Equipping Dance Professionals with a Neuroscientific Approach to Wellbeing of Fragile Groups

Our general objective for this project was to develop and pilot a new VET curriculum for dance professionals and trainees, in order to equip them with necessary skills, competences and tools to support fragile persons in augmenting their overall wellbeing (rehabilitation) In this project called DanceBrainRehab, we understood the word rehabilitation in a broad sense - how to live everyday life the fullest within the physical, mental and social abilities each person has. Our overall aim was to support the work with fragile groups in the field of art, addressing the needs of both professional artists and participants with fewer opportunities and promoting equal access, inclusion, diversity and fairness. We were also eager to contribute to innovate the way training courses and VET Curricula for dance rehabilitation professionals working with fragilities are shaped, devoting an entire section of the training to the peculiar competences needed to operate with autism, dementia or psychotic illnesses which are still only partially explored by research and experimentations in artistic dance practices.

We wanted to initiate a European-wide collaboration and create and introductory education program based on three Specific Objectives (SO): - To exchange good practices and experiences between dance professionals working with fragile groups in Romania, Italy, Spain and Finland (SO1). - To co-design and implement a VET Training program for dance professionals working with fragile groups, and show the versatility of challenges the artistic dance can help with: autism, dementia and psychotic illnesses (SO2). - To develop and test a new methodology synthesised from previous psychological and observational measures to evaluate the progresses the participants in the dance program obtained in four categories: Movement and perception, Relationships, Cognition and Behaviour (SO3).