Supporting Dance Practice and Education during COVID-19
We are glad to see so many initiatives, both online and off, being developed to support venues and artists in this challenging time with its unknown future. Our research during the last 10 years at Motion Bank has focussed on the digital documentation of dance practices with the aim to open up and share these materials online with other artists, researchers and educators. One of our ongoing projects has been the development of a web-based software system (including previous Piecemaker and MoSys tools) for documenting, annotating and transmitting dance.
During our first week of #stayathome here in Germany we sat together … errr, met online and discussed what we can do to best support our collaboration partners and network during the upcoming weeks and even months. From these discussions, we decided to focus on supporting dance education, given that so many dance educators are rapidly having to shift their teaching and learning to entirely online platforms.
As mentioned above, Motion Bank is in its 10th year now. Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak in Europe, we were already preparing some celebrations. We were also working on plans for a more sustainable route into the future. As a part of this, we are planning to work on better supporting dance education through increasing the documentation and availability of our methods and tools. Given the urgency of the moment, the team has been super busy in the last days 🙏🏻 finishing and polishing our newest Motion Bank Systems version and documenting steps to create dance documents offline to share and discuss them online. Some of the new documentation and tutorials are available already here.
Although we’d love to offer a big green sign up button and go “open for all” this is not what we are able to support at the moment given the size of our team. We are sending out logins to current partners and network and if you also are interested in using our systems … please get in touch with us here: office@motionbank.org
Stay healthy!
