Day: March 19, 2022

World-famous ballet dancers from Russia and Ukraine, Argentina, Cuba, France and Japan come together Saturday for a gala to raise funds for Ukraine and send a message of peace.

“We as artists have talent and we need to use this talent to say what we believe in,” Ukraine’s Ivan Putrov, co-organizer of the event to be held at the English National Opera’s London Coliseum, told AFP.

“Art has a voice and is the voice that we use,” said Putrov, who was a principal dancer with London’s prestigious Royal Ballet from 2002-10.

Putrov and Romanian ballerina Alina Cojocaru both trained in Kyiv and decided to mobilize the world of ballet for this “humanitarian appeal” in the face of Russia’s invasion.

Now, they have united a team of exceptional dancers to “raise funds that will save lives,” Putrov said.

The message is not only for the West and those in Ukraine, but also Russia.

“Some Russians will hear us and will raise their voice… because what’s happening is outrageous,” he said.

Stars taking the stage include Russia’s Natalia Osipova, Argentina’s Marianela Nunez and Japan’s Fumi Kaneko, all from the Royal Ballet, and France’s Mathieu Ganio from the Paris Opera.

Ukraine’s Katja Khaniukova, Spain’s Aitor Arrieta and the United States’ Emma Hawes of the English National Ballet will also perform on the night.

The evening hopes to raise more than $130,000 for the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) UK charity collective which includes the British Red Cross and is helping victims of the war.

“Is art appropriate in such a horrible circumstance? Of course it is, because it gives hope, it gives inspiration to people,” said Putrov.

Loaded with symbolism

The Ukrainian national anthem will open the evening, which will close with The Triumph of Love from the ballet Raymonda, with music by Russia’s Alexander Glazunov.

In between there will be 13 symbolism-laden choreographies such as No Man’s Land by Liam Scarlett, Lacrimosa by Gyula Pandi and Ashes by Jason Kittelberger.

Russian composers including Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff will also be played.

“Russian culture doesn’t have anything to do with (President Vladimir) Putin, and equally Putin has nothing to do with Russian culture,” said Putrov.

Osipova, one of the most famous Russian dancers outside her country, declined to be interviewed.

But her presence “signifies that Russia doesn’t equal aggression,” said Putrov.

Cuba’s Javier Torres of the Northern Ballet will perform The Death of a Swan by Camille Saint-Saens.

The piece is about a paraplegic who loses one of his limbs and “represents fighting for what you have lost,” Torres told AFP.

“It talks about fighting to the end and that’s how I wanted to interpret it,” he said, thinking of “people who try to resist what happens to them,” like the Ukrainians mired in war or the Cubans who have suffered under decades of U.S. sanctions and embargoes, and “even by the Russians” in Soviet times.

“I have that pain, I have that anguish that every Cuban who lives outside of Cuba has, because we know the needs that are experienced there,” he said.

He said he has not previously mixed art with politics, but Saturday’s gala is “a humanitarian duty as a dancer, as a human rights defender, first as a person and then as an artist.”

Source: Voice of America

The world is at a ‘dangerous moment’ in the fight against diseases like polio, a senior World Health Organization official said, as efforts begin to immunize 23 million children across five African countries after an outbreak in Malawi.

In February, Malawi declared its first case of wild poliovirus in 30 years, when a 3-year old girl in the Lilongwe district was paralyzed as a result of her infection.

The case raised alarm because Africa was declared free of wild polio in 2020 and there are only two countries in the world where it is endemic: Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan marked a year without cases in January 2022.

“This is a dangerous moment,” Modjirom Ndoutabe, polio coordinator for WHO Africa, told Reuters in a phone interview from Brazzaville, the Republic of Congo.

“Even if there is one country in the world with polio, all the other countries are in big trouble.”

Ndoutabe said the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns had slowed efforts to vaccinate children against other diseases such as polio, and also hit surveillance.

According to the Gavi vaccine alliance, childhood immunization services in the 68 countries it supports dropped by 4% in 2020, representing 3.1 million more “zero-dose” children likely unprotected from childhood diseases like polio, diphtheria and measles, and 3 million more under-immunized children than in 2019.

“This is a tragedy,” Seth Berkley, chief executive of Gavi, said in an interview with Reuters. “The challenge is getting that back up.”

In Malawi, where polio vaccine coverage is high – above 90% in most districts – rates during the pandemic fell by 2%, according to Janet Kayita, WHO Malawi head. She said the child who was paralyzed had one dose of the polio vaccine at birth, but not the other doses needed for full protection.

Kayita said surveillance had been more significantly impacted. The case is linked to a strain circulating in Pakistan’s Sindh province in 2019, which means it does not impact Africa’s polio-free status. But teams are now scrambling to answer how it arrived in Malawi, and how long it spread undetected.

Polio, a highly infectious disease spread mainly through contamination by fecal matter, used to kill and paralyze thousands of children annually. There is no cure, but vaccination brought the world close to ending the wild form of the disease.

Mass rollout

In a bid to prevent renewed spread in Africa, almost 70,000 vaccinators will go door-to-door in Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, to give all children under 5 the oral polio vaccine in a $15.7 million campaign funded by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, the WHO said in a statement on Friday.

The first round, beginning Monday, will target more than 9 million children, followed by three further rounds aiming to reach all under-5-year-olds, regardless of their vaccination status, to boost immunity, Kayita said.

Efforts have also been stepped up to track any cases linked to the Malawi outbreak and to monitor transmission in wastewater. So far, no other linked cases have been found.

Vaccine-derived polio, a form of the disease stemming from incomplete vaccination coverage, is more widespread globally, and recent outbreaks have sparked concerns about how the coronavirus pandemic may have hit vaccination coverage.

Israel is battling an outbreak of vaccine-derived polio, its first since the 1980s, after a case was discovered in Jerusalem last week. Almost 12,000 children have since been vaccinated.

Ukraine reported its first vaccine-derived polio case in five years last year, but urgent efforts to curb the outbreak were halted after the Russian invasion on Feb. 24.

Complete vaccination protects against both forms of the disease, and a focus on that will halt both the outbreak in Malawi in months and all forms of polio in Africa by 2023, said Ndoutabe, who described his sorrow when he first heard of the Malawi case setback.

“But we did not stay in this sadness. We had to act quickly,” he said.

Source: Voice of America