At Risk Children Dance for Social Change

We finished this year’s Panamanian summer very energized and began Enlaces’ 2016 course in mid March with many surprises and intense activities.

In March, as part of Panama City’s arts and creative industries festival MacroFest 2016, Enlaces received the INNOVA award in the Category of Social Impact through the Arts. As part of the festival’s program our top student Juan presented a solo in front of more than 500 people.

Following this great pep, three of our children were casted in “Las Mariposas Ya no Viven Aquí” (Butterflies no longer live here), a local production that has traveled to Guatemala, Costa Rica and Miami since 2014, promoting through dance the message of Tolerance and Fraternity by staging the Jewish Holocaust and its impact in our modern society. The cast consisted of 96 professional and non-professional dancers, who were directed by the renowned Spanish choreographer Fernando Hurtado. Our selected children assisted to intense daily rehearsals for a month, and were able to participate in educational workshops by the international organization Yad Vashem about the Holocaust and the consequences of indifference. There were four presentations between April 5 and 6, to whom more than 10,000 people assisted. The rest of our children also received workshops and talks about this subject by Yad Vashem, assisted to the theatre to see their peers and received a special dance workshop by Fernando Hurtado.

After the rush of a very successful production, one of our students received an invitation to represent Panama in the XXth Summit of Dance Schools and Academies of Central America held in Managua, Nicaragua, on April 29^th, as part of the celebrations of the International Day of Dance, where dance students from Central America and Mexico presented their work. Our 15 year-old student Juan, traveled to this Central American country for the first time, and aside from taking ballet, jazz, modern and folklore classes with renowned teachers, he presented a solo in the magnificent Theatre Ruben Darío of Managua.

It has been a very exciting “First Act” for 2016, and we are very happy we have started the year with events that promote and recognize the talent of our students in national and international stages, help them build their artistic curriculum and nurture their dance experience. 

*The names in this report have been changed to respect the privacy of our benecifiaries.

Links:

• Spanish Report