Description
The idea of the project "Tandem Dance” is to get together a group of 15 people with visual impairments with 15 professional dancers and dance teachers in order to learn/teach dance while working in mixed pairs. During a week of intensive dance workshops they will put the basis of a new form of artistic expression. As to objectives, the project “Tandem Dance” aims at realizing an artistic experiment by using two art forms (music and dance) as context for cultural exchange between a Norwegian choreography expert and Romanian experts and professional dancers. The novelty consists in the fact that some of the dancers are persons with visual impairment working in pairs with visual professional dancers. In this way, Romanian and Norwegian musical themes will be interpreted choreographically. The Norwegian partner, Kjersti Kram Engebrigtsen, is a well-known professional choreography expert that has worked with visually impaired for the past 30 years and whose expertise has been already shared in many other European countries through various projects.
Summary of project results
In Romania, but not only here, efforts towards integration of persons with disabilities are mainly focused on work-place integration and less on social and cultural integration. Artistic expression and development are not encouraged and, even when efforts are made towards inclusion, they tend to view the disabled as passive audience to cinema and theatre performances. What the PP aimed to achieve, and it succeeded, is to emphasize the artistic potential and to encourage an exploration of new means of expression. After the dance workshops led by Ms. Engebrigtsen they synthetized their experience in a 10 minutes film that was well received by a mixed audience (sighted and unsighted) and pleaded with the schools for the blind in Romania to start including dance and body-awareness classes in their activities. All in all, they reached almost 2000 blind and visually impaired persons and 5000 sighted persons. As a consequence, they received a lot of requests to continue with this project and they actually did a two months dance course with the children at the Bucharest school for the blind in another project financed by MOL Romania, with excellent results. The five young dance professionals that studied with Ms. Engebrigtsen are now teaching dance classes for the blind in various other projects. Moreover, there is now an interest in the blind community for other performative arts projects, like a series of theatre workshops, in another project financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund -Romania. These workshops will also include dance and scenic movement classes, led by one of our former dance students. The PP considers that it has managed to prove to both the sighted and unsighted communities in Romania that there are no barriers in artistic expression and we will continue to promote and present performances by blind artists. PP owes all these results to the expertise and teaching style of Ms. Kjersti Engebrigtsen, the Norwegian partner in this project. She brought with her 20 years’ worth of understanding of the blind universe and she was the main force behind the project. Her method proved to give palpable results and both the sighted dancers and the blind dancers formed a tightly knit group under her supervision, working together as partners.
Summary of bilateral results
The Norwegian, Ms.Kjersti Engebrigtsen, brought with her 20 years’ worth of understanding of the blind universe and she was the main force behind the project. Her method proved to give palpable results and both the sighted dancers and the blind dancers formed a tightly knit group under her supervision, working together as partners. This is the most important aspect of their collaboration – the notion that all dancers are equals and that by letting themselves led by the blind dancers the sighted dancers can find new means of expression and not force their own concepts of movement. This is an important change of perspective that Kjersti Engebrigtsen brought with her, the idea that one does not force one-way integration but that both side make adjustments until finding a common ground. Both the Norwegian and the Romanian side were very sorry that the whole experience was not long enough to materialize into a public performance, but they keep in constant touch hoping to continue on this path and present our results to Romanian and Norwegian audiences.