Almost a year after it started, the Teachers for SwanZ project continues its journey through the world of ballet and dance schools, borrowing the optimism and energy of the teachers and students who have started a new school year, 2021 – 2022. A much better school year, we all hope, when the pandemic will be defeated and the classes and the dance training could be held not in the living room, but physically, in the classroom and dance hall.
Teachers for SwanZ is a strategic partnership project co-financed by the Erasmus+ Program of the European Union, dedicated to dance and choreography vocational education, initiated and coordinated by the Floria Capsali Choreography High School in Bucharest. The project runs from December 1, 2020 to November 30, 2022, in partnership with the National School of Arts Professor Vesselin Stoyanov in Rousse (Bulgaria), Attitude Studios – Ballet with Laura in Vienna (Austria) and the Hellenic Union of Romania.
As recently we all celebrated the World Ballet Day – October 19th, when the big companies of the world revealed to us aspects of the show preparation that we usually cannot see, we thought to share with you details of what is not seen, of what is behind the scenes when we talk about the development of the Teachers for SwanZ project.
First of all, who are those behind the curtain? If we refer to the two ballet and dance public schools involved, the high schools in Bucharest and in Rousse, the protagonists are ballet and dance teachers, a ballet pianist, who is also the project manager, colleagues who teach foreign languages and literature, mathematics, physics, geography, biology, social sciences. They all want fresh air and career progress, to increase the prestige of their schools, international collaboration to expand and diversify their methods of working with students. A private ballet and dance school, the one in Vienna, brought into the project famous ballet dancers who are also teachers, psychologists, PR and marketing people, actors, various talents that brought a new perspective to the initiative, a perspective that can bring students and those who teach them closer to the stage world, to the market in which they will exercise their profession. Equally talented in teaching dance, especially traditional Greek dance, are the members of the Hellenic Union of Romania involved in the project – from poets and translators to teachers, entrepreneurs, persons with very different professions. In order to achieve the project’s „concrete results“ – a training manual for ballet and dance teachers and a guide for teachers who teach general culture subjects in dance schools – the participants have created two specialized working groups.
Project stage and what’s next
Since March until now, these groups have met 2 to 3 times a month, exclusively in the virtual environment, and during the summer holidays they have worked intensively to develop the two works, which will become, through the Erasmus+ Program of the European Union, open educational tools, made available free of charge to those interested.
By the end of this year, the two working groups will finalize the works’ content and in 2022 the materials will be ready for printing, translated and posted on the net in the languages of the partnership – English, Romanian, Bulgarian and German. If you are wondering what these materials bring new, in short we can say that the Teachers for SwanZ training manual, targeting the ballet teachers and dance instructors, aims to enrich the existing dance methodologies and practical guidelines, to bring them up to date, to adapt them to the way in which the students of 13- 16 years old, representatives of generation Z, receive new knowledge and skills. The Mini-guide of Movement, the work done with and for teachers who teach other disciplines in dance schools, will encourage interdisciplinary learning, facilitating the links between dance and general education. Both materials will combine the teachers’ rigour with their personal experience, which will bring more originality to the approach. The third concrete result of the project is under construction – the dance platform Virtual Learning Laboratory – an innovative educational tool that will give those interested the opportunity to learn, to improve themselves in the field of different types of professional dance – classical ballet, character dance, traditional dance, contemporary dance. But we will come back to this issue in a future material.
In 2021 the priority was to work on the creation of educational products. According to the decision of all the partners, the year 2022 will be dedicated mostly to the organization and development of the planned “mobilities”, which will take place in Bucharest, Rousse and Vienna. Also, 2022 will be the year of dissemination of the project results, as they will materialize, the year of openings to new collaborations and partnerships.
