Over the course of the project Dance as ICH: New models of facilitating participatory dance events (Dance–ICH), we have journeyed across Europe — from Norway and Belgium to Slovenia, Romania, Hungary, Greece, — engaging with a rich diversity of dance traditions, communities, and practices. This initiative has not only brought together cultural heritage institutions, researchers, and artists, but most importantly, it has fostered deep collaborations with communities, inviting them to become co-creators in the safeguarding process.

In this toolbox we discuss and draws six different paintings of why and how museums and cultural heritage institutions should play a part in future sustainable structures for safeguarding dance as living heritage.

This sustainable structure called events of practice exhibition should therefore encompass more than the events themselves. Firstly, these events should be recurrent and embedded in a permanent space. Secondly, they should entail a facilitator in the role of a supporter, in line with the principles for adaptive management to ensure long-term viability, and recognition of value. A cultural institution and its living heritage facilitators can help the dance community by promoting and incorporating their practices into an organizational system, without interfering with the execution of the intangible heritage practices itself. For future and continuing research, it will be obviously important to research these methods over time, in different contexts, and to question the distribution of roles in co-creative processes and the sustainable structures when it comes to funding and resources.