We were lucky to catch up with Jaruam Xavier recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jaruam, appreciate you joining us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I am from an artistic family, and I started dancing when I was ten. Shortly after I completed sixteen, I decided to be a professional dancer and work in a dance company. My father was to one that came to me, and during the ‘father’s talk,’ he said that I should move to a big city to increase my chance of becoming a professional dancer. At seventeen, I got my first job as a tap dance instructor, and at eighteen, I got my first contract as a professional dancer. One year later, I moved to a big city to dance in a well-known dance company.

Jaruam, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I started dancing at age ten, and I was working as a professional dancer around sixteen. After twenty years of working as a dancer, performer, teacher, and choreographer, I focused on my teacher and choreographer skills. As a choreographer, I explore Anthropophagic Body Formation, a metaphor I created to illustrate the assimilation of knowledge through the embodiment of dance and cultural hybridity. My works bear the influence of Candomblé, Capoeira, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, evident in their distinctive traits.

The main thing I would share with my followers is that creativity is lawyered, and there are many ways to express our creativity. I like to write, play guitar and draw as a form of expression. Moreover, as a choreographer, I envision partnering dance as my main form of artistic expression. People and relationships are complex; thus, my desire to unfold this complexity through the abstractionism of dance is also a form of healing and understanding people and myself on a deeper level. Therefore, the entangled dance I have been creating is based on how I perceive and translate these feelings.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I danced for ten years in the same dance company in Brazil. Bale da Cidade de Sao Paulo is the most important dance company in the country. The challenge of dancing in the same place for so long is beyond my love for dance. When I was thirty-six, my life was a mess, and I had to find a new direction to keep living from my art. The fantastic dance company wasn’t longer an attraction to further develop my art. I had to find a way to move forward to build a long-term plan. One day, a Brazilian professor visited the company to give a class. Armando Duarte is a professor at the University of Iowa, and he was looking for dancers that could fit the university’s dance program.
When we met, I asked about his possibility of supporting my application as a candidate. He is a great person and supported my application to the dance program. However, I had to pivot my life to get accepted to the program! I worked as a dancer, and moving to the academic world wouldn’t be easy and is still complex.
Thus, after three years of preparation and some bumps, I got accepted to the University of Iowa.
The takeaway of this story for me is simple and profound at once. My strength is my career as a dancer, my experience, my high-level performance, and the diversity of choreographers and countries I have danced. Eventually, our strengths became our weaknesses, so I felt that I had to adapt a lot to change my mindset and avoid being ‘the dancer’ in the academic world. I had to learn how to be a student again or for the first time. I am still in this process, but now consciousness of it.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Moving countries is more complicated and can be even more challenging at a certain age. Cultural shock is hard to deal with and happens often. English is my second language; these are just a few examples of how resilience is necessary to strive as an international student. Every day is an opportunity to learn something new and work on my objectives. I got upset with random situations, miscommunication, cultural differences, etc. However, I have to keep moving; Resilience isn’t just a word; resilience is a way to comprehend and act toward life’s challenges.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @jaruam
• Youtube: Jaruam Xavier

Image Credits
Black Pants dance photos credit to Clarissa Lambert.