Catch the Common Rhythm: Dance and Music for Intercultural Dialogue

This youth exchange project aims to bring young people together and use dance and music as tools for intercultural dialogue, multiculturalism, and peaceful coexistence. Today, young people grow up in social contexts where different cultural identities coexist, yet this diversity is often met with prejudice, misunderstanding, and exclusion. This project approaches cultural differences not as a problem, but as a creative and transformative source of learning.
Dance and music, as universal forms of expression that transcend the barriers of political discourse and economic constraints, facilitate the development of trust-based relationships among young people. Within the scope of the project, participants will share rhythms, movements, and musical practices from their own cultural backgrounds, while also developing new, hybrid, and collective forms of expression through joint creative processes. This process will not be based on cultural superiority or homogenization, but rather on mutual recognition, listening, and harmony.
The project is directly aligned with Erasmus+ priorities on inclusion, diversity, and active citizenship. Through workshops, group work, and performance-based activities carried out using non-formal learning methods, young people will gain tangible outcomes in cultural awareness, empathy, self-expression skills, and democratic participation. With AI-supported processes, participants will discover a shared rhythm and common body language by drawing on the dance, music, and movement elements of their own cultures. Together, they will experience that human communities and cultures are fundamentally similar, and that difference is not a source of discrimination or exclusion, but rather a richness for the European Union.
At the same time, the project creates space for young people to question their own identities and to realize through experience that cultural identity is not fixed, but relational and transformable.
This youth exchange seeks to embody multiculturalism not as an abstract concept, but as a bodily, sensory, and collective experience. In doing so, the project supports participating young people not only in gaining an international experience, but also in becoming active individuals who strengthen intercultural dialogue within their own communities.