A stray bullet crushed Iraly Yanez’s aspirations of becoming a professional dancer eight years ago as it ruptured two of her vertebrae and left her paraplegic.
However, now the young Venezuelan dancer is pursuing her life-long passion in a wheelchair — and hoping to put her career back on track — thanks to a contemporary dance company that is helping disabled people perform.
Caracas based AM Danza works with 50 young Venezuelans who are pursuing their passion for dance, despite limitations like broken spines, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome or blindness.
Photo: AP
Yanez, 34, joined the group three months ago and recently performed in her wheelchair in an emotional hour-long show that the dance troupe put together for its followers.
“This is the opportunity of a lifetime,” Yanez said after the contemporary dance review, Ubuntu, was held in one of the Venezuelan capital’s most prestigious theaters. “I can’t allow external issues to affect me any longer.”
During the show, disabled dancers performed alongside fully abled professional dancers to demonstrate that art knows no barriers. Some members of the audience shed tears.
Dancers with limited mobility in their legs lifted their crutches in the air in unison. A dancer hoisted Yanez from her wheelchair and lifted her above her shoulders to perform complex moves.
“Dancing is all about passion,” AM Danza director Alexander Madriz said. “You have to enjoy your possibilities and use your body to express emotions.”
Madriz has worked for two decades with dancers who have disabilities and said that thanks to them he has learned that corporal expression has no limits.
“Not everything has to be the perfect lines and symmetry that you see in contemporary classical dance,” he said.
Madriz, 47, said that the students’ love for dance has helped them overcome the numerous obstacles faced by disabled people in Venezuela, where public transport is still mostly inaccessible to people on wheelchairs, and ramps on sidewalks and public buildings are few and far between.
In addition, like everyone else in Venezuela, they have to cope with rampant medical shortages and hyperinflation that has devastated their incomes.
Yanez said that on weekdays she can spend up to three hours waiting for one of the few wheelchair-friendly buses that pass through her humble neighborhood in the suburbs of Caracas to take her to AM’s dance studio.
However, that did not seem to diminish her will to train.
She said that the dance company has allowed her to come to terms with the accident that changed her life and has made her feel like she can now “fly through the sky.”
As this year comes to a close, Yanez said she is looking forward to participating in more performances.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
INSTABILITY: If Hezbollah do not respond to Israel’s killing of their leader then it must be assumed that they simply can not, an Middle Eastern analyst said Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah leaves the group under huge pressure to deliver a resounding response to silence suspicions that the once seemingly invincible movement is a spent force, analysts said. Widely seen as the most powerful man in Lebanon before his death on Friday, Nasrallah was the face of Hezbollah and Israel’s arch-nemesis for more than 30 years. His group had gained an aura of invincibility for its part in forcing Israel to withdraw troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, waging a devastating 33-day-long war in 2006 against Israel and opening a “support front” in solidarity with Gaza since
RSS