Dance it All! Erasmus Project

Project Title

Dance it All!

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Partnerships for Creativity

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Health and wellbeing; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

Movement meditation (or conscious dance) is a collective name of methods to improve health and well-being. Through regular practice, nonverbal exercises and the emphasis on both self-expression and community collaboration these practices are offering one of the best and most simple ways for personal development and community building in its broadest sense. Movement meditation is a form of physical education whose mental, emotional and creative dimensions are particularly relevant to many people who are looking for ways to improve their health and well being and navigate modern life. Its origins are reaching back to the early 20th century, and it reached widespread audience in the past decades thanks for the spread of Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms and other methods.

In the spring of 2020, within a couple of weeks educators and leisure sector workers suddenly faced radical changes in their activity regulations, which led to forced cessation of activities for many of them. Since COVID-related rules of physical distancing and isolation, many adult education sectors are in need of finding innovative ways to continue offering their practices.
Through the process of sharing best practices and the dissemination of its results, this project aims to create innovative ways to deliver dance classes. Through these activities the project will contribute to the development of skills and competences of educators. The new innovative methods also enable the inclusion of new groups of participants, who were excluded from the traditional frameworks due to economic, social, geographical or other reasons. The objective of this project is to gather, analyse, test, validate and disseminate innovative good practices in the field of movement meditation. At the end of this project we will produce a collection of well selected and tested innovative approaches toward embodied group work. These will include methods which are happening through partly or fully digital connection and also some methods which can be practiced in open space, outdoor environments.

The project includes educators from across the EU and it will allow them to learn new skills, develop their competences and have practical innovative responses to COVID that they can use in the future. We are seeking to extend and develop movement meditation teachers’ methods and tools across the EU and world. As on-line lessons is one of the alternative responses to physical distancing, and the exchange of best practices will study and deepen the understanding of the best way to use digital tools, this project is surely extending and developing the competencies of educators through effective use of digital technologies.

14 movement meditation teachers will consist of the core group who will execute the project. They are all related to one of the four partner organisations, which form this Strategic Partnership. All of these teachers have years of experience in their field and they remained active even during the most challenging times during the social distancing periods.
During the project we will gather existing innovative practices from embodied movement facilitators. Then we will assess the potentials of these new practices. We’ll take into account all available information from the type of the groups, the length of the events, the methods used by the facilitator and much more. Then we’ll choose a handful of practices to test them during a longer period of time, in different countries, with different facilitators in different groups. Then during a project meeting we’ll evaluate these results and choose the best practices. We will create larger scale validation events to prove the value of these techniques and to demonstrate their effectiveness. The validation events will also provide opportunities to take pictures, videos and gather personal testimonies from participants, which will be an integral part of the dissemination documents. After the validation events the project team will create the dissemination documentation of the innovative practices. We’ll create step-by-step guides for other practitioners, in order that they could avoid potential difficulties and get the best results out of their efforts.

The project will improve all participant’s understanding about the various challenges the dancing communities needed to face across Europe and will provide learning opportunities, access to innovative pedagogical materials for the participating educators. The newly developed practices will help educators to better exploit the possibilities of digital tools, they will help marginalized groups to access the benefit of movement meditation, the new methods will create a wider range of frameworks and circumstances where these movement meditation can be practiced. We are hoping to open up the limited rooms of movement meditation practices into a multitude of virtual rooms and into open spaces of parks, city squares and nature.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 49550 Eur

Project Coordinator

Táncmeditáció Közhasznú Nonprofit Kft. & Country: HU

Project Partners

• Associazione Culturale Ubuntu in Movimento
• International Conscious Movement Teachers Association
• Association for creative sustainable development Wild Iris Skopje