WhoLoDancE: Whole-body interaction learning for dance education

Dance resides among the most ancestral forms of art, representing a major asset of the human intangible cultural heritage playing, at the same time, a primary role in contemporary artistic creation. WhoLoDancE, a Research and Innovation Action funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, aimed at the double goal of preserving its inheritance and integrating digital technologies into contemporary dance learning, teaching and choreography through the digitalisation of dance movements with motion capture techniques, the creation of a large motion repository - including movements from ballet, contemporary, flamenco and traditional Greek folk dances - and the implementation of breakthrough applications ranging from movement quality annotation and segmentation, similarity search, movement blending, multimodal and virtual reality-based experiences for self-reflection and experimentation. In this paper, we present the prototype tools and state-of-the-art results of the project development in its conclusive phase, highlighting the added value this interdisciplinary approach could possibly bring to dance learning and practice, the main technical, practical and cultural challenges encountered in this path and open issues to be addressed in the months to come, providing hints on future research directions.