“Your body begins before you and is the place of all the rituals that belong to you. When you listen to your body through dance, you also listen to the bodies and dances of seduction and celebration that belong to your ancestors and your species.
In your body you carry the dances that will save you.
The one who dances touches the other beyond the skin; dance touches its weight and its smell, defeats touch screens and erases the borders between bodies and nations.
I have lived on both sides of the story. I have seen poverty and wealth, landscapes and bodies fed and abused by power. My work excavates, looking for the real bodies among those that are officially on display.
Being a choreographer in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, the magical islands where I live, surrounded by the Caribbean Sea and people dancing before birth, is an unmentionable privilege.
Dancing is the great antidote against the madness of humanity.
To each person displaced, refugee and exiled from all over the world, I say: you have a country that goes with you that nothing and nobody can carry; the country of your body.”
Marianela Boán. Cuba. Choreographer, dancer and teacher.
Link to original text of speech in Spanish reported by Cubarte
29 April 2018 – International Dance Day which took place in Havana, Cuba in 2018.
International Dance Day was created by the Dance Committee of the International Theatre Institute ITI, the main partner for the performing arts of UNESCO. Since its creation in 1982, the International Dance Committee and the International Theatre Institute ITI select an outstanding dance personality to write a message for International Dance Day each year. This day is a celebration day for those who can see the value and importance of the art form “dance”, and acts as a wake-up-call for governments, politicians and institutions which have not yet recognised its value to the people and to the individual and have not yet realised its potential for economic growth.
Cuba 50 
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