Creative Europe - Dance as ICH (English)

Dance as ICH: new models for facilitating participatory dance events

2022 – 2025

CEMPER vzw is one of nine partners from six different countries collaborating on the Creative Europe project ​“Dance as intangible heritage: new models for facilitating participatory dance events.” Throughout the project, we reflect on participatory dance practices, their communities and how the cultural heritage sector can contribute to safeguarding these practices. The project aims to provide new or innovative models for the performance of participatory dance within museums so that museums can function as new dance spaces.

Dance as intangible heritage (ICH) requires a new interpretation of the exhibition concept as an event of practice that challenges the traditional roles of researchers, curators, administrators and others. Intangible heritage starts from the heritage communities and thus the practitioners of dance themselves, so these new models must be created through bottom-up processes of co-creation.

This innovative way of exhibiting is crucial to permanently anchor new dance spaces and thus provide a future perspective for cultural dance heritage in Europe. A series of workshops in the different partner countries will lead to a toolbox and a research publication that will reveal our recommendations on new models for facilitating participatory events of practice exhibition.

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Workshop in Belgium

Belgium is the first partner country to organize several workshops. From January 30 to February 1, 2023, CEMPER will work on the interpretation of dance as intangible heritage and its safeguarding. We will discuss the needs of the heritage communities themselves and hope to provide inspiring examples of working with dance communities and organizations that support and enable dance in Flanders or Belgium. Throughout the workshops various speakers will be featured, including many dance communities. In addition, several partner organizations will present their projects on safeguarding intangible heritage in a museum context.

Partners

• Norwegian centre for traditional music and dance 
• The Museums of Southern Trøndelag (MiST)
• CEMPER, Centre for Music and Performin Arts Heritage in Flanders
• The Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) 
• The Slovene Ethnographic Museum (SEM)
• ASTRA National Museum Complex 
• The Hellenic Folklore Research Centre (HFRC) — Academy of Athens 
• The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA)
• The Hungarian Open Air Museum (Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum) 

Go to the website of the project

More info can be found on the European site of the project Dancingaslivingheritage​.eu.