Dance ICH comes to closure with conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia

Dance as ICH: New models of facilitating participatory dance events (Dance - ICH) is a project that started in 2022 and is coming to its closing stage in 2025. Throughout the project, nine partners from six countries have interacted in the themes of facilitation of dance as intangible cultural heritage and the relationship between local dance heritage communities, museums, heritage institutions and the public.

During the last three and a half years, we have organized four workshops and one closing conference. The four workshops were held in Belgium, Romania, Hungary and Greece in the year 2023, while the closing conference was organized in Slovenia by the local partners The Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), and The Slovene Ethnographic Museum (SEM).

The closing conference of the project DANCE as ICH, HOW SUSTAINABLE IS DANCE AS ICH? was held in the atrium from ZRC SAZU, in Ljubljana (Slovenia), from 20 – 23 May 2025. It was attended by experts from all over the world and began and ended with a participatory dance event. In addition to the 27 papers presented during the conference, Andriy Nahachewsky has shared his keynote lecture titled: Dance and Semi-Tangible Cultural Heritage.

 The extremely interesting lectures intertwined knowledge about intangible cultural heritage, sustainability, museology, and dance. We learned about various dances, dance communities, the revival of dances, the invention of dance tradition, the changes and development of dance as intangible cultural heritage. Certainly, but not least, the core of what was communicated was stories of dance as resilience and cultural preparedness.

 During the conference the participants also had the opportunity to raise questions which opened room for dialog and made visible the common challenges, and methodologies across institutions.

 After the conference, representatives from the partner institutions of the Dance ICH project have met to work on future steps for the project, which includes a publication coming at the end of 2025. This publication will emphasize the lived, practiced, and experienced dimensions of dance heritage. In addition, we have prepared an electronic toolbox, consisting on a handbook and guidelines of good practices for working in collaborative projects through sharing the case studies of our Dance ICH project.

Photo: Marko Zaplatil, ZRC SAZU , Celina Gallo, Sff