♪♪ Hi, guys.

My name is Nicolay.

And this is how art changed me.

I cannot imagine a life without dance.

I honestly can't.

I was born in Bogota, Colombia, and I started dancing.

And my approach to arts was in Bogota.

In Colombia, it's -- it's hard to understand that you could be an artist, right?

It's hard for people, and especially my family had a hard time understanding why I was a dancer 'cause they were worried, "What are you gonna live off?

How are you gonna, like, pay your bills?"

But I remember that my stepfather will play a lot of classical music, and I will just be in the living room dancing.

So I came to the United States by myself when I was 16 years, 17 years old, pursuing to become a dancer.

As a dancer, when I was going through school, sometimes I didn't had breakfast, sometimes I was dancing for eight hours straight.

You know?

But I didn't have money, so it was, like, pay my classes or my ballet shoes or a lot of things that I needed in order to keep my career or surviving, right?

And I had really dark moments when I -- when I was questioning myself.

And I'm like, "Why I said that I want to go through all these tired, emotional, and physical pain?

Like, why is that it -- Why?"

Um... And dance saved me from dark times.

It saved me from drugs, I guess that dance saved me from getting into bad habits.

In New York City, in a city where, like, there's so many possibilities for you to, like, go the wrong way, so, literally, dance -- dance is my life.

It saved me.

It saved me from being alone.

It saved me from solitude.

It saved me from not being consistency, from not -- you know, from using drugs, because, you know, you have to be just so conscious within your body and aware that -- Yeah, I would say that all of those moments were moments where dance rescued me.

Also, art have taken me all over the world.

Like, I have been able to travel because of dance.

I went to Russia, to Moscow, to the Bolshoi Academy, which was another dream of -- that I have.

♪♪ I do think that there is very importance to -- to, like, put people in front of art.

It is important to give people the opportunity to dance.

It is important to give people the opportunity to play an instrument.

Before the pandemic, once the pandemic started, I opened up a nonprofit organization called The Sunset Arts Foundation.

And The Sunset Arts Foundation uses arts and dance as a tool to educate and empower the lives of people while fighting for food insecurity.

I don't think that that's something that nobody should, like, go through, so that inspired me, as well, to -- to do this project.

At the end of the day, what I want is to people to get what they want and to be that bridge as dance was for me and for them to be able to reach their possibilities, because I was helped.

I put the work, and I found a source of joy, a source of communication, and a source of language that a few people understand, and it's dance and arts.

And we'll be creating maybe policies where dancers could have a better payment or dancers could have better opportunities, because we bring so much to this world -- so much -- and sometimes we get so little.

[ Chuckles ] ♪♪ ♪♪