While waiting for the 2021@creative.fellowship application process to be completed, the Talent Showcase, in partnership with Attitude Ballet Studio (Vienna, Austria) held a series of exhibition classes in modern dance for vocational students. Attitude Ballet Studio, a member of the “Teachers for SwanZ” project, co-funded by the European Union Erasmus + program, invited amateur young dancers from rural areas of Ukraine and North Macedonia to take part in master classes taught by Laura Christinoiou, the studio’s artistic director and a former dancer with the Bucharest National Opera.
The exhibition classes were designed to research the cultural differences between dance students from various backgrounds, and to further use these discoveries to unify teaching methods shared in the “Teachers for SwanZ” Virtual Laboratory. The virtual lab is an online platform to be created on the basis of the results of the EU Erasmus + co-funded project by the partnering institutions. During the master classes, the organizers, in cooperation with local English educators, also looked into how to match language teaching with dance training in order to make English language lessons relevant for the purpose of professional development within a multilingual environment.
“This was a new and exceptionally interesting experience for our children. First, working with international professionals is a rarity for students practicing dance in a recreational center in an industrial town. Second, we have seen in practice that the online format can be used not only for academic teaching, but also for engaging in creative training taught from anywhere in the world to participants from a number of countries,” Natalia Lutsenko, choreographer and project coordinator from Ukraine, shared her experiences.
“The experience of working with trained vocational scholars from different cultures and their teachers was extremely informative. I would like to thank all the participants, especially those who stayed with us for all the classes. Over the course of our research, we clearly observed how people with different mentalities can perceive information differently, and what organizational challenges this can lead to. In addition, our experiment provided the basis for further research on such markers as proactivity, openness to dialogue, responsibility, and engagement. We are very pleased with the results and are looking into future possible collaborations with the students and their teachers,” commented Laura Christinoiu.
