The Art to Dance Community – An African Way of European Inclusion
Dance of Cultures coordinated the ERASMUS+ co-funded project “The Art to Dance Community – An African Way of European Inclusion” from 2020-2023 as a Strategic Partnership for adult education in the category of Exchange of Good Practices. Our project partners were the Macedonian Gestalt Association-Kontakt (North Macedonia), Popolomondo – Associação Cultural (Portugal), NamaStay – Social Justice Lab e.V. (Germany) and Association Dju Dju (France) and Centar IGW Zagreb (Croatia).
We wanted to take a closer look at the question of how best to teach dance when different cultures and nationalities meet on the dance floor: How can different languages dance together? How do you make people of different cultural identities and social backgrounds feel like a group and create cohesion through dancing together? In order to research these questions and develop suitable formats for transcultural dance lessons, the consortium was formed with partners from Germany, Portugal, France, Croatia and later North Macedonia, bringing together expertise from the fields of dance, dance education, Gestalt therapy and social work. All partners are already confronted with the challenges of transculturality at a national level and how they can best respond and develop their services. The international exchange between the project partners should address common problems, approaches to solutions and pedagogical guidelines so that dance is not simply (frontal) teaching, but a lived „art of dancing together“ with real social relevance.
The objectives of “The Art to Dance Community”
1. international exchange of experience and promotion of collegiality of cultural practitioners in the field of dance & music (education) across borders
2. Pooling good practice and developing suitable interactive formats for transcultural dance education based on African dance forms and principles that are accessible to a target group with diverse cultural identities and correspondingly different disadvantages.
3. Expanding the skills of participating (dance) educators for their own artistic and teaching practice in order to offer the innovative formats in their organizations and countries in the long term and to further develop them in everyday practice
4. Establishment of a network platform and long-term exchange on transcultural dance education in Europe and beyond
The project activities
As part of the project, we held 3 staff training sessions and 3 transnational project meetings (plus one virtual project meeting). Due to corona restrictions, the first staff training focused on the internal exchange and development process. In the two subsequent staff training sessions, freely accessible transcultural dance workshops with live music were offered with teachers from all project partners, as well as an interactive, participatory dance performance for a local audience that was developed in-house during the course of the project. In terms of content, the consortium has developed pedagogical guidelines and formats for dance education that go beyond the label „African dance“ and are characterized as a transcultural methodology based on the two models of ritual and group formation. These principles of dancing community became accessible and tangible for people with diverse cultural identities through the dance performances with live music and the dance workshop formats. This was accompanied by the production process of the project results of the method handbook and the video toolbox to record the results and make them accessible to others.
The project results
As concrete project results, a practice-oriented „The Art to Dance Community“ method handbook (PDF) and an accompanying video toolbox (on YouTube) were produced, making the developed pedagogical guidelines and formats accessible to interested dance educators and other interested parties in the cultural education sector in Europe.
In addition, two project videos of the staff training sessions in Portugal and Hamburg were produced, which provide impressive behind-the-scenes insights into the project process and complement the methods manual and the video toolbox, making them accessible.
Another project result is the participatory dance performance with live music as a concept and tested work of art, which features its own choreography, a dance pedagogical guide and specially composed music and makes „The Art to Dance Community“ lively, cool and appealing to a diverse audience and goes beyond the normal notions of dance lessons.
While the handbook and video toolbox were already concretely targeted outcomes in the project proposal, the full development of a participatory dance performance is a project outcome that clearly exceeds our expectations. We set out with the aim of finding suitable and innovative formats and methods that make transcultural dance education with a focus on group building and social inclusion tangible and open to diverse target groups. At the beginning of the project, we would never have dreamed of such a successful synergy of dance education and dance art with live music in the form of a dance performance that playfully combines dance workshop, performance and concert. The greatest challenge in this project – combining art and therapy or education – resulted in a great project outcome, which can be seen in this video, among others