The Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil

Santa Catarina is an international reference when it comes to dancing. The Bolshoi Theater School opened in March, 2000 in the municipality of Joinville, as a branch of the most respected ballet teaching institute in the world, the Bolshoi Theater Moscow. For the first time in two hundred years, since the advent of the Bolshoi Theater, its teaching methodology is being adapted and applied in another country, under the supervision of Russian masters.

The school offers a technical course for the Preparation of Ballet artists that takes eight years, and is recommended for children between the ages of nine and eleven. There is also the modular course, which takes two years, and is for children above the age of eleven who already have some knowledge of dancing. At the moment about 300 students study in the school, receiving professional training to become ballet artists, and citizens with better awareness of their roles in society.  

The Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil maintains the same social objective which motivated the creation in 1773, of the Moscow Choreographic School in Russia: to make it possible for children of lower income families to grow in cultural terms – 85% of the vacancies are taken up by scholarship holders, the majority of whom are from disadvantaged families. They receive teaching, uniform, transport, medical assistance and food subsidies.