Without Words (WW) is an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership project which aims to promote the collaboration between arts and disability organisations across Europe to investigate the potential for cross cultural communication through visual storytelling.

The project is aiming to explore and identify how creative and nonverbal mediums such as dance, music, mask, puppetry and physicality can be used to increase access for disabled people across Europe. The project is working specifically, but not exclusively with, people who have learning disability, sensory or neurological impairment. It is exploring concepts of non-verbal communication and it’s use within disability arts, asking how we can use them to generate fully inclusive opportunities without compromising artistic quality or disassociating the disabled person.

The project examines how learners can adapt and apply skills learned in their own organisations and will result in an online forum between the organisations and a documentary resource for wider use.

Learning Teaching Training Events will run alongside the explorations in order for workers (including those who are learning disabled) to learn techniques that will enable them to embed non-verbal methodologies into their own work. These activities will take place in each partner country and will target arts workers, artists, disability workers and those working within arts and disability from within the partner organisations.

Through a combination of transnational workshops, conversations, learning events, online discussion and evaluation of ongoing activity within partner organisations the project will explore current approaches, experiences and models, investigate what is important and what isn’t, explore what works and what doesn’t and find ways to communicate that to the current conversations taking place regarding quality, inclusion and learning disability in the arts.

The project in which Action Synergy is participating as a partner is coordinated by Headway Arts from the UK.