Community Activism: WAR ON POVERTY: Teaching The Dance Of Life

The girl was 11 a child of the streets of Fortaleza, Brazil, whose future seemed as bleak as the slums in which she lived. Then Carla Nisiane Anacleto da Costa saw a ballet performance by students from a dance school called EDISCA, a troupe that included other impoverished girls from her street. EDISCA (the letters stand for the Spanish name of the School of Dance and Social Integration for Children and Adolescents) was not your average ballet company, and this was no Swan Lake. It portrayed Fortaleza's poorest kids begging at traffic lights and living on the street. "That really affected me," says Da Costa. "The reality in the ballet was just like mine. I hadn't begged, but the lives I saw were very close to the life I was living."

Da Costa enrolled in EDISCA, and the school changed her life, as it has the lives of 800 other girls ages 6 to 19--and a few boys--from Fortaleza, a coastal city in Brazil's poverty-racked northeast. The school was founded in 1992 by Dora Andrade, 42, a dancer who cut short her career in the U.S. to come home and teach girls to dance their way out of the slums. Most of the children who enter EDISCA can't read or write. Many have health problems and are close to running away from violent homes or being lured into child prostitution. Andrade and a staff of 36 teach them about nutrition and health care as well as art, theater and music. But only one course is compulsory. "Dance is the pillar of the school," says Andrade. Through dance, "a seven-year-old learns about vision and order, about creativity." A child with seven years of education "will never be poor again."

Schools modeled on EDISCA are now open in five other Brazilian cities. Andrade's students sell out the local theater and put on shows as far away as Italy. They attract funding sources like the Washington-based Ashoka organization, a nonprofit group that identifies and supports 1,100 "social entrepreneurs" in 41 countries. Last year a $550,000 loan from the Brazilian government let EDISCA move into a new building.

"EDISCA doesn't form dancers, it forms people," says Da Costa, now 19 and heading for college. She plans to start a dance school of her own "to pass on everything I learned from Dora."

--By Andrew Downie/Fortaleza