Citizens' engagement

EDN members actively work on the topic of citizens' engagement in Ateliers

Building and sharing knowledge

EDN activities around citizens' engagement and what is to be understood under the term "audience".

Common ground: to care

Investigating dynamics of the long-term relationship between artists and audiences, this Atelier organised by Dance House Lemesos in October 2017 focused on how to strengthen professional practice, a clue aspect of the EDN events for the upcoming years. "Audience development is a mindset, not a product or project”, one of the ideas that arose from the meeting.

"Audiences do not need to be taken care of but they do need to be cared for and cared about".

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Enhancing citizens' engagement

Taking a global perspective on civic engagement through dance, this Atelier held at CSC Bassano del Grappa in August 2018 provided food for thoughts and actions to shift the way we engage with audiences. Topics addressed were related to the development of long term relationships and trust, with citizens, towards contemporary dance initiatives and proposals of the dancehouses.

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International forum

EDN, Lavanderia a Vapore (Italy) and the Place (UK) had planned to build on this topic in May 2020. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, these events could not take place. Audiences engagement has been challenged by the time of the pandemic and the closing of dance houses and cultural institutions. We decided to take the time and investigate new formats to share knowledge with dance professionals. We look forward to reflect on audience engagement in a new, hybrid format in 2021.

Stay tuned for more information

Best practice, larger projects

EDN members are developing longer projects to dive into the topic of citizens' engagement under a multitude of facets.

We present here two of those cooperation projects.

Migrant bodies - Moving borders

Migrant Bodies - Moving Borders (2017-2019) developed a shared international research, focusing on identifying, developing and testing new and relevant actions for the inclusion of refugees and migrants with dance and movement based initiatives. At its core, the project aimed to meet, feel, break down barriers, connect and build new communities through dance.

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Dancing Museums: the democracy of beings

Dancing Museums (2018-2021) is an action-research project designed to foster and sustain long-term collaborations between dance organisations, museums, universities and local communities in order to develop inspiring and long-lasting arts and cultural programmes that people in those communities want to get involved in. The Democracy of Beings is the second of two programmes, following an initial research phase (DM1) that ran from June 2015 to March 2017. You can watch more about DM1 in the video below.

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