Digital Lectures in dance history. Our new concept

The German Dance Film Institute is a presence media library that has been able to test a new pillar of communication with colleges of dance and dance education for the first time through the project “New Accesses to the Cultural Heritage of Dance”. A special feature of archives is that the holdings cannot be viewed off-site and without context with archive staff. This means that knowledge transfer can so far only take place in-house or through specially compiled media libraries, which are shown outside in a narrowly defined framework accompanied by specialist staff. Film collections in particular may not be borrowed, as they are originals with copyrights held by dance and film makers. Due to the pandemic, this fundamental problem came to a head.

An important goal of our project was to realise online lectures for universities of the arts with degree programmes in professional dance and dance education. Participating in this inaugural series were the Orot College in Tel Aviv (studying dance education, among other things) and a master class in dance education at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen.

In close collaboration with the respective dance lecturers, Dr. Talia Perlshtein and Prof. Henrietta Horn, 20 dance lectures were created on the topics of “Dance and Politics” and “Solo Dance”. In addition, we have modernised a dance history tool (TGT) in the sense of a visual dance encyclopaedia for lecturers and students and updated its content. TGT is now also accessible in two languages (German and English).

Wissenwandel.Digitalprogramm für Bibliotheken und Archive within Neustart Kultur is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and is launched by dbv Deutscher Bibliotheksverband.