Inspiration
As avid dancers, we know how versatile, fun, emotionally uplifting, socially engaging and inclusive dance is. It is also a great workout. As public health team we are motivated by the benefits of dance to physical and cognitive health and mental wellbeing.
What it does
Dance has been gaining significant traction in public health research over the past decade. Increasing numbers of scientific publications, including our own, have documented the numerous health benefits of dance, be it primary prevention of chronic disease or secondary prevention therapeutic aid. However, although dance participation in Australia is relatively high among young people (10%), participation drops drastically as people age. Only 3% of Australian adults engaged in some form of leisure-time dance. Dance and health research suggests that adherence to senior dance class exceeds any other forms of seniors' exercise classes. Our own research on dance for falls prevention in older adults, for example, attracted many more seniors than the statistics infer, indicating that there are unmet needs. Older adults are known to be the least active population, with less than a third meeting recommendations for physical activity. How do we get them dancing...?
Compared to other countries, Australia has avoided the worst of COVID. Lockdowns have been intermittent, infections low. However, Australia is a nation of immigrants. Western Sydney is particularly culturally, linguistically, and socio-economically diverse, and is the epicentre of Australian migration with 50% of the population born overseas. Blended and multicultural families, and people with families, friends and loved ones overseas have not been able to meet in person for at least a year with no prospect of that changing for at least another year. Young people can feel particularly disconnected. How to motivate people to stay connected…?
How we built it
Under social isolation rules, technology platforms have been used more than ever before to keep people connected and bring dance into the life of a family or community via real time or recorded home dance classes. TikTok has amassed over 1 billion users globally. Users are generally young, already the most active population group. Reproducing and sharing TikTok dances, and sometimes creating dances, is a popular activity. Over lockdown, young people started to include their families in dance clips and challenges. We want to encourage them to go further. The Western Sydney University (WSU) Dance FANs challenge has people compete for a cash prize for their original TikTok dance to go viral. Dance FAN TikToks must:
- Be intergenerational
- Be as diverse as possible
- Be original dances
- Go global
The ‘FANs’ are Families and Neighbours. Young people gather their families and/or neighbours, create a TikTok dance to their favourite music, perform it together, and upload it to TikTok, tagging us in (#wsu #dancefanschallenge) and tagging their own dance name (#dancenamegoeshere). They then encourage their families and connections in different countries to learn their dance and upload their own performance of it, including the same tags. The challenge will be promoted by WSU university, which has extensive community networks and through local councils in Western Sydney.
Challenges we ran into
This is a new project, so has not faced challenges as yet. The broader challenge of how to engage "novice" inexperienced adults, particularly culturally diverse Non-English speakers, in dancing and dance programs remains, a particularly difficult task in the current circumstances where older adults are uncertain about their safety and can feel isolated from their broader communities. The great strength of this initiative is that the public creates, shares and promotes the content, giving us broader representation of our multicultural community.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As academics and practitioners, we are proud of our dance-based public health research. We aspire to translate more of the research into community dance for health programs and initiatives.
What we learned
There is a great potential to increase dance participation in Australia, and the media interest in dance and health research is huge. We receive many emails and letter of supports from individuals and organisations. There is now a good infrastructure to engineer dance into the life of our communities.
What's next for WSU Dance FANs TikTok challenge: Stay local, think global
As Western Sydney and the rest of the country and world opens up, Dance FANs events - learning and recording community TikTok dances - can run in neighbourhoods, schools or local parks in Western Sydney. We would like to encourage engagement in dance creation, learning and performance creative movements by families and neighbouring communities and track if intergenerational multicultural dances can go viral.
Built With
- tiktok
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