DanceMap: Innovation Pathways and Policies to Promote European Dance Heritage at Home and Abroad

Project team

Simon Ellis
Charlotte Waelde
Rachael Davies
Marie-Louise Crawley
Kathryn Stamp
Lily Hayward-Smith
Joe Askew

Collaborators

The DanceMap partners are:
Bureau Ritter (Berlin, Germany) as lead partner
C-DaRE (Centre for Dance Research) at Coventry University (Coventry, UK)
University of Antwerp (Antwerp, Belgium)
Motion Bank research group at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz (Mainz, Germany)
Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln (Cologne, Germany)
STUK House for Dance, Image and Sound(Leuven, Belgium)
Culturgest (Lisbon, Portugal)
Noa Eshkol Foundation (Tel Aviv, Israel)
Station Centre for Contemporary Dance(Belgrade, Serbia)
Lokomotiva Centre for New Initiatives in Arts and Culture (Skopje, North Macedonia)
Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia (Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Nomad Dance Academy Croatia (Zagreb, Croatia)
Brain Store Project (Sofia, Bulgaria)
Rosas (Brussels, Belgium)
Culture Concepts (Berlin, Germany)
Goethe-Institut – Associate Partner (Germany)

Total value

3,996,161.18 EUR

Duration

01/01/2025 - 31/12/2027

Project overview

The heritage of 20th century dance in Europe is largely invisible and in real danger of being lost. Works that are no longer being performed – even from the recent past – are forgotten, their memory confined to small and fragmented communities of artists and practitioners.

DanceMap is a pioneering heritage initiative funded by Horizon Europe, the European Union’s funding programme for research and innovation. This ambitious project, which will run for three years from January 2025 to December 2027, operates under the research cluster “Culture, creativity and inclusive society” and aims to develop a cross-sectoral strategy for safeguarding and promoting Europe’s rich dance heritage. The total funding amount is just under 4 million euros.

C-DaRE is leading work package 2: Mapping European dance heritage.

Project objectives

1. Make dance heritage more visible: much of Europe’s dance heritage is difficult to find or scattered across small personal archives. DanceMap aims to assemble this knowledge in one place, making it easier to understand what exists, what is missing, and how we can better protect dance heritage for the future.
2. Recognise shared values: by recognising dance as a powerful way of expressing values such as cultural pluralism, shared experience and belonging and by highlighting underrepresented or marginalised voices and bodies, DanceMap aims to broaden understandings of cultural history and recognising.
3. Improve digital access and reach wider audience: by creating new digital soultions to help describe, link and share dance archives and collections across platforms, DanceMap aims to open up access to dance heritage, making it more accessible – through exhibitions, performances and digital tools – so that more people can discover, engage with, and be inspired by it.
4. Support the creative use of heritage: DanceMap is trying to help make archival documentation a part of everday creative practice, so that heritage is not just preserved but kept alive in performance, practice and education.
5. Influence policy and funding: Dance is still undervalued in culrutal policy, so DanceMap provides tools and research to help policymakers and funder understand its importance, and support stronger and more sustainable ways to protect and promote Europe’s dance heritage

Impact statement

The DanceMap project will:

• Build cross-sectoral alliances of organisations from the fields of culture, heritage, culture, technology and education who will contribute to the safeguarding and promotion of European dance heritage.
• Increase the visibility of and access to European dance heritage by piloting a digital platform with international reach.
• Valorise artistic dance heritage and highlight the ways in which it reflects European values and priorities, contributing to a sense of belonging for all.
• Embed awareness of dance heritage in the cultural & creative sector.
• Assess the effectiveness of existing digital tools for safeguarding dance heritage and propose a conceptual framework for ensuring that the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) is equipped to feature intangible heritage and embodied practices.
• Develop specific policy tools for dance heritage.

Outputs

Project deliverables including European artistic dance heritage knowledge graph (June 2026)
Policy documents (Including D7.2 Copyright guidelines; Standard contracts for Copyright Clearing and Multi-authored Intellectual Property Rights, June 2026)
Academic articles and conference presentations including
Article: Crawley, M.-L., Davies, R., Ellis, S., Stamp, K. and Waelde, C.n ‘European Dance Heritage and the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage’ for European Journal of Theatre and Performance Special Issue Mobilising Heritage: Dance, Theatre, and Performance in the Age of (In)Tangibility, ed. Timmy De Laet, Franz Anton Cramer, Vicky Kämpfe, and Dunja Njaradi (forthcoming)