At Risk Children Dance for Social Change

We bring you three stories in which dance and art build bridges, connecting people.

Young artists from 3 Social Projects of Panama City, and until now, perfect strangers, were invited by the Prisma Festival of Contemporary Dance to participate in a research and choreographic creation laboratory led by Amparo González Sola and Pablo Kun Castro, of the collective Km29 (Argentina).

Dance, the common language of these boys and girls, allowed a deeply human and honest encounter. During the 8 days of intense rehearsals, dance facilitated a meeting point, a recognition, a dissent, and a construction based on their experiences, their convergences, and divergences.

The result of the laboratory, called CAMPO (Field in spanish), was presented at the Maximum Classroom of the National Institute, a place where the discourse of panamanian young people has been a protagonist in the last 100 years.

Through the Creation Laboratory, we could inquire about the appearance of movement in the encounter with - and through - the others. Thinking about the insistence as a strategy of transformation, empathy as a way of relationship, and group listening as a tactic to build a shared evolution in which there is room for uniqueness and difference. Tune in, synchronize, sympathize, become another. CAMPO is a sensitive constellation of relationships.

Amparo and Pablo. Directors / KM29

At Enlaces we believe that diversity and pluralism are key to the development of more democratic, inclusive, peaceful and just societies.

Culture invites us to know and re-know ourselves through the encounter with the other, and from that encounter validate, respect and celebrate our differences.

During this month the Kol Shearit Israel Congregation invited the boys and girls of the Intensive Enlaces Program to learn a little about the culture, history, and traditions of the Jewish people. Rabbi Gustavo Kraselnik received and answered all the questions of the boys and girls attending.

Our boys and girls are aware of the importance of art in the process of creating bridges of understanding, which transcend the barriers that human beings have raised for centuries.

How to denounce human suffering, inequality, and violence through art? How to provoke, through dance, the wish to meet the great needs of children and adolescents in the Central American region?

Mobilized by this reflection, UNICEF, CAMMINA and the Seattle International Foundation extended an invitation to the students of the Enlaces Program to present "Entre Líneas", a piece developed collectively by the students of the Enlaces Program, in the framework of the Central America Donors Forum, 2017.

The boys and girls of Enlaces performed for the attendees , in a process of reflection on the realities that thousands of children and adolescents in the region live in, and that, in many cases, forces them to abandon their homes, schools, and communities in search of a life free of violence.

We believe that art is a very valuable tool to provoke and denounce. Our students’ movements, accompanied by music , and sometimes, even in the moments of silence, give rise to powerful sensations in the audience.

Analida Galindo Co-Director. FEC

Our students were in charge of raising the voice for those who suffer in silence and are invisibilized. They assumed the task of recognizing themselves as performers able to connect a world of pain, violation of rights and abandonment, with a world of possibilities, actions and actors involved. Worlds that, through art, can have an encounter.