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Dans Animae’ is a youth exchange – Action 1.1 – Youth in Action, implemented in Ankara, Turkey – focused on combating poverty and social exclusion using the traditional dances as a tool. The aim of this exchange was to bring together youngsters with fewer opportunities and to reinforce their solidarity, mutual understanding and intercultural learning skills and abilities using the traditional dances as a tool. The youth exchange had been implemented by youngsters, with youngsters and for youngsters with fewer opportunities and aims at offering them a participatory frame using the traditional dances as a tool for intercultural dialogue. 40 youngsters from Turkey, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Romania, youngsters coming from families facing poverty and social exclusion shared their experiences and to got to know the others’ youngsters realities. Within the actual context, fully affected by the social and economic problems, the traditional dances had been the element that facilitated the youngsters’ social integration. The dance workshops had been the instrument to know each other and to unite all the participants. With social problems shaped according to the countries’ situation, the youngsters used the dances as a way to facilitate their social integration and to overcome the discrimination phenomenon. In each of the 8 days of activities, the youngsters discoverd and learnt traditional dances coming from the countries involved in the exchange with the goal of mixing traditions and cultures and inventing new and alternative ways to use the dances as an instrument to express themselves as important societal resource. For the target involved: youngsters with difficult socio-economic background, youngsters facing poverty and social exclusion, the traditional dances had a great impact on their socializing process and helped them to overcome the cultural differences, seeking for recurrent elements in their traditional dances. The dances encouraged the dialogue among youngsters coming from different countries and bringing with them their own and personal backgrounds. Not only dances, but also other methods and tools, fully based on non-formal education methodological approach facilitated the youngsters’ awareness on the poverty and social exclusion phenomenon and gave them inventiveness to reflect upon these topics. (simulations, role playing games, animation games) . The project came to and end with Dans Animae event, a complete show that combined theatre, animation and traditional dances, that the youngsters prepared the whole week and had been presented to the children and families from Ulus, a poor neighbourhood of Ankara, fully affected by poverty and social exclusion.
