Paulo Costa Trio Entrevista - Laura Branco

Paulo Costa Trio Entrevista

Paulo Costa Trio presents a new series of interviews with Brazilians, Latinos, and people connected with the Brazilian culture who live in Cleveland, Ohio. Our mission is to build a stronger community among Brazilians living in the city, telling their histories, promoting their work, and helping new members to feel welcome in Cleveland. We will post one new interview every week! Every guest will have an opportunity to sing a song with us. We hope you all enjoy it. - Paulo Costa, Felipe Brito, Davi Lira

Interview with Laura Branco

March 22, 2017 | Cleveland, Ohio

Executive Director and Producer: Felipe Brito

Story by Felipe Brito, Paulo Costa, and Davi Lira

Laura is an artist, AYTM Therapist, capoeira player, and owner of The Open Space, in Cleveland, Ohio; a place specialized in Yoga, Ayurvedic Therapy, Ayurvedic Yoga Therapeutic Massage, Reiki, Tantric Therapy, Osho Art Therapy, and 5Rhythms. She left Brazil 15 years ago and has lived in India and several cities in the United States.

Tell us where you are from in Brazil.

I’m from São Paulo, Ipiranga, I’m an original “Paulistana.” I arrived in Cleveland for the first time in 2001 with my husband for his work. We moved with our two daughters. Before I left Brazil, I worked as an interior design professional in Campinas, São Paulo. When I arrived in Cleveland with my family, I started from ground zero. I did not speak English, and I suffered a lot because of that.

So, Cleveland was the first city that you came to, but after you moved somewhere else?

Yes, we moved to North Carolina, where I finished my studies in the Arts School with a concentration in performance. Performance is fundamental in my life, especially in the cities where I lived in the United States because it allowed me to never lose my identity as a Brazilian. Most of my performance experience came from capoeira. It opened a lot of doors even when I did not speak English well.

So, how did it transition from visual arts and capoeira to what you do today at The Open Space?

I already had a connection with my body, I also did yoga before, and when my family and I moved to India, I started looking for meditation. We already knew that I had a calling for that, but I was still searching for it. I used to live close to a meditation and therapy center. We lived in India for three years. Now, I travel there every year to teach and learn. Today I’m focusing on a documentary about Ayurvedic Yoga Therapy with my master Kusum Modak.

Tell us more about the documentary.

My master has retired already, and everything that she did was very intuitive. So, why not document the story of this humble woman who taught more than a thousand students in forty countries. She helped to transform the lives of countless people from around the world. There are so many testimonials from her patients and people who have received training from her. They forgot personal issues of the past and are looking only forward to a new direction. I want to build something. After discovering my teacher, this path emerged in my life, which I had been searching for a long time, I decided to become an Ayurvedic Yoga Therapy professional.

Why did you decide to create The Open Space?

Through this experience, I also found other techniques that use meditation as a foundation. This type of meditation is not the usual one that we typically use, but it focuses on how we arrive in a meditative state. Based on this experience, I created The Open Space to teach people how to meditate within the scope of our modern times, the urban human being, for the people of our times. We use painting, movement, and other techniques to engage with our bodies. Nowadays, we only take care of what is happening above our heads but don’t concentrate much on what is connected with our feet. The techniques of Meditative Art Therapy and 5 Rhythms are related to dance and are a combination of everything that I have done throughout my life.

Who will benefit from attending classes at The Open Space?

The Open Space is for everyone that has a body and a brain. [laughs] It is for everyone that is creative but has forgotten how to use it. I have workshops that focus on moments in your life when you were told that you were not creative or not good enough. We have our 5 Rhythms classes every Wednesday night. If you don’t know how to dance, it’s okay, that is what we want. They are all collective meditation classes. We meditate through dance, a beautiful process developed by dance and theater director Gabrielle Roth. This technique is a map to find healing through movement, like medicine. It is very intuitive and individual without any pressure. We experience how to be connected to the ground. It’s called The Open Space for that, because we welcome musicians, artists, and people to open their wings again, for freedom and to transform again. We also have Ayurvedic Yoga Massage and Painting Workshops. We try to capture this beautiful feeling through painting or movement.

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Paulo Costa Trio
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