Under the title „The singing Body- physical empowerment for European values“, organizations in artistic, social and intercultural spheres of activity located in Germany, Portugal, Bulgaria, Spain and Italy are partnering, to establish together a interdisciplinary project in the dance pedagogy for empowerment. The transnational intercultural project plan wants to give artists a place of exchanging practices in dance and pedagogy and to expand their network. Innovative methods will help to deepen together the artistic practice. Creative dance from different ethnics and with the voice as an instrument for empowering processes as well as lectures about European values are giving the frame of the project. By bringing together sociocultural pedagogy and artistic perspectives, different ethnic music and dance traditions are merging to a tool of social inclusion. The project cycle consists in his total of a group formation process, the exploration stage ( improvisation and practice), knowledge accumulation, construction of methods, implementation of practices, evaluation as well as spreading out the results to local, national and international stakeholders. The project includes activities of a four-week stage in Portugal and meetings for practice implementation in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Bulgaria, and Germany. Every activity has it’s own focus to give a new perspective on the theme of the project. In coproduction transferable formats and innovative Methods will be developed and implemented in the current practices. The main goal of the methods along with the political education mission is to encourage the individual to implement the European values in a self-reliant way in his artistic practice. The main intention is to use and to develop innovative methods in singing and dancing education and making it usable for everyone across the EU. Especially using elements from voice training for empowerment in a creative way.
With the project, we wanted to develop innovative methods for teaching dance and singing to adults that promote community building and personality strengthening in culturally diverse contexts. In doing so, the project was intended to contribute to a paradigm shift in artistic and pedagogical work with voice and movement toward a holistic, empowering practice. In the exchange of good practice in the interdisciplinary consortium, one goal was to professionalize the participating musicians/dancers and social workers/adult educators by acquiring competence in pedagogical or creative/artistic approaches to embodied voice work for empowerment. Another goal was the transformation of stereotypes, clichés and prejudices through critical examination of cultural and gender-specific attributions and values in dance(pedagogy), art and social work. In these protected spaces for embodied, intercultural negotiation processes about "European" values and norms, the social inclusion of disadvantaged groups, especially people with mixed cultural identities, was another goal.
The starting point of the project was the need for a dance pedagogy that uses voice work for empowerment and can thus be used for community building and personality strengthening. Ethnic dances often do not know a separation between singing and dancing, making voice and movement as communal rituals part of these traditions. This potential from the combination of dance and voice has hardly been used in contemporary dance classes as well as modern social work. "The Singing Body" was intended to create something new from ancient knowledge and operationalize various ethnic music and dance traditions into a tool for social inclusion. With this method of movement and voice work, the project addressed the needs of the two main participating target groups of the project partners: 1. musicians/dancers who want to use their creativity professionally for social inclusion and acquire pedagogical skills for adult education. 2. social workers/adult educators who want to use artistic, creative approaches for their socio-pedagogical work with disadvantaged target groups. This was only possible in an interdisciplinary, intercultural exchange of practice.