International Contemporary Dance Collective (iCoDaCo) 2024-2027 is an artist-led project supporting the development of alternative and innovative strategies and methodologies for the creation and distribution of contemporary dance. Involving a critical mass of contemporary dance artists from 12 European countries, it aims to collectively forge new knowledge, methodologies and practices in order to guarantee sustainability, accessibility and innovation within the contemporary dance sector, as well as fortify the contribution of dance knowledge to adjacent sectors and other parts of our society.
Through collective research and co-creation processes and by utilising and repurposing existing technologies, iCoDaCo 2024-2027 will develop an open-access digital platform for contemporary dance practices. This will enhance cooperation, collaboration and accessibility in contemporary dance on a global scale whilst also maintaining and even strengthening the physical and empirical dimension of the art form.
The involvement of many artists in the knowledge production, creation and presentation components of the project, as well as the development of international knowledge sharing and co-creation, will support the creation of relations between remote geographical locations across the world whilst decreasing our ecological strain. iCoDaCo 2024-2027 proposes solutions to sectorial challenges of contemporary dance, solutions to better suit the ecological, political, financial and social realities of our time.
As part of the 44-month project, FACE will lead the Continuous Professional Development Programme (CPDP) to assist the iCoDaCo 2024-2027 participants and enable arts workers to better organise their ambition. Our objectives for the programme are to:
- Assist the artists and arts workers who are directly involved in this project as well as the constellation-team-network of arts workers of each partner by developing strategies for sustaining their practices in the 21st century
- Provide practical advice and operational guidance, using various peer exchange formats, to develop alternative methods to create, produce and present work locally and internationally in constantly evolving circumstances
- Support the manifestation, circulation and use of individual expertise to help all part-takers (artists and arts workers) develop stronger and long-lasting relationships as well as their individual/collective trajectories
Four types of activities will take place in CPDP:
- Thematic Industry Workshops: online workshops gathering arts workers, i.e. individual artists / collectives, their administrative teams (producers, managers, tour bookers, agents) addressing cross-cutting themes, discussed at European and global level, in relation to sustainability, how they impact the daily management of their operations and engender tensions, choices or renunciations. The workshops aims to analyze both how arts workers translate values into working principles and help surface their needs, establish a diagnostic on new knowledge, contacts, tools, skills they need to acquire.
- One-to-one online accompaniment: following the Thematic Industry Workshops, this individual support will happen over time. Each individual artist / collective and their administrative team will access tailor-made guidance provided either by external experts/resource persons or partners’ team members. This guidance will focus on different areas such as:
- Deployment beyond production/touring (e.g. strategy to move from a project-based approach to a more global development approach)
- Internal structuring (e.g. redeployment of working time, identification of skills needed internally, identification of funding sources, recruitment and outsourcing)
- Communication (e.g. copy, website, dossiers, languages, social media)
- Networking/connecting (e.g. to potential partners, to networks, to peers and resource persons)
At least 60 individual artists / collectives and their administrative teams would benefit from this accompaniment. This professional development programme extends to the partners and their in-house teams as they express the need to better connect, at a deeper level, and address their way of collaborating, which usually happen indirectly in cooperation project. The in-person seminars are conceived as inward networking opportunities and reflection time on e.g. how artist-led processes, collective decision-making, collective leadership resonate or challenge their respective framework.
- Seminars: Throughout the project, annual seminars will take place on the occasion of annual partner meetings and use a variety of methodologies and tools produced by the arts community in recent years to strengthen knowledge exchange.
- Thematic Conferences: annual conferences taking place online and open to the entire arts community will be curated to learn from artists, not only on the way they collaborate and generate knowledge but how they address the latest industry and societal developments and take action in relation to care, well-being, mental health, longevity, climate emergency, access, new forms of exclusion or social engagement.
