Review 

Dancing on Board [Feb 2006], TES Extra for Special Needs, Young Achievers, p.5

"We are all in the same boat" was literally true for an art, storytelling and dance collaboration by 160 pupils aged 9 to 18 from Welsh mainstream and special schools. Their efforts culminated in performances at two of the country's most prestigious venues: the Millennium Centre in Cardiff and the Riverfront Centre in Newport.

Guided by artist Megan Lloyd, storyteller Michael Harvey and dancer Fernanda Amaral, pupils from Grangetown primary school, Bryn Deri county primary, St Joseph's RC primary school, Ysgol Erw'r Delyn, St Julian's special unit and Alway Primary School, from Cardiff and Newport, some with and some without physical and/or learning difficulties, created a huge sailing boat, stories to tell in it and dances to express them.

'It was most beautiful to see, because most of the kids had never been in a theatre before, let alone on stage,' said Ms Amaral. 'One child told his true story about coming here on a boat to flee a war. Others made one up about rescuing monkeys from a zoo, being swallowed by a big fish and sneezed up again when they sprinkled pepper inside it, so they were flung on to Copacabana beach.'

Much of the subsequent Brazilian football dance was choreographed by the children, she said.

'There was one boy with a manual wheelchair and as he wheeled himself towards five others on the floor, they rolled as if he was pushing them. It was very powerful. Some of these children could not speak, but they had such a strong presence on stage you couldn't help watching them.'

Review by David Adams, Jan 2005

Chapter’s Latinoamerica season may have at its heart a three-week residency and performance from Buenos Aires’s Andrea Servera Dance Company, with a sort of postscript in a few weeks from Costa Rica’s Diquis Tiquis.

But there have also been a couple of fascinating celebrations of the existing cultural links between Wales and Latin America.

A couple of weeks ago we had Jill Greenhalgh talking about the role that the Wales-based Magdalena Project had in helping organise events that more and more concentrated on marginalised women in a region that may well be exciting but which is also dangerous and male-dominated.

Now we have a Brazilian who has lived in Cardiff for over a decade, the charismatic Fernanda Amaral, talking about her Patuá Dance and offering us a selection of the work with that unusual company and the links developed between Wales and Latin America.

What’s fascinating about Patuá Dance is that it has become very reciprocal: Fernanda Amaral brought her enthusiasm for Afro-Brazilian dance to Wales and now Wales takes its hybrid product back to Brazil and then brings back more Brazil to Wales.

At the heart of Ms Amaral’s mission seems to be her emphasis on body language: it was she tells us, only when she encountered the black Brazilian dance of the north of the country that she realised that her classical-ballet training in the south was not what she wanted. So restraint and control lost out to pretty quickly to intuitive, sexy gyrations – and the liberation of the body.

It’s that which seems to have informed the development of Patuá Dance, as evidenced in this entertaining mix of live performance and video clips.

Indeed, Ms Amaral can hardly stand still as she talks to us, and given the invitation to join in, most of the Chapter audience relished the opportunity to do a sometimes bizarre white pastiche of uninhibited Latin American body-talk.

The body, of course, is at the core of Patuá’s work and it is interesting to see how the European has embraced the ethic of the Latino as a kind of missing “other” – an aspect of human expression that we have missed out on – as Patuá’s dancers danced around.

Alongside the two Latin-American dancers there’s a great young Cardiff Woman that could be Brazilian – but also a guy who looks as relaxed as anyone in this night of carnival in Canton.

It’s a far cry from Magdalena’s concern with using performance as a political weapon of resistance but I guess Patuá’s commitment to body awareness is as liberating in another, more accessible and individual, way.

The company’s enthusiasm cannot but be infectious and this snapshot of dance, storytelling and music (a great little band, too) got across the informal, joyous and hardworking qualities of one of Wales’ lesser-known intercultural enterprises.