Dance Without Barriers

How can The Cultural Schoolbag (DKS) experiences reach the full spectrum of children and young people, with and without disabilities? Through the Mind the Gap project, dance artist Daniel Grindeland visited a resource centre in Trondheim.

In the large assembly room at Dalgård School and Resource Centre, a lone figure stands gathering his thoughts. In a few minutes, fifteen young people will come through the door. All of them have experienced having to change schools in order to receive the support and framework they need.

Daniel Grindeland is excited. The award-winning breaker and dance artist knows all too well what it is like to struggle at school, but also what it is like to change schools and encounter a new everyday life marked by confidence and community. This is what he talks about in his DKS performance Energy, which he will present later in the day. But first, he will lead a dance workshop.

“Today, we will try to adapt a DKS visit for people with disabilities. We have a dance workshop where a group of pupils will learn a choreography, a complete dance. Afterwards, we will have a performance where the pupils will be part of the performance towards the end,” says Grindeland.

He feels a little nervous thinking about the dance workshop and performance being observed by researchers through the Mind the Gap project, but chooses to believe that he can contribute something positive.

“It is a very exciting project. I have been a little uncertain about exactly what I am coming into, because I have not done this before. But I find it incredibly exciting and very rewarding.”

By agreement with the resource centre, the images in this article have been converted into a “cartoon format” before publication to protect the pupils’ anonymity. All photos were taken by Kulturtanken. AI tools were used in the conversion.

A Long Tradition of Aesthetic Subjects

At Dalgård School and Resource Centre, art and culture are a natural part of everyday life. Dalgård was established as a special school in 1978. It was linked to a local primary school in 1998, and in 2011 the resource centre was established. The centre provides special educational services for all of Trondheim. According to the school’s website, the pupils have cognitive and physical disabilities that require specially adapted educational provision.

“The pupils who come here have complex challenges and may become isolated and lonely at their local schools,” says Helge Strøm, head of department at the resource centre.

“We have a group of pupils with somewhat different needs and somewhat different cognitive functions. But they benefit greatly from being part of a social community, and we have a long tradition of using the aesthetic subjects — that is, music, singing, dance, band, crafts, painting and similar activities. It is a subject area that creates confidence and belonging, and we see that it has an enormous effect on our pupils. When you increase your own self-confidence, it often has a positive ripple effect on all other subject areas.

He explains that the resource centre actively uses The Cultural Schoolbag (DKS), both through DKS visits to the school and by travelling to other DKS offerings nearby. The educators review the annual DKS programme to find offerings suitable for their pupils, and it is usually possible to find room for a smaller group of pupils.

He is very pleased that the resource centre is now able to take part in the Mind the Gap project.

“I think it is truly wonderful that systematic development is being done on this particular group of pupils, because it is so diverse in many ways. There is enormous breadth, and we can see that in the dance group taking part today. It can be a demanding task to ‘capture’ the whole of this pupil group, but it is absolutely possible,” says Strøm.

Aiming to reach the full spectrum of children and young people

As the pupils stream through the door to take part in the dance workshop, Tone Pernille Østern gets ready at the back of the room. She is a professor of arts education with an emphasis on dance at the Department of Teacher Education at NTNU, and has come to
experience Daniel and the pupils as they unfold on the dance floor.

As part of Mind the Gap, she and fellow researchers Libe García Zarranz and Polina Golovátina-Mora will develop a method guide, which they have proposed calling accessibility exercises, to support the development of more inclusive art encounters in DKS. The exercises are aimed at artists, arts educators and cultural workers.

The researchers have previously participated in a workshop with dance artist Dalija Acin Thelander.

“I am looking at how Daniel works in the encounter with the pupils. I will then take impressions and observations from that encounter with me as I continue working on the accessibility exercises. They are intended to stimulate, perhaps even provoke, changes and developments in the way art is created for DKS and for encounters with children and young people representing a broad range of differences,” Østern explains.

She explains that children and young people with different disabilities can be found in every school, everywhere. Ideally, artworks and art mediation brought into schools should reach, communicate with and be interesting to the full spectrum of children and young people.

An inspiring accessibility tool

Following Grindeland’s visit, pupils, teachers and the performer himself are interviewed about the experience by Østern and senior adviser Lise Lundh from Kulturtanken.

“We hope to gain a little more knowledge about how art and culture can reach people, what possibilities they hold and what adaptation needs we can learn more about. We will develop an accessibility tool in which we look at art and cultural experiences and adaptation for greater diversity. Not as something limiting, but as something opening and inspiring for thinking in new ways and finding new approaches to art production and quality,” says Lundh.

Østern says that it is demanding to create accessibility exercises that feel interesting and thought-provoking without becoming too prescriptive. The intention is that they should inspire a desire and curiosity to change one’s own artistic formats and artistic practices.

“We have now divided the exercises into different phases of an artistic process. They cover what you do before you begin, how you work with the artistic process, how you work during the artistic performance itself, what you do afterwards, and how you take learning from your art encounters,” the NTNU professor explains.

At the “Accessibility Exercises” webinar, a first draft of the accessibility exercises was presented digitally so that experiences could be shared with both Norwegian and European stakeholders. The accessibility exercises will eventually be introduced in The Cultural Schoolbag.

“Absolutely awesome!”

The dance workshop has been completed, and Daniel Grindeland can breathe a sigh of relief.

“It has been great fun. I met the pupils about an hour ago; we had a little chat, talked about what we were going to do and got to know each other a bit. Then we did a short warm-up just to loosen up the group.”

Although some pupils withdrew to the side or sat down along the way, most of the young people participated wholeheartedly and enthusiastically throughout the workshop. The session ended with cheering and high fives.

“It can feel a little scary when someone from outside comes in. But now we have a dance lasting more than three minutes, which they are going to perform on a stage in front of an audience afterwards. So I think it is absolutely awesome! And I also feel that it has been quite educational,” Grindeland smiles.