and armed police were invading Rocinha from both land and air. Many locals described it simply as ‘civil war’.
These were two extreme examples of a situation in which violence has become normalised. Life in the favelas is visibly marked by poverty, lack of education and opportunity, and racial prejudice. In such circumstances, I couldn’t help but wonder, what’s the good of a dance class?
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On a brute level, it can quite simply increase the chances of survival. ‘If the children are doing activities in the classroom, they’re not left to wander on the street,’ says Sylvio Dufrayer, general co-ordinator of the Programme for Education through Movement (PEM) in the outlying favela of Cidade de Deus.
The name Cidade de Deus – ‘City of God’ – has become widely known through the success of Fernando Mereilles’ 2002 film of the same title, which portrays the brutalised lives of youths and children involved in drug trafficking and crime. ‘No one here likes the film,’ says Sylvio. ‘People got the impression that somehow everyone in Cidade de Deus is involved with trafficking and robbery.’ And perceptions have real effect. ‘It makes it harder for people to get jobs,’ he continues. ‘Sometimes people who live here have to go so far as to give a different address when they’re looking for work.’ For the vast majority of residents, drug trafficking – and the violence and danger that result from it – are something they have to live with, not something they are involved in.
Certainly, the streets surrounding PEM – filled with modest shops, the odd diner, and somewhat improvised buildings – look more impoverished than threatening. PEM itself is housed in a three-storey building rented from the church. Founded in 2001, PEM offers classes in capoeira, folk dance, circus, gymnastics and street dance to about a hundred children aged between 9 and 13. Those who come in the morning go to state school in the afternoons; those at school in the mornings come to PEM in the afternoon. All of them are given a free lunch. ‘For youngsters here, life is like a very narrow wall,’ says Sylvio. ‘Our aim at PEM is to widen that wall, so that they don’t fall on one side, drug trafficking, or on the other, death.’
Death is a real risk, both for the few who become traffickers and for the many who don’t – and not just because poverty and lack of health provision and education inevitably conspire to increase mortality. A UNESCO report published in June this year showed that between 1979 and 2003 – that is, in one generation – the death rate due to firearms in Brazil rose more than fourfold. The total number of gun-related deaths during this time was more than half a million. That’s more than in most war zones, both as an annual average and in absolute terms – four times, for example, the number of deaths recorded in the Arab-Israeli conflict over the last 50 years. Nearly half of these victims were between 15 and 24 years old. And the risk factor is dramatically higher if you take into account locality (favelas), race (black) and gender (male).
Gender is one reason why Sylvio, a dancer and choreographer himself, avoided the word ‘dance’ for the project. ‘In Brazil there are many dance projects for children,’ he explains, ‘but when you go there you don’t see many boys. Dance attracts far more girls. Here at PEM we wanted an equal ratio’ – a goal they’ve achieved – ‘so we call it education through movement. We have capoeira, circus, gymnastics. And of course,’ he adds with a smile, ‘we also have dance.’
But the classes are about much more than just a safe environment to keep kids out of trouble; they’re about improving quality of life, both now and in the future. ‘It makes the children happy,’ says Sylvio, ‘and that is most important.’ However, it also improves their co-ordination and concentration, their discipline and their motivation. They learn social skills through working with partners and in groups. ‘Parents tell us things like: he doesn’t fight with his siblings, he takes care of his clothes, he’s doing better at school. Of course! A child who comes here every day and follows structured classes – of course he’ll improve.’
Changes in self-perception are as important as changes of behaviour. Sylvio describes an exercise with a group of children who had been attending PEM for 18 months. They drew pictures of themselves as a animals, first the creature they were before they arrived at PEM, then the animal they are now, and finally the animal they will be when the leave. A strong pattern emerged, remembers Sylvio with pleasure. ‘The first was almost always an animal with a shell – a tortoise, a cockroach. A closed or defensive creature. The second was often a feline animal, like a lion or a cat. And the last was most often a bird. So you can see: today they feel stronger, and they want to fly higher.’
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It brings to mind a Portuguese phrase: to give wings to the imagination. That is, surely, one of the most powerful values of art education: to free the mind. It’s not only about self-expression, but also – however unpredictably or precariously – about imagining possibilities. And in that sense it is directed towards transformation, and towards the future.
Though movement is the mainstay of the teaching here, it’s supplemented by discussions, storytelling, music, drawing and writing – Sylvio is a strong believer in the value of interdisciplinary education. He also emphasises that movement education works as a complement to school education, not as a replacement of it. ‘We have a range of activities so that students can flourish in any one of them. In a dance training school it’s the opposite. They have many students of whom maybe only one will become professional. Our idea is inclusion. It’s also to guide children towards becoming better citizens and towards transforming their own lives. We don’t want to encourage impossible dreams – like from here you might progress to being a prima ballerina, or a professional football player.’
But that still leaves a clear gap here between a person-centred arts education and the professional demands of the employment market. To fill this gap, PEM has begun a secondary programme for 14 to 17 year olds, aiming to equip them with skills for entering the job market by providing training in computing, bookkeeping, maths and business administration, alongside audio-visual projects and education in current affairs, human relationships, sexual health and information about drugs.
On the day that PEM started this programme, a queue of people had been forming at the door since 4 in the morning. But there were places for only 50. And this kind of training is more expensive than dance classes for children: it requires more textbooks and more equipment. PEM relies on donated computers, which are shared between students during classes, and the teachers have been working as volunteers. Without substantially more resources, there is a severe limit on the amount of professional training it can provide.
As a profession, performing arts such as dance and music are – like sports – one way out of the ghetto for those whose basic resource is simply their selves; but that route becomes reality only for a tiny minority. If more people from the favelas are to enter into professions, they need access to a much more solid infrastructure of educational resources and training opportunities.
Social projects using arts and culture have mushroomed across Brazil during the last few years, clearly responding to an urgent need. In addition to PEM in Cidade de Deus, I managed brief visits to two other such projects. The first, in the city of Belo Horizonte, was to Corpo Cidadão – ‘Citizen Corpo’ a reference to its host company Grupo Corpo, Brazil’s best-known modern dance company. And I did finally make it to the Maré Centre for Study and Social Action (CEASM) in Baixada Fluminense. There were many differences between these projects – in size, in levels of funding, in the classes they run – but two common aims kept recurring: self-esteem and citizenship.
And therein lies a question. How do people acquire self-esteem if they remain at the bottom of the social hierarchy? How do they become citizens of a society which manifestly excludes them? It is widely acknowledged that social, cultural and educational projects in favelas can build and improve local communities. But comunidade is a loaded word in Brazil. ‘Here in the comunidade’ means inside the favela. Outside – in what I guess must be ‘society’ – the word crops up as, for example, an estate agent’s euphemism: ‘with a view of the comunidade’ means that your window looks out onto a shanty town.
As a response to these divisions, PEM has recently started a scheme called Mão Dupla (Two-Way Street), inviting people from more affluent areas of Rio to come and talk about their lives – and to experience Cidade de Deus for themselves. ‘It’s to balance the perceptions of the two worlds,’ says Sylvio, ‘to break down the barrier between the comunidade and the middle classes. Things will only get easier when this wall is broken.’
For ‘community’ to become an integral part of ‘society’ requires a transformation on both sides of that wall – across society as a whole, and even across national borders. In the face of such large-scale questions, it’s easy to feel that there’s no chance for change. But perhaps small acts can answer big questions. Not at a stroke, not uniformly and quite possibly not consciously. But the combined effects of these diverse projects and programmes, with their varied individual and local effects, may ultimately mobilise wider changes. In which case, that one cancelled dance class becomes important not in spite of the senseless death of 30 people, but because of it.