Susanne Franco on ‘Dancing museums, the democracy of beings’

Dancing Museums, an international project that was financed by the European Commission within the Creative Europe framework, has just ended. The project analysed how dance can generate new ways of creating art and of transmitting and safeguarding cultural heritage. 

The first part of the project, ‘Old Masters, new traces’ (2015-2017), focussed on the role of the public and on its transformation. The second part, ‘Dancing Museums, the democracy of beings’ (2018-2021) — which involved Ca’ Foscari University of Venice as a partner —  has resulted in a series of research projects which aimed at exploring new strategies to rethink the current role of museums and to refine the professional skills that are needed to boost this transformation. 

One of the outcomes of the research conducted by the Ca’ Foscari team is Moving Spaces. Enacting Dance, Performance, and the Digital in the Museum, a collection of essays edited by Susanne Franco and Gabriella Giannachi for Edizioni Ca’ Foscari.

The book was presented on 7 October at 2 p.m. during the online conference The Museum as a Space of Experience: A Choreographic Conference, the first of two events which mark the end of the Dancing Museums project. The conference will be an opportunity to present the results of the research conducted by artists, curators, museum directors and scholars over the years. The three keynote speeches will be separated by the performances of artists-in-residence, in which the public will be involved. 

Susanne Franco, who has coordinated the project for Ca’ Foscari, tells us about Dancing Museums: