In one of Rio’s toughest neighbourhoods, a makeshift ballet school is offering young women the opportunity to escape the everyday struggle of favela life – even if just for a day. On the third floor of an old building in Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro, a group of girls float silently across the wooden floor. A teacher shifts between them, barking instructions. “One and two and three and close!” she shouts, pushing one dancer’s back straight as the others whirl, pirouette and plié in rows. “Four and plié and five and arabesque!” She corrects one girl’s calf and knee. “Port de Bras… elevé!” Outside of these walls, Brazil is home to one of the world’s most unequal societies. According to Oxfam, the country’s richest 5 per cent have the same income as the remaining 95. Likewise, Brazil’s six richest men have the same wealth as the poorest 50 per cent of the population – which totals around 100 million people.
Text: Fabian Federl Photography: Evgeny Makarov
Nowhere is this kind of disparity more visible than in Rio. Around a third of the city’s near-seven million inhabitants live in favelas: shantytowns with ramshackle houses and winding alleys, where the sunlight doesn’t reach the ground. In Rio’s South Zone, they often border on the richest neighbourhoods. However, most of Rio’s favela residents are situated in its North Zone, a flat urban sprawl featuring hundreds of different shantytowns. In here lies Manguinhos: one mammoth neighbourhood made up of multiple complexes that have since become indistinguishable.
Life in Manguinhos is different from that in the South Zone. Those who live there don’t have contact with the rich. Most of them work either somewhere inside the favela, or travel to the equally downtrodden city centre. For residents, violence is part of the daily fabric of life, while drug gangs hold more sway than law enforcement. Opportunities to get out are rare.
But, around eight years ago, on one of Manguinhos’ main streets, something happened that offered an antidote to the negative headlines and stats: a ballet school opened.
‘Ballet Manguinhos’ was founded by Daiana Ferreira de Oliveira, a 31-year-old local resident. Formerly a teacher for the South Zone rich, she started giving lessons for free in Manguinhos from a Baptist church. For Daiana – who, as a kid, first learned to dance in a disused printing plant – it was the injustice she saw everywhere that inspired her to start the school. After long days spent giving lessons to the children of wealthy families, she would return ho
