In March 2020, Assistant Professors Crystal Perkins and Daniel Roberts led the Brazil Dance Tour Group on a unique 15-day experience in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. Department Chair Susan Hadley created and directed the program four years ago, and it is now a permanent study abroad offering. Designed to create a distinctive cultural experience for Ohio State dance majors, Dance Brazil introduced the dancers to Brazilian art and culture. The students performed and studied with Brazilian dance masters, learn first-hand about Afro-Brazilian culture and engage in cultural exchange with Brazilian dancers.
Before setting on this expedition, the thirteen dancers took a class on the history, culture and language of Brazil in order to gain a respectful and educated global context on their study abroad program. Starting in October 2019, the dancers began learning repertory that displayed a diversified pallette of dance, including tap, modern, contemporary, jazz, step and African dance. Faculty, guest artists and cast members choreographed the repertory, which the tour group performed for grade schools, universities and local communities.
Along with performance, the tour group experienced Brazilian culture by participating in classes in Capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art with elements of dance and gymnastics, taking Samba classes, which is Brazil’s national dance, attending music and dance performances and meeting local collegiate and professional dancers. The group also travelled to the historic city of Lençois in the center of Bahia where they performed outdoors in the round.
In addition to his resident director duties during the tour, Roberts had a choreographic residency with one of Brazil’s national dance companies, Balé Teatro Castro Alves, in Salvador. Over the two-week period, Roberts taught daily technique class and created a new work for the company titled Flora e Fauna, which reflected Roberts’ ongoing interest of shape, rhythm, and landscape inherent to natural phenomena. There was a showing of the 13-minute choreography, which featured 13 of the company dancers, for invited guests and students on April 13th. Roberts was the inaugural choreographer for an ongoing residency program between Instituto Clara Ramos (ICR) Brasil and Ohio State Dance Brazil.
