Despite having to change our plans several times due to corona restrictions we are happy that in the end we could move online and connect with even more of you than we ever thought possible!!! We held 10 online meetings with 300 artists from over 30 companies, the contemporary free scene and the commercial freescene! 

We want to say a huge THANK YOU to all of you who participated, who took time to zoom in, listen, connect and share your experiences, concerns and questions with us. Also to the dancersconnect team who have learned from and supported each other though hours of online preparation and meetings. We have become so much stronger and closer thanks to this experience. 

The 4th conference was a milestone for our network, a realisation of our growth and achievements but also as encouragement to push forward and further as we move into 2020!

On the 14th of October 2019 dancers from theaters, companies and the free scene across Germany and a few from our neighbours in Belgium travelled to Dortmund to be apart of almost 100 people who participated in this important day for the dance community. The Mayor of Dortmund opened the day's events and five special guests presented Open Space workshops in psychology, ensemble culture, dance medicine, sexual harassment and how to set standards within our artistic passion. The day was closed with a Panel discussion involving dancersconnect, active members of the cultural-political scene, the Bühnenverein and the directors association BBTK. Re-read the full program here...

Achievements of the day:

• The new German Dance Board was successfully elected with seven members, some continuing in their positions and other fresh faces joining the team.
• The unionization of dancers is at the forefront of our plans for creating change. Dancersconnect will continue to promote and campaign with the goal of achieving 50% of dancers in Germany unionized in the New Year!
• We created our “health team” who will work to gather more information on dancers’ health and bring together different professionals in order to improve the health care situation across Germany. In cooperation with Dachverband Tanz Deutschland we held the first Round Table for Dance Medicine on December 2nd, 2019.
• We developed the initiative to create an online sharing platform, where anyone would be able to upload documents and articles, creating a large pool of easily accessible information.

Ideal utopian future for dance as an art form

More than 40 representatives from 25 state and city theatre ensembles started off the day by working together to share and formulate their ideal utopian future for dance as an art form. With the inspiration of this first task, the conference sought a forward-looking and solution-oriented style of thinking for their discussions.
Rivca Rubin acted as an expert on communication and encouraged the dancers to take new approaches to self-awareness and conversation. We were introduced to a form of positive language that helped us create more room for our dialogue partners to share ideas and suggestions with us. With all of this in mind, the participants adopted an 8-point plan of intention, which we intend to introduce into the cultural policy discourse in the coming months. Read the 8-point-plan and the protocols for the 3rd dancersconnect conference here...