Movement for All, ERASMUS +
What eighteen months of Erasmus+ exchange taught us
For the past year and a half, a group of dance educators and pedagogues has been packing bags and crossing borders — not for performances, but to learn. Between December 2024 and June 2026, with support from the European Union's Erasmus+ programme, we sent our team to observe, train with, and learn from organisations across Europe that work with the same groups we do: adults with disabilities, and refugees and migrants building new lives far from home.
This is the story of that project — Movement For All — what we set out to do, where we went, what we brought back, and what it changed at KOMMA.
Why we did this
The pedagogues in this project have spent years using dance as a tool for empowerment, social inclusion and personal development, working with adults with disabilities and with refugee and migrant communities in Copenhagen. But before this project, most of that work grew out of individual, project-based workshops — valuable, but sporadic. The educators had strong instincts and good intentions, but we lacked a strategic, sustainable approach, and we lacked a wider network of peers doing similar work elsewhere in Europe to learn from and lean on.
Movement For All was our answer to that gap. We set ourselves four objectives: to strengthen our educators' competencies; to develop a strategic plan for delivering informal dance education to socially marginalised groups on an ongoing basis, ; and to build a genuine international network for exchange and collaboration. Eighteen months later, we can say all held up — and in several ways, the project grew well beyond what we originally planned.
Where we went
By the time the project wrapped up, our educators had travelled to six: Spain, Italy, Poland, Germany, Hungary and Belgium. In total,, 18 in job-shadowing placements and 3 in longer courses and training were — adding up to 174 days of mobility abroad.
We visited:
- moveus GbR, Germany
- Fundacja Sanatorium Somatyczne, Poland
- PROYECTO REGENERACION LA BOLINA, Spain
- Stowarzyszenie Pedagogów Teatru, Poland
- Leben Nuova, Italy
- ArtMan Mozgásterápiás Müveszeti Közhasznu Egyesület, Hungary
- Tessura vzw, Belgium
- Movimiento Atlas, Spain
La Bolina: theatre as a bridge
One visit worth dwelling on is our time with La Bolina in Pinos del Valle, Spain, in August 2025. La Bolina develops immersive Forum Theatre work in collaboration with migrants and refugees through its Social Theatre workshops — performances exploring belonging, diversity, migration and racism, built from participants' own lived experience. While there, we also followed their work alongside Stowarzyszenie Pedagogów Teatru on a joint project called The Art of Moving Forward: Migrant Empowerment – Creative Tools for Community Building and Advocating Labour Rights.What stood out to our team was less a technique than an approach: facilitators who created a genuinely safe space — no language or knowledge hierarchy, everything translated — who checked in daily with the group, and who took the time to build real relationships with participants before layering on any artistic vision of their own. It's a reminder that the craft of facilitation and the craft of trust-building are, in this kind of work, the same craft.
photos by Ottavia Catenacci
Białowieża Forest: theatre at the border
Our job-shadowing with Stowarzyszenie Pedagogów Teatru (Theatre Pedagogues) took our team somewhere very different: Białowieża Forest, on Poland's border with Belarus — one of the places at the centre of Europe's ongoing border crisis. There, participatory theatre wasn't an abstract method to observe from a comfortable distance. We worked directly with the themes of borders and migration in a place where those themes are a lived, daily reality, not a subject to discuss in a studio far away.
Photos by Yulia Dzichkouskaya and Michał Czarnecki
Warsaw: listening as a skill
One of our educators who job-shadowed at Fundacja Sanatorium Somatyczne in Warsaw — joining their workshops for Ukrainian care workers — described the experience like this:
"Overall, I feel both personally and professionally grateful for the opportunity to meet and exchange with other people in my field, to understand and expand my field, and my understanding of the same. It's a beautiful and really politically important thing that citizens of Europe get familiar with the variety of the continent."
What she brought home wasn't a single new method so much as a sharpened instinct: the care workers she met weren't passive participants in someone else's creative project — they approached the sessions from their own sense of agency, connecting the work to their professional and collective lives. Learning to notice that, and to adapt to it, is now part of how she works.
photos by Ottavia Catenacci
Body Mind Centering®: the body as the starting point
At moveus in Germany, KOMMA educator Birgitte Lundtoft spent two weeks studying primitive reflexes, righting reactions and equilibrium responses, and human ontogenetic development — the movement patterns we all pass through from early embryonic life through our first year outside the womb — under teachers Friederike Tröscher, Odile Seitz and Nina Wehnert. As she put it:
"I gained a thorough and eyeopening understanding of the primitive reflexes and their role in early development, and how their integration supports functional movement. I gained knowledge and a foundation to explore and support reflex integration in educational and therapeutic contexts."
She also came home with a wider professional network — she studied alongside participants from Germany, Italy, Romania, Chile, Argentina, Poland and Austria, and exchanged ideas with physiotherapists, therapists, dramaturges and researchers along the way, creating cross-disciplinary grounding we hoped this project would give our team: technical skill, paired with a wider community to keep developing it in.
Tuscania: a decade of partnership as a model
In January 2026, our project leader travelled to Tuscania, Italy, to job-shadow at Leben Nuova — and found an organisation whose own history offered a model for much of what Movement For All was trying to build. Since 2014, Leben Nuova has run a close collaboration with Association ps Kinesfera, also based in Tuscania and another of our project's hosting organisations, sharing values and methods around promoting processes of awareness and psychophysical integration in individuals and groups. Between 2013 and 2015, Leben Nuova was co-creator of SPARKS – Somatic Practices, Art and Creativity for Special Needs, a European Commission–funded project researching intercultural exchange around self-learning.Photos by Angelika Mizińska
What changed at KOMMA
The clearest shift is in how our educators teach. Classes for adults with disabilities have become more attentive to individual sensory needs, timing and pace — a change from simply generating movement toward building genuine connection between participants.
We've also built relationships with far more partner organisations than we planned for — eight new international partners across six countries, well beyond the four we originally scoped — and formed a new domestic partnership with Foreningen for Integreret Moderne Dans (FIMD), a Copenhagen organisation working with persons with disabilities.
What's next
KOMMA has just been awarded funding for Movement For All 2.0, a follow-up Erasmus+ project that will expand this work further. If the first phase was about building the foundations — skills, relationships, a strategic approach — the next is about putting them to sustained use.
We'll have more to share as that project develops. For now, our thanks go to the European Union's Erasmus+ programme, the Danish Agency for Higher Education and Science, and every partner organisation across Spain, Italy, Poland, Germany, Hungary and Belgium who opened their doors to us this year and a half. We came home with more than we expected — and we're only getting started putting it to use.
The pedagogues involved in this project were;
Lara Vejrup Ostan
Birgitte Lundtoft
Yeong Ran Suh
Ottavia Catenacci
Agnes Grelinger
Ella Östlund
Tanya Rydell Montan
Lucía Maglio
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Danish Agency for Higher Education and Science. Neither the European Union nor the Danish Agency for Higher Education and Science can be held responsible for them.