Dancing into Communities Conference Proceedings Published!
Dancing into Communities took place in 2022 and was daCi's15th conference. The conference took place from July 10-15 and was hosted virtually for the first time due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Please enjoy the proceedings now published by York University and accessible here.
Permanent URL for the collection: https://hdl.handle.net/10315/42081
INTRODUCTION:
It is said that there is nothing so consistent as change. This is particularly true of the daCi 2022 Conference, which was originally planned to occur in July 2021 at York University in Toronto, Canada. When the COVID pandemic created a world health crisis, we postponed the conference for one year. However, due to the continued precarity of gathering together, we ultimately made the decision to offer the conference virtually. While the preparations leading up to the daCi 2022 Conference were extremely challenging, we were very pleased that the responses during and after the conference were very positive.
The content was a carefully calculated blend of pre-recorded students’ dance performances, papers, posters, and workshops with live presentations by most keynote speakers, along with many panels, workshops, papers, and research discussions. Every session concluded with a live ‘Question and Answer’ period so that delegates could chat, and discussion rooms were available for casual visits among colleagues. Each day began at 7 am Eastern time and concluded by 10 pm Eastern time with large breaks throughout the day. This facilitated registrants across all time zones to participate throughout their day at convenient times for them.
In large part our ‘virtual’ success was due to the tremendous commitment and expertise of the technology experts at York University, for which we are very grateful. Technology rehearsals were available and smoothed the way for all speakers, leaders, and moderators.
The Opening Ceremony presented inspiring young dancers from 7 performing groups from across Canada. We were welcomed by Susan Koff, outgoing daCi Chair from the USA, and Jeff Meiners, the then-incoming Chair from Australia. During the conference, 130 young people participated in Creative Gatherings and Exploring our Futures sessions that were led by a total of 16 facilitators. Each group included dancers from different countries, with young people from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Uganda, Jamaica, the USA, South Africa and Barbados having the opportunity to create dances and talk with one another.
Exploring our Futures was a new initiative that focused on the importance of Good Health and Well-being, one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The discussions around mental health were greatly appreciated by everyone.
Another new initiative was the Indigenous Forum, which offered a panel of Indigenous dance educators from Canada, Australia, Uganda, and Brazil who addressed issues and questions regarding appropriate inclusion of Indigenous dance in the curriculum. We hope to continue this discussion in the future.
We thank everyone who gave presentations and who participated in the 2022 virtual conference.
Nancy Francis and Norma Sue Fisher-Stitt
daCi Conference Co-Chairs, Canada, 2022
ANNOUNCEMENT: Panpapanpalya 2018 Proceedings published
We are pleased to announce that a new daCi research collection of the Panpapanpalya 2018 Proceedings have been published by the Ausdance National website featuring papers from our Advisory Board and Members!
The second joint world congress of Dance and the Child International (daCi) and World Dance Alliance Global Education and Training Network was held 8 – 13 July 2018 in Adelaide, Australia, hosted by the University of South Australia.
The world congress took place in a pre-Covid world in which travel was comparatively easy, unhindered and enabled physical contact due to cheapening flight costs.
For the joint congress, over 900 participants came together from 26 countries to dance and learn with the congress key words: dance, gathering, generations, learning. The program included a variety of activities and presentation formats. Many brought snapshot performances to showcase on the first two evenings with other chances to perform in Pop-Ups and a BigDance. There were opportunities to gather and dance, to network, share and develop knowledge in Creative Gatherings, Young People’s Gatherings and Twinning projects. In addition, Teachers’ Gatherings and Scholarly Gatherings focused on more academic dance study. The congress challenged a widely-held preconception that dance is a soft option for learning or study, reflected in the papers presented here.
READ THE PROCEEDINGS HERE: https://ausdance.org.au/publications/details/panpapanpalya-2018
Research
The proceedings for past daCi conferences are hosted by Ausdance.
See below for links to the proceedings for
2012 - Dance, young people and change
originally published on
2015 - Exploring identities in dance
by Charlotte Svendler Nielsen & Susan R. Koff
The 13th World Congress of Dance and the Child International (daCi) was held 5–10 July 2015 in Copenhagen Denmark hosted by the Dance Halls, Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports, University of Copenhagen and the Danish National School of Performing Arts.
The World Congress explored the theme of identity in dance as it is experienced in formal, non-formal and informal settings of education. The program included a variety of activities and presentation formats such as Nordic Dance Flavour workshops, invited keynotes, Creative Meeting Points, Twin Labs, Youth Forums, Professional Forums, papers, panels, roundtables, research and dance workshops, project dialogues, lecture sharing, performances of young people and professional companies.
Dance is part of four recognised artistic areas within arts education, which is acknowledged as a key area within UNESCO’s 21st Century Skills. Dance education, in particular, puts an emphasis on the role of the body in artistic processes, and the body is in current research in educational studies, psychology and neurophysiology highlighted as being the ‘place’ where experiences, cognition and identity processes are grounded. A person’s identity is multi-faceted and believed to be constantly developing in intertwinement with embodied and cultural experiences, social relations and the various situations that the human being experiences. This understanding of identity formed the base for the Congress presentations to explore:
How can we comprehend and describe identity in the 21st Century?
What kinds of identity are experienced and expressed in dance practice of young people around the world today?
What role does dance play for young people to define and perceive their own and others’ identities?
How do professionals working with dance and young people comprehend and articulate their own professional identity?
Following the event, authors of papers, panels, and project dialogues were invited to submit their contributions for these proceedings, the second that are hosted online by Ausdance. The submissions are organised into the themes of the congress program: Embodiment, Empowerment, Assessment, and Education. In addition, there are a few special papers: two papers that report research as recipients of the Across Borders Research Fund from daCi, and one Roundtable report that followed a keynote and the Youth Forums report.
We appreciate the support of all those who made these proceedings a possibility and hope that you will enjoy reading. Please click here to read the proceedings.
Susan R. Koff and Associate Professor
Charlotte Svendler Nielsen,
Co-Editors and co-chairs of the Congress committee for papers, panels, and project dialogue.
daCi Archives
The daCi archives are housed at the National Resource Centre for Dance (NRCD) in order to preserve our history. The catalogue records for daCi’s archive are available online at the NRCD website: www.surrey.ac.uk/NRCD
The archive is divided into sections based on these types of materials: papers, periodicals, books, audio, film, video/DVD, photographs, posters, theatre programmes, and computer-based materials.
Please contact someone from our team for further information, or if you have any questions or ideas on how to support daCi International.