Release, New Dance, Improvisation, Performance, Conceptual Dance, Spoken Theatre, and much more – which formats and methods are particularly suitable for conveying contemporary dance and theatre arts to children and young people, especially those from disadvantaged social backgrounds or with migration or refugee experiences?

This question is the focus of the annual professional exchange Teaching Performance, organized since 2018 by the Initiative LUNA PARK in Berlin in collaboration with LOUNA PARK ERGA in Athens. The most recent edition took place in September 2024. The exchange brings together participants from Greece and Germany who work in formal and informal educational settings across several European countries. They are engaged as teachers in dance, theatre, and music education, composing, acting, and developing choreographies for both amateur and professional dancers and performers. The experiences they bring to the exchange are shaped by diverse perspectives, informed by their social and cultural backgrounds, and accumulated through years of professional experience or in early career stages.

In Berlin, the professionals meet at the Gesundbrunnen Primary School, a school in a socially challenging area of Wedding, which is the key partner of the Initiative LUNA PARK and the local focus of its activities. The spacious and bright school hall serves as a meeting, discussion, and rehearsal space. It is an ideal place for reflecting on one’s own practice, researching and comparing methods, experimenting, and, last but not least, developing short dance sequences. Other spaces within the school are also used. A parallel dance and theatre education workshop program, organized by the Initiative LUNA PARK, offers the opportunity for participants to gain direct insight into local practices – from morning observations of professionals in action to a pop-up performance by the children in the schoolyard in the afternoon.

To show the children what they have been working on during the exchange, some of the participating dancers also present their own choreographies. Workshops, including those at TROPEZ, an art space in the nearby Humboldthain Swimming Pool, the Uferstudios, one of Berlin’s most important spaces for the experimentation and presentation of contemporary dance, and the St. Elisabeth Church, a venue for a variety of artistic expressions, offer further opportunities for the children to learn from and with the professionals. Through these experiences, the children discover how dance and movement can enrich their lives – and how much fun they can have doing it.