From a young age, Viní Martins Araújo had big ambition. “I used to tell my mum, being a kid, ‘Mum I want to move’.”
Martins Araújo channelled this energy into dancing, starting classes in jazz, ballet, hip-hop and other contemporary styles, where he quickly excelled and was offered a scholarship. The scholarship granted him the opportunity to tour his native Brazil as a teenager, performing in shows and competitions.
“I’m this type of person who really dives deep into everything I’m doing,” Martins Araújo says, “when I was playing football I was like ‘I want to be a football player’, but I realised I was not good at it, so then I was like, maybe I want to play tennis and be a tennis player ... I was nine years old talking about moving to another country.”
The 20-year-old made these dreams a reality when he moved from Franca in São Paulo, Brazil, to Dublin in December 2023, to further his dance career.
“I always had this feeling of needing to expand and go somewhere else, do something different ... I was just really tired of seeing the same and doing the same and really looking for some change. I felt like I was a bit stuck.”
Martins Araújo imagined whatever country would become his new home as a place with a more temperate climate, considering Canada or North America at first. “I used to say that I wanted to go to somewhere where it’s cold ... I think I have a very warm blood and I start sweating very easily, and this bothers me a lot. Brazil is a very warm place, so I was like, I cannot [deal] with this weather.”
On the advice of a travel agency, he took a leap of faith and decided to move to Ireland, despite having little previous awareness of its existence. “I didn’t even know about Ireland ... I didn’t know it was a country. For me, abroad was USA and Canada, and they speak English, and that’s all I knew,” he says.
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For Martins Araújo, this choice offered greater freedom, allowing him to balance work and study.
By day, he juggles morning shifts at a hotel in Dublin city centre with his studies at an English language school. By night, he trains and teaches dance classes, often doing rehearsals and lessons back to back.
‘Time here goes by different. It’s been one year and two months, but it feels like a lifetime’
— Viní Martins Araújo
Having just returned from New York, where he performed in the Irish Arts Center with John Scott’s dance company, Martins Araújo is now preparing for an Irish tour of their show Begin Anywhere. The performance will be brought to Galway, Limerick and Dublin, finishing with a week-long run at Project Arts Centre in Dublin as part of St Patrick’s Festival.
The move to Ireland naturally came with some surprises for the young Brazilian. “I was expecting people to be colder and to be non-receptive,” reflects Martins Araújo.
“We hear that in Brazil we are very open and we are very nice and we are known for being nice. This is told to us as a Brazilian thing as if we were the only people in the world who were open, so I thought, I’m going to move to Europe – and European people are very cold and closed.”
Thankfully he found this was not the case, and “everyone here was so nice and talkative and open to listen to what I had to say and to share experiences”. Although he finds Irish people friendly, Martins Araújo says it has been hard as an immigrant to make connections.
“I just feel like there is this difference when you are not an immigrant, period. Even though you put yourself in our shoes, you’ll never have the same experience.” He says a person might say to him, “‘Yeah I care about you and I like you, but I’m going home to see my mum'“, but he cannot himself “go home and see my mum because she is miles away from here”.
“We [immigrants] connect more with each other because we are the people who we have, and I feel that Irish people – they have their families here.”
This difference became obvious for Martins Araújo during rehearsals for a pantomime where “the cast was completely Irish, I was the only foreigner there.
“They couldn’t understand what I was going through,” he says, adding that “even though we were not connecting, they were not disrespectful at any point”.
Working with Irish teenagers, Martins Araújo says he noticed an innocence that young people in Brazil lack. “They are so innocent, and I feel that in Brazil we learn to be more awake for things earlier because it is more dangerous somehow, and life is a bit tough in some senses, so we learn not to be naive.”
While he feels “pretty safe” living in Dublin, Martins Araújo expressed his concern at rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Ireland. “I know that there have been things happening and anti-immigrant movements ... I don’t understand why people would think like that.”
The dancer says the “huge diversity” of Ireland’s capital “is very different from what I had” growing up in Franca, “being only surrounded by Brazilians who are born and raised in that village, and that’s it. I learn a lot from people.”
Martins Araújo now lives with his boyfriend, who recently moved to Ireland from Spain. The couple met last year through dancing. Together they enjoy going to the Bord Gáis Theatre: “I’ve watched Swan Lake, Mary Poppins. We are going to see Moulin Rouge there as well. This is something I like – we have more access to art here than I had in my city.”
“Time here goes by different. It’s been one year and two months, but it feels like a lifetime,” he says. There are plans to relocate in future, but for now Martins Araújo is enjoying his time in Dublin.
“So far I’m okay because I’m still getting to know the [dance] market, I’m still getting to understand myself as an adult person who needs to take care of my life and pay bills and taxes and everything.
I think about moving but I still don’t know when, I still don’t know where, and it’s not as if I wasn’t satisfied here.”
We would like to hear from people who have moved to Ireland in the past 10 years. To get involved, email newtotheparish@irishtimes.com or tweet @newtotheparish
