Declared “National Glory of Dance” in the Dominican Republic, Marily Gallardo is a dancer, choreographer, researcher and educator, and the creator of a unique pedagogical proposal in the Caribbean.
At a very young age, in 1974, she was a member of the first National Olympic gymnastics team.
Marily trained as a contemporary dancer, but soon she entered the world of body expression, through theatre, music and anthropology.
Marily Gallardo then went to a rural community to work with girls to highlight to them the power of women within the construction of culture in the Caribbean. She worked to empower women through creative expression.
Marily is the Founder of the Kalalú Dance School located in an afro-descendant community in a very impoverished rural area of Santo Domingo, she promotes an appreciation of afro-descendant identity so that girls may be empowered and make for themselves a better quality of life.
Her pedagogy consists of using art to generate historical and social awareness and motivates girls and women to a more satisfactory path towards well-being, through the expression of the body.
“I realized that women were invisible, so I decided to recover a series of practices that had been dissipating, but then I discovered that it was difficult to articulate all this within the existing with the education system, partly because of racism, and that was when I decided to start my own school”.
Marily employs dance as a tool of expression for women and as a strategy for the political positioning of women: respect for rights, participation in local and global institutions, She emphasizes the important presence of women in solving problems that directly affect the quality of their lives and to build self-esteem in girls.
“The Caribbean is dance and music. That is the basis of their culture, a heritage that we brought from Africa, the body is the ideal vehicle for human expression. Kalalú is a school that puts this into practice”.
Marily Gallardo is a key reference figure in the fields of performing arts and education, both in the Dominican Republic and in the Caribbean more widely.