Dancing Her Own Dance

Exuberant, enthusiastic, energetic: this is Chris Linnares. “I moved from Brazil to Fargo — yes, you heard that right — from the tropical country of Brazil to the frozen tundra of North Dakota,” she said with a laugh. “I love it here. But it hasn’t been easy.”

Linnares grew up in a small Brazilian neighborhood with four brothers and one sister. “My mom was my inspiration,” Linnares said. “She came from a really simple family; her father was an alcoholic. She moved to São Paulo and worked as a maid to pay for her studies. Today she runs her own schools and has more than 3,000 students. I watched her succeed. “

When Linnares was 17, already an actress and professional dancer, she was invited to tour in a musical. Her mother suggested she take a break to do something different. Linnares decided to be an exchange student and spent her senior high school year in West Virginia. “I had a sweet American mom whose great-grandfather was in the Civil War,” Linnares said. “She sat with me for hours and told me American history. I became passionate about American history and the American spirit. “

“One day, I watched the Oprah show for the first time. A psychotherapist was talking about giving back to our families. When I heard him, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to become a psychotherapist.”

Linnares went back to Brazil for college, where she also worked on a radio show. She wrote and published “Divas on the Divan,” graduated with a degree in professional clinical psychology, and spent two years working in clinical and group therapy.

“I was invited to do a fifteen-minute talk show every week on national television about women’s issues. I decided to write a play about women’s self-esteem. It started playing in small theaters, and I performed it with one other actor. To my surprise, the play became a smash hit and was made into a successful DVD. Then my book became a big success. It was huge. I was young. Wow, I felt like I had it made; I had two cell phones and a cool lifestyle.”

About that time, a woman in Linnares’ life, whom she calls her ‘second mom,’ telephoned her. “I’m in the hospital. I have some pain in my back,” she said. “Can you stop by the hospital to see me?” Linnares said she’d try. Her second mom persisted, “The hospital is nearby. Can you come this afternoon?” Linnares said maybe. “My second mom passed away that night,” Linnares continued. “And that day it hit me. Whatever I was doing, however I was leading my life with all its interviews and columns and successes, I hadn’t even made the time to go see someone I’d loved, who’d taken care of me.”

Linnares said, “I closed my fancy office and went back to my parent’s hometown. I started reviewing my values. I had thought that I didn’t need anything. I didn’t need a man. I didn’t need help. But I was confusing things. I didn’t know that being vulnerable could be powerful.”

“Society helped me to be a success in my career, but did not teach me how to be successful in my private life,” she said. “I decided to be humble. I started praying, every day. I want to find the man of my life. I want to get married. I believed that God would bring me this person.”

I had a dream.

“One evening, I had a dream,” Linnares said. “In it a man was walking on a beach. He said, ‘I am waiting for you in Los Angeles.’ It wasn’t a normal dream. So, believe it or not, I signed up to take women’s studies at UCLA and moved to L.A. I told people in Brazil to take a last picture of me alone. I was going to find my soul mate. It sounds really funny. People said I was crazy. But I trusted.”

While in L.A., Linnares met her future husband, Bill Marcil Jr. When her family found out she was serious about a man from North Dakota, they rented the movie “Fargo.” They said, “You still have two months. You can still cancel!” The first time Bill brought Chris to Fargo was in May, when they were engaged. “He took me downtown — me from São Paulo, a city of 20 million — and I said, ‘Oh, I love this neighborhood. Where is downtown?’ I was looking for big buildings!” Linnares laughed.

Chris and Bill were married in Brazil in August of 2005, six months after they’d met.

Some of the people who knew Linnares, read her book, had seen her on television, accused her of being a powerful woman who’d left it all for a man. “But what did I really have?” Linnares asked. “What was I doing with my life? I had no one to share love with. I married my Prince Charming, and he came to pick me up with what I call my two little ponies, our wonderful daughters Isabelle and Zoe.”

“I didn’t know anybody in Fargo. I loved to talk, but was really uncomfortable with English. About that time my father discovered he had a brain tumor. He was my hero. I was crazy about him. Then I got pregnant. I don’t remember one day during my pregnancy that I didn’t cry. I gained sixty pounds. Our daughter Luiza was born with difficulties and was in intensive care for a week. She was six months old when my father died.”

Artificial Happiness

Linnares had begun her journey though depression. “I was mourning so many things: my father, my changed body, loss of my culture and language, dealing with a new baby. My therapists wanted me to take anti-depressant medication. They said my depression was a disease. They wanted to take away this difficult time in my life and give me artificial happiness. But being sad is not always a disease. I had a right to be sad. I wanted to find a way out without being medicated.”

Talking through cultural differences with a therapist helped. “Latin people talk loud,” Linnares said. “Bill would ask, ‘Why are you yelling at me? Why are you screaming?’ and I’d answer, ‘I’m not. I’m just talking!’ We both had a lot to learn about each other’s cultures. He learned to say, ‘Chris is not yelling, she is talking with passion.’”

“My father was a Don Juan type — giving flowers and telling my mom she was the most beautiful woman,” Linnares said. “I didn’t understand that people expressed love differently.

I’d say, ‘You don’t love me.’ And Bill would say, ‘Of course I love you! I take the garbage out!’ My father said, ‘Honey, if you wanted to marry a romantic guy, you should have married an Italian. Bill is a good man. He has a good heart.”

Linnares craved a natural alternative to treat her depression. “I felt like I was facing my Red Sea, like Moses did. I was feeling tired, sad, and lost. If I wanted to continue to move forward in my journey I needed faith. I looked to God. I studied and read. In the past I had helped women, but now I was the one who needed inspiration.”

Linnares read about a study from Duke University in which two groups of depressed people were compared. One group exercised; the other took medication. The group with the best results was the one on the treadmill. Linnares began to think about when she’d been happy. And she remembered that when she was in Brazil, dancing had brought her joy.

Diva Dance

Linnares began to dance samba again, to the music she loved, and she started eating better. “Sugar is a depressant,” Linnares said. “You are not what you eat. You eat what you are. If you are healthy you will eat healthy. I needed to treat my body like a sacred temple. Because I was created in the image of God.”

In 2007, Linnares was attending Total Balance Gym in north Fargo, owned by Barb Kloeckner. She started talking to Kloechner about the power of the body/mind connection and dance. “I was a stay-at-home mom, I didn’t feel secure with my English, I was so afraid to speak in public,” Linnares said. But Kloeckner encouraged Linnares, saying, “We are going to do this.” Linnares decided to teach a class. She had a good cry in the bathroom before the first class. Forty women showed up.

“I felt the fire when I saw the women,” Linnares said. “I made fun of how I talked and the women connect with my humor. It was surprising to me. People said, ‘Oh, those white girls cannot dance!’ but they did! They had a blast. They were like me, starving for a moment to relax. I wasn’t alone.”

Diva Dance — a combination of pep talk, dance, teaching, and the science behind the mind/body connection — took off with its message: Energize your Body, Empower your Mind, Express your Soul. “Diva Dance is a metaphor for our lives,” Linnares said. “Dance is a way we express our emotions.”

Diva Dance has grown into workshops, camps, wellness programs, DVD’s, and conferences worldwide from Rio to Paris to London. Diva Dance has been enthusiastically featured in magazines including “Women’s Health,” “Shape,” and “Marie Claire,” and has earned rave reviews from the American Heart Association, Fox News, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Dr. Robert Sallis, past president of the American College of Sports and Medicine. And on top of all of its fame, Diva Dance is also a whole lot of fun.

The Beautiful Women of North Dakota

As Diva Dance grew, Linnares’ husband — Bill Marcil Jr., publisher of the Fargo Forum — was thinking about his three daughters. “My husband is a photographer,” Linnares said. “He picked his mother’s maiden name, Black, to use as his photography pen name: Billy Black. We watched how our daughters were struggling with superficial images of beauty. We began to wonder where the true heroes were for our daughters to admire.

In 2009, Bill and Chris began to think about making a book to recognize women who were extraordinary but not commonly noticed by society. They placed ads and asked for nominations for “The Beautiful Women in Your Lives.” They traveled across North Dakota in a motor home with their three daughters while they interviewed and photographed twenty-two women. As they heard the women’s stories and saw their lives, Linnares’ life changed, too.

“For me,” Linnares said, “That’s when a final puzzle piece came together. Why I am here? Why Fargo? Why 30 below? This place helped me to discover a hidden beauty. Beauty is so much more than skin deep. It’s what you give to the world. I love the people in Fargo,” Linnares said. “There is something special here, a genuine heart.”

“Beautiful Women of North Dakota,” published by Kototama Publishing in Fargo, celebrated a red carpet debut at the Rourke Art Museum and was featured on “Entertainment Tonight.” It also won the prestigious

National Best Books

2010 Award in photography.

“After the Beautiful Women project, I knew I couldn’t raise my daughters in a better place than North Dakota. The women we interviewed made me feel so little; they had such values! I met a woman who raised eleven children on a farm by herself. My generation can be a bunch of complainers. These women were amazing. Meeting them changed my life. I know why I am here. I want my daughters to be inspired by these women.”

Marketplace for Kids and Naturally Diva Head to Soul

Linnares, ever exuberant and lively, didn’t stop with the publication of, “Beautiful Women of North Dakota.”

This year the Beautiful Women project has partnered with Marketplace for Kids to develop a literacy project. “We’ve made a curriculum, free for teachers to use. Students, ages 11 to 13, will find their own beautiful women to interview, write a story about, and photograph. Twelve thousand students will take part in the program, and we will publish a second Beautiful Women book with students’ work in it.”

Linnares is partnering with Swanson’s Health in Fargo to develop pure and empowering products for women called ‘Naturally Diva - from Head to Soul.’ They use mostly 100% organic items and natural products such as coconut oil and essential oils products and combine them with positive and empowering messages to nurture the body as well as the mind.

The new Swanson’s products will help support a part of Chris and Bill’s foundation called ‘Dance Your Own Dance.’ “Part of everything we sell goes to this foundation,” Linnares said. “Sometimes, people raise a million dollars to send to Africa, but don’t know that their neighbor might need $2,000 for a sewing machine. Our foundation gives small grants to individuals and organizations.”

“We are all looking for a sort of promised land. My generation of women was told, ‘You can have it all.’ But we lost the nurturing side of femininity. I am totally comfortable saying, ‘No, I can’t have it all.’ Some days the ‘promised land’ is that the house is peaceful, or my daughter dressed herself, or I can have a piece of chocolate. Life is not perfect, but we can develop a love for what we are going through.”

One of Linnares’ goals is to find a way to include a Diva Dance DVD in the care baskets that hospitals send home with new mothers. “Many women have depression and weight gain after the birth of a baby,” Linnares said. “I’d love to see baskets contain something for the new mothers, not just the baby.”

Linnares has found her place with the people of Fargo, North Dakota. She came with her exuberant Latino personality and stayed, showing herself and others that sometimes the best thing you can do is dance. As she said, “We all want to feel healthy, sexy, and powerful for our families and our community. We want to be divas. Super kiss! Ciao-ciao!” [AWM]

For more information visit: Naturallydiva.com