Ballet School at Theatro Municipal do Rio celebrates 94th anniversary

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Rio de Janeiro’s Theatro Municipal Maria Olenewa State Dance School celebrated its 94th anniversary yesterday, April 27th, with the launch of the e-book “Professores que Construíram Nossa História.”

With testimonials from several teachers of the oldest and most traditional school of classical ballet training in Brazil, the e-book is available on the Theatro Municipal’s social networks.

To celebrate the date, the institution held a live event yesterday afternoon to talk about the school’s trajectory, based on research done by Paulo Melgaço, professor of Dance History since 1993.

“To celebrate the 94th anniversary of the Maria Olenewa State Dance School, we are paying tribute to all the masters who passed through here and contributed to the development and training of thousands of students over time,” acknowledges Melgaço.

Dancer and teacher Liana Vasconcelos highlighted 3 fundamental words for a classical ballet school: memory, tradition, and evolution. “We teachers teach our students, throughout their nine years of training, the importance of valuing the memory of our school and all those who have been part of that history.”

Every year, 30 to 40 new students enter the Theatro Municipal’s Dance School. However, not all of them complete their studies. There are 6 years of preparatory courses and 3 more years of technical courses. The school’s director, Hélio Bejani, points out that the journey requires great discipline, training, and physical fitness.

“The study is hard. You have to be physically fit, even though it is a public school. But because it is technical, it requires physical fitness.”

With many students dropping out, about 20 graduate each year, on average. “In these 94 years, you can imagine the number of dancers who have graduated from the school,” he says.

According to Bejani, the interest in ballet has increased among boys. “Today, boys start earlier.” He, on the other hand, started the course at 22, after graduating in engineering. “I had to battle hard to become a first dancer in the theater. Physical fitness helped me, too.”

Of the school’s 270 students, only 40 are boys. But, according to the director, prejudice today is less focused on the gender issue and has migrated to the economic question. “They say that it is a profession with no future, a very difficult profession,” says Bejani, who has been in charge of the school for almost 4 years.

For the coming years, the goal, according to him, is to keep alive the technical, artistic and educational legacy left by the Russian dancer and founder of the school Maria Olenewa. “What I try to do is this: improve the possible conditions but, above all, maintain what has been conquered so far. You can’t go backwards.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the school tried to keep all subjects remote. Last month, in-person classes started to be resumed, but in a hybrid system (maintaining online teaching).

The school’s infrastructure is guaranteed by the Rio de Janeiro state government, through the State Secretariat of Culture and Creative Economy, but to maintain itself, the institution needs donations and relies on the support of the Association of Friends of Theatro Municipal.

“The school is public. No one pays anything to study here,”, guarantees the director. It depends, however, on the “generosity of parents who can contribute” and other donors.

“But no one will stop studying at the dance school because they can’t contribute,” Bejani emphasized, affirming that the great majority of students are children with no means to donate. “This [the dance classes] creates for them an extra dream, an extra possibility,” he reflects.

Although they don’t have to pay to attend the dance school, students have to prove that they are enrolled and attending regular school. According to the director, the school’s methodology consists in using ballet as an educational tool.

“We are forming citizens. We are not just training dancers. We need to prepare them emotionally and cognitively for life, for the future, to face life’s impermanence with more tranquility. Look at what we are going through now,” he said, referring to the pandemic.

For Bejani, if health professionals fight to guarantee the life of Brazilians in the pandemic, culture workers are the doctors of the soul. “A people without culture is a people without soul,” highlighted the director.