La Compañía del Cuerpo de Indias is something like a dance equivalent of Venezuela’s Simon Bolívar Symphony Orchestra – a professional troupe drawn from El Colegio del Cuerpo, which “draws many of its students from Cartagena’s most impoverished districts. Many come from a shantytown called Nelson Mandela, home to many families displaced by years of violence that pulverised Colombia in the 1980s and 90s.”