The project focuses on the transferable skills of dance and movement practice and how these skills can offer creative answers to needs in other sectors such as health care, architecture and urban development or human resources. We want to prepare our students as early as possible for their future professional careers, enlarge the potential environments where their skills can be applied and increase their employability. The individual students will need to develop more entrepreneurial skills allowing them to create their own job opportunities and they need increased ICT-literacy and competences to support this. The ultimate objective of the project is to redefine the vision of the body in dance and to reinvent dance education by developing new curricula that focus on transferable skills which are also applicable outside of dance as a performing art practice and which offer creative answers to particular needs of other sectors. We will focus on the following transferable skills: Rethinking bodies will focus on the application of the somatic skills of the dancers outside the field of dance in therapeutic or health care contexts. Redesigning spaces will focus on the application of the spatial and social skills of dancers to improve the quality of public places and increase the social cohesion in underdeveloped neighbourhoods. Redefining career will focus on how dancers can diversify and pro-actively create their own job opportunities, for instance how to apply their social and communicative skills within the field of human resources. The three core partners are all leading institutions in the field of dance education nationally and internationally. They share the objective of constantly renewing their curriculum in order to prepare their students for both the opportunities and challenges of their future careers. We will work cross sectorial: for instance dance & health; dance & urban development; dance & human resources. These other professional fields have particular needs to which movement practice can offer unique answers. The first of the three cross sectorial partners DEMOS has expertise in the social artistic and intercultural field of culture, sports and youth work. With this project, they meet their objective for a more inclusive society, where the excluded sections of the community are empowered by inspiring artistic experience. The second cross-sector partner Tilburg Dansstad includes all other professional dance organizations in Tilburg and has developed with projects such as the Dance Month and the Dance Night a particular expertise in dance in public spaces. The third cross-sector partner, the Jana Deyla Conservatory, is the only education institution of its kind in Central Europe offering music education to blind and visually impaired students and students with Specific Learning Disabilities. They believe that movement practice will enhance the learning and confidence of these students. Other partners will be added to this in function of the content of the Intensive Study Programmes. Three Intensive Study Programmes necessary to develop and test the new curriculum will be held, one in each country, curated by one of the partners at which staff, teachers, students and professionals of the working field of all the partners will participate to exchange their best practices. We will record the sessions of the Intensive Study Programmes with Mediasite, (a system and platform for recording and webcasting), so that the original sessions can also be followed by groups of students and teachers of the different partner organizations at home with live stream, allowing them to participate and give real time feedback on them using video conferencing. Part of the recordings of the live stream will be used as the video content for the Learning Units that will distributed as open courseware. The main intellectual output of the project will be the open courseware; consisting of three interrelated Learning Units of 40 hours of study load Afterwards each partner will integrate all three Learning Units in to their curricula, and look for means to continue to develop them. The active dissemination of the Learning Units as open courseware to other dance education institutes, arts institutes and related sectors will further enlarge the impact. At different stages of its development the project will be presented to the European League of Institutes of the Arts (ELIA). The project will be presented to all members, accompanied by explicit actions (such as questionnaires) to obtain feedback.
The dance careers in the 21st century are changing. The diversity within the professional practice is becoming increasingly large and the actual career of a professional dancer includes a lot of transfers and hybridity. In our academies we aimed to widen the perspective on the career of the dancer because we saw that the narrow scope of educating a dancer exclusively for the stage did not reflect the actual career of dancers who make many transfers in their careers. We also saw students entering the academy with degrees in psychology, medicine, literature or mathematics who would benefit from an inclusive view on their career. The current generation is more interested in finding a purposeful and fulfilling career, rather than a successful one; they do not want to follow the path of those that went before them, they wish to create their own work and decide for themselves what constitutes a successful career. Our academies observed a strong need for skills that reflect the current reality of the contemporary dance artist: from that point of departure we set up the project. The project focused on the Transferable Skills of Dance and Movement Practice and how these skills could offer creative answers to particular needs in other sectors such as healthcare, urban development and somatic practices. The aim was to prepare dance students of our academies, as well as future dance professionals at large, as early as possible for their future professional careers, to enlarge the potential environments where their skills could be applied and increase their employability. By redefining and broadening the vision on the dance career, we aimed for reinventing dance education and developing new curricula that focus on transferable skills which are also applicable outside of dance as a performing art practice, and by supporting our students in developing more entrepreneurial skills and ICT-competence. We asked ourselves; how can dancers diversify and pro-actively create their own job opportunities, not only as performers but to expand the benefits of dance in society, beyond the narrow scope of dance solely created for the theatre stage and art for the sake of art. These objectives were achieved. In line with the title of the project: Inclusive Dance and Movement practice, the transferable skills of the dance artist, the project has helped to redefine dance education and has contributed to career development and the positioning of dance in society from an inclusive approach. The project approach was inclusive: inclusiveness of body-mind, sectors and groups with diverse abilities, spaces and practices. The possibilities of dance in other contexts and/or sectors and vice versa has resulted in an understanding of transferable skills of the dance artist, (re)new(ed) (educational) practices, on-/offline sharing and learning with digital means and a growing learning community in this field. The international co-operation included Fontys Dance Academy, Artesis Royal Conservatoire Antwerp and Duncan Centre Prague as the three core partners, together with Dans Brabant/Tilburg Dansstad, Demos Antwerp and Parkinson Help vz (regional work field partners). Each partner adopted a theme and created a practice-based research trajectory: • Re-thinking Bodies (Antwerp) (ultimately defined as Dance and Diversity) • Re-designing Spaces (Tilburg) (ultimately defined as Dance and Public Space) • Somatics (Prague) (ultimately defined as Dance and Somatics) The project involved activities including student and teacher exchange in three intensive study weeks, hosted by each academy, and the building of an open and online learning community with curated material in the form of live-streams, interviews, documentaries, vlogs, film clips and articles. At the end of the project, the first 120 hours curated content was made available open and online at the platform that was created as part of the project: www.inclusivedance.eu. The platform exemplifies and inspires ways to transfer knowledge and experience from dance and movement practice into other, non-dance focused practices and contexts; tools from dance and movement techniques, perspectives and creative concepts that can be integrated in other sectors. The platform contains the curated content (Explore), but there is also room for every interested member to share his or her own experiences and ideas (Share) and to connect to others who share the same interests (Connect). It is our enduring ambition to further strengthen the platform into a hybrid community of practice (online and offline) of dance students, teachers and professionals, that connect with other fields of work, expertise and disciplines, inside and outside the artistic domain. This project had a profound effect on how we look and define a dancer’s career, on our responsibility as educators and how we are now designing our education and collaborating with the work field and with students and teachers within our academy.