The mission of El Colegio del Cuerpo (The College of the Body) is to generate a renewed comprehension of the body as an essential element of the human condition, a means of expression and as a determinant factor in the improvement of the quality of life for the population. The College is a not for profit organisation based in Cartagena de Indias on the north Caribbean coast of Colombia, and is directed by the choreographers, dancers, and teachers Marie France Delieuvin and Ãlvaro Restrepo.
It is a cultural and an educative space - plural and democratic - that offers children, young people, and the general population of Cartagena de Indias, the Colombian Caribbean, the country of Colombia, and Latin America an opportunity to construct a new ethics of the body, deeply engaged with the elaboration of an aesthetic and artistic search, and associated to contemporary cultural, social, political, and economic undertakings. It contributes to cultural, artistic, and social development through programmes and projects concerned with education, creation, audience development, and investigation in contemporary dance and other artistic and complementary disciplines.
According to the Spanish Language Dictionary, the concept 'college' is defined as a 'community invested by the same dignity', which suggests a space/time of reflection/action in specific disciplines. Unfortunately, 'college' has lost its wider philosophical connotations, in such a way that it is commonly associated with the idea of training. In its most universal meaning, derived from the Latin, 'colligere' - 'to gather' - it implies investigation, individual and collective reflection, debate, documentation, the production of ideas and publications, besides other activities.
El Colegio del Cuerpo is an international artistic and educational centre that supports interchanges with other institutions and artists throughout the world, initiating and cultivating dialogue between diverse artistic and cultural streams. To make its mission possible and to reach the future vision of its founders and collaborators, work is achieved in four areas and programmes developed through a series of projects and activities. These areas are:
- formation
- creation
- audience development
- documentation and research.
Through its education work the College initiates new alternatives and spaces for vocational and professional insight and development, and for the qualification of children, young people, and the general population. It develops programmes in formal, non-formal, and informal education, related to artistic and corporal disciplines. It is not simply concerned with 'the creative utilization of free time': on the contrary, what the project offers is professional development at a high artistic level from childhood onwards. The College offers a range of programmes:
- a body awareness and contemporary dance programme for children over 7 years
- Formal High School level artistic programmes in contemporary dance, for children and teenagers from 6th to 11th grades, in association with other schools in Cartagena de Indias and the Caribbean Region of Colombia
- a high level professional programme for those students graduating from the artistic high school programme - in agreement with high school educational institutions - together with a specialization programme in teaching, criticism, contemporary dance theory and cultural promotion
- a permanent programme in contemporary dance and complementary disciplines for professionals and semi-professionals
- a non-formal and informal education programme in complementary disciplines related to performance and production (staging, lighting, wardrobe, sound, stage machinery, etc)
- a programme for educators in corporal education
- residences and interchange programmes with similar national and international educational institutions.
In addition, the College has established a number of performance initiatives with young people and children, using the experience of working inside a contemporary dance programme. The purpose is to offer them an artistic educational alternative in order to improve their life chances, with the hope of combating poverty and truancy.
The first of these initiatives began in September 1997, when a Pilot experimental group began a process in contemporary dance. The majority of these kids are high school students, and the time they dedicate to this discipline is absolutely voluntary and vocational - their contemporary dance classes are not part of their academic studies programme. The short-term objective is the creation of two programmes: an artistic High School studies programme with emphasis in contemporary dance, as well as an advanced professional level programme.
In April 2001, a corporal sensitiveness and contemporary dance approximation programme was initiated with a group of one hundred children, between the ages of ten and twelve, coming from three schools within what is historically the poorest area of the city. The project called integrated services for young people, is part of the Presidential program Young Columbia, financed by the World Bank. Its aim is to offer these children with very scarce resources, complementary programmes to their academic education, to help them find meaning in their lives and combat truancy.
Another project, Mi Cuerpo: Mi Casa (My Body: My House), took place with one hundred children who live in the Nelson Mandela neighbourhood of Cartagena, which shelters refugee children from all regions of Colombia. The project, financed by the Red de Solidaridad Social, is aimed at children between the ages of seven and ten who are the innocent victims of armed conflict in Colombia and who have lost every sense of belonging. Its objective was to create a space, using contemporary dance, to help them reconstruct their wounded sense of themselves, by means of a new ethics of the body. The body, as conceived by El Colegio del Cuerpo, is their only real possession, alongside the house of their soul and their human dignity.
The College in addition is concerned to develop a critical audience for its work and has established programmes of activity that strive to reach across the widest populations and raise peoples' aspirations in terms of access and quality. An International Arts Festival - Memory and Imagination - gathers traditional dances and work from the artistic vanguard in order to establish a plural, multi-cultural and inter-ethnic dialogue. One of its purposes is to break down barriers between cultural art and so-called - almost always pejoratively - popular culture.
By establishing work throughout Cartagena, visiting communities and localities with which it seeks to work, The College encourages people to come to those precincts of the city generally seen as exclusive and elitist and thus initiating access by marginalized sections of the population.
The Artistic Directors of The College have created a repertory of work for the Pilot Experimental Group that has toured nationally and internationally, and has begun to undertake residencies based in the wider international community. The College takes on co-productions with other cultural and artistic institutions.
Behind all this activity is a determination by Ãlvaro Restrepo and Marie France Delieuvin to challenge traditional approaches to physical and dance education in Colombia and here he outlines in more detail his thinking about the distinction between physical education and education of the body and its place in our lives.
Physical Education vs. Corporal Education
(A qualitative difference)
At the centre of an educational revolution - and within the bigger context of an urgent and unavoidable peaceful revolution at every level inside Colombian society there are two fundamental principles expressed by our friend and master, the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and by the Ministry of Education, to which we subscribe ourselves. The first principle focuses on what Garcia Marquez himself calls 'precocious vocation', and the early discovery of these vocations so they can be transformed into a talent that is both developed and empowered. Garcia Marquez goes even further; he also speaks of 'genetic vocations', in other words those innate talents that are naturally manufactured, and an integral part of a every human being and which only an alert, generous, flexible, specialized and visionary education can help to discover and nurture in time. And when we say 'in time' we are specifically referring to the opportunity that such a discovery offers in achieving what Garcia Marquez describes as 'the perfect formula for a long and happy life' with 'everybody working only on what s/he really likes.'
The other principle to which we adhere to has to do with the concept of happiness: with the pleasure of working within a discipline and the exorcism of suffering, once and for all, from the classroom. A process that, as we know, never ends: as Garcia Marquez himself says: '...from the crib to the tomb...'
An education for happiness, fulfillment and for life, an education that succeeds in striking the difficult balance between profession and vocation. Because reality sometimes forces us to choose our professions according to family, social and economic pressures. Vocation, on the other hand, chooses us and when revealed, it rebels us, and it transforms itself into a passion, into a healthy obsession reaffirming our fulfillment and self-worthiness.
Talent, vocation, will and discipline: an irrefutable tetralogy of tools for living. When Garcia Marquez first visited The College of the Body, he said: 'there are those who have talent and those who have will, but when talent and will are combined, no thing and nobody can stop us' How many times have we heard people saying 'I am a frustrated artist, I am a frustrated scientist, what I really wanted to do/to be is...' This is our aim: an education that helps us, vigorously, to eliminate frustration from our college and academic lives.
It is within this framework of ideas that the College of the Body wants to contribute, with a new vision for the education of the body and its presence in the traditional curriculum. Our objective is the creation of a learning field, which until now has been confined to the execution, mostly unconsciously and mechanically, of a series of sport practices, routines and exercises with very little awareness or reflection on the subject.
It is through this pilot experience that we would like to propose the substitution of what is known as "physical education" for a more holistic and integral approach through Corporal Education. This change, which at first sight appears to be a mere change of name, would contain within itself a revolution which incorporates those themes already discussed of acknowledged vocation and the end of suffering. In Colombia, how many of us have passed through the instruction of a physical education teacher (in many cases a retired military man) who instilled in us the notion that the only way to communicate with our own body and to discipline it, was through corporal punishment, press-ups and endless runs around the football pitch?
Let us make absolutely clear that we are not against sport: what we are for is the possibility and the right to have access to other types of relationship with our corporal being. A genuine education of the body, one that helps us to understand that the body is our only true possession, because it also possesses us, and therefore it creates indissolubility between the body and being. This kind of education would include aspects as sports, anatomy, physiology, sexual education and artistic corporal disciplines such as dance, mime, and acrobatics, etc. It would also cover aspects related to nutrition, complementary or alternative physical disciplines such as yoga, tai - chi, martial arts and other techniques of physical self awareness like Alexander technique, Feldenkrais or Rolfing.
Recently we have witnessed a whole new boom and cult of the body through the proliferation of aerobics, spas, and gymnasiums. All this, which can be seen as a step forward in the awareness of a more integral idea of well-being and an improvement in the quality of our lives, is still fairly superficial and not well thought out. In many cases the main purpose is reduced to the accepted look of what a sculptural body is supposed to be like.
Physical culture versus Culture of the Body, Training versus Inner Search, Make-up versus profound transformation. Body sculptor / Body as culture. Self-esteem, self respect versus respect for others. We have to choose.
For further information email: restrepoalvaro@hotmail.com or elpuente@ctgred.net.co
We are extremely grateful for the assistance of Juan Toledo, at the British Council, in the production of this article.