ABSTRACT

Dancing Across Borders presents formal and non-formal settings of dance education where initiatives in different countries transcend borders: cultural and national borders, subject borders, professional borders and socio-economic borders. It includes chapters featuring different theoretical perspectives on dance and cultural diversity, alongside case narratives that show these perspectives in a specific cultural setting. In this way, each section charts the processes, change and transformation in the lives of young people through dance.

Key themes include how student learning is enhanced by cultural diversity, experiential teaching and learning involving social, cross-cultural and personal dimensions. This conceptually aligns with the current UNESCO protocols that accent empathy, creativity, cooperation, collaboration alongside skills- and knowledge-based learning in an endeavour to create civic mindedness and a more harmonious world.

This volume is an invaluable resource for teachers, policy makers, artists and scholars interested in pedagogy, choreography, community dance practice, social and cultural studies, aesthetics and interdisciplinary arts. By understanding the impact of these cross-border collaborative initiatives, readers can better understand, promote and create new ways of thinking and working in the field of dance education for the benefit of new generations.

part 1|46 pages

Collaborations across arts practice and academia

chapter 1|10 pages

Dancing past categories

Researching a live art project with participants

chapter 2|14 pages

‘It’s all about art!’

Crossing borders of academia and arts practice in an arts-integrated educational project in South Africa

chapter 4|4 pages

A step offstage to restage

Remembering Swan Lake

part 2|33 pages

Difference and diversity – community initiatives

chapter 6|12 pages

Fostering intercultural competence and social justice through dance and physical education

Finnish PE student teachers’ experiences and reflections

chapter 7|9 pages

Sustaining dance practices in turbulent times

Dance, displacement, identity and the Syrian Civil War

chapter 9|3 pages

Unlocking joy in the body

Creative movement with Yazidi refugees in Northern Iraq

chapter 10|4 pages

Who sets the limits for us to dance?

Dance for equal movement rights in Estonia

part 3|37 pages

Intercultural collaborations in dance education

chapter 11|9 pages

Women of Consequence (WOC) – ambitious, ancillary and anonymous

A cross-border arts-based research project between South Africa and USA

chapter 12|4 pages

Brazil and Denmark dance encounters

A case study of intercultural artistic coexistences in higher educational contexts

chapter 13|10 pages

Dancing across the wall(s) of exclusion

Reflections of two dance teachers on overcoming barriers to difference in dance education

chapter 14|4 pages

Sum of our ancestors

We are connected to spirit and to Country – we are the sum of our ancestors?

chapter 15|4 pages

Disrupting the ‘foreign’ and the ‘indigenous’

Teaching dance as an investigative practice in the contemporary Indian context

part 5|37 pages

Collaborations across subjects and educational sectors

chapter 22|9 pages

Reaching back to move forward

Performing the archive as interdisciplinary artistic-educational process

chapter 23|4 pages

Magic in Movements!

The art of teaching creative dance through the cultural schoolbag

chapter 24|4 pages

Dance in nursing education

Somatic awareness, improvisation and embodied leadership

chapter 25|5 pages

Moving onto, into and between the boxes

Surfaces and volumes as the triggers for children’s movement