From the lived experience of Europe’s dance organisations, EDN's campaign addresses policymakers to highlight choreographic arts as vital to social, democratic, and cultural life.
Dance serves communities in transformative ways. It embodies our society’s cultural and political urgencies.
Choreographic work carries embodied knowledge developed through years of physical practice, cultural transmission, and somatic research. As knowledge shaped by sustained practice and exchange, it both reflects and reimagines the questions and challenges facing our societies. Yet, choreographic arts remain marginalised in policy, undervalued in funding, and vulnerable as a profession. EDN’s campaign aims to translate the sector’s lived experience into tangible pathways for policy change.
Dance as Democratic Infrastructure
The artform of dance needs to be experienced where people are. Dance organisations anchor communities by providing a space and time for connection, embodiment, and civic participation.
Contemporary dance culture is a site of cultural research and a system of professional labour. Its porous, participatory nature engages people navigating complex social and cultural landscapes.
Power Imbalances
However, not all dance is created equal. While traditional forms, such as opera, ballet, and national theatres, benefit from established visibility, consistent funding, infrastructure, and policy support due to their historical institutional embedding, contemporary dance remains systematically undervalued.
We therefore ask policymakers to complement heritage investment with balanced support for independent contemporary arts and artistic experimentation and to acknowledge contemporary dance as an integral part of our societies’ intangible heritage.
Recognising dance as a democratic infrastructure means addressing systemic imbalances in cultural policy and ensuring equitable support across all performing arts.
It's Not the Artist, It's the System
“Most mental health struggles in dance come from systemic failure, not from artists themselves.” – Luísa Saraiva
Dance professionals — freelancers, performers, choreographers, dramaturgs, curators, researchers, and producers — operate under conditions marked by systemic vulnerability, exploitation, and a lack of recognition within social and economic frameworks. Precarity is not a natural state of artistic work: it’s a policy failure.
The Issue with Invisibility
Unlike industries with stable infrastructures, dance remains fragmented, project-based, and often relies on external partners for production, presentation, documentation and data collection. As a result, the sector is largely invisible in national statistics and overlooked in public support schemes. The lack of data ownership is more than an administrative gap. It means erasure from policy conversations.
We’re calling for improved data collection on freelance artistic work and dance as a distinct sector to inform evidence-based policymaking and employment legislation.
Virtual Bodies
Choreographic work represents embodied knowledge developed over years of physical practice, cultural transmission, and somatic research, which can’t easily be protected by copyright. Digitalisation and generative AI pose new threats by further devaluing artistic work if not adequately addressed.
Infrastructure Is Access to Time and Space
Dance support systems are generally short-term, output-driven, production-oriented and biased toward large institutions, leaving freelance and non-institutionalised sector, including micro, small and mid-scale organisations trapped in survival mode. The lack of dedicated spaces for dance, limited opportunities for research, and insufficient technical resources deepen these structural challenges.
To truly fulfil its democratic role, the dance sector requires long-term, strategic support that goes beyond production-based grants.
Culture cannot be reduced to a commodity or entertainment. Dance offers something that resists such instrumentalisation: alternative rhythms of presence, embodiment, and genuine co-existence.
Freedom, Mobility, and Equity
Mobility is the lifeblood of dance. As an embodied art form, the movement of the artwork is inseparable from the mobility of its creators. With institutionalised support and work opportunities unevenly distributed across Europe, the dance field adopted a nomadic lifestyle, making internationalisation a key factor in its survival.
Yet mounting barriers, visa restrictions, geopolitical tensions, environmental concerns, and financial inequities are increasingly fragmenting the European cultural space.
Artistic freedom is a fundamental democratic right. Mobility measures should be grounded in principles of democratic, social and environmental justice.
Societal Value
Despite its transformative impact on our societies, dance continues to be systematically undervalued. This lack of recognition, be it symbolic, financial, or institutional, undermines the sector's capacity to contribute to broader societal objectives.
Nevertheless, positive practices are emerging across Europe that demonstrate the benefits of stronger recognition and support when healthcare, education, and social sectors co-invest with culture, ensuring balanced responsibility and shared outcomes.
Recognising community dance practices as artistic — and sustaining them as such — is crucial to ensuring the meaning and value of dance arts are fully acknowledged.
Upholding choreographic arts as vital to social, democratic, and cultural life opens the way to a future of dance that is porous, joyful, interdependent, and rooted in lived experience — a future that is already being practised today.
Get Involved
Join EDN’s flagship online conference where diverse voices from Europe’s contemporary dance scene respond to the urgent need for cultural policy reform.
Learn More
Read EDN’s Position Paper, submitted to the Culture Compass Consultation 2025, which sets out long-term priorities for Europe’s cultural and creative sectors.
About the project
This campaign is brought to you by Embodied Transformations, EDN’s EU-funded network project. It connects contemporary dance professionals, organisations, and communities across Europe to foster a transformative and interdependent dance ecosystem.