Workshop “Creative dancing”, a part of the project Benčić Youth Council, was the continuation of the cooperation with Association Prostor Plus. The Association for the Performing Arts Prostor Plus was established in order to connect and educate individuals in the performing practices, contemporary dance, physical theater and mime. The association enriched and cultivated the lack of systematic higher education in these expressions in Croatia with its non-formal education program.
Organizing the workshop with adults and children at the same time created a special atmosphere and interesting dynamics. Adult workshop participants were parents and people interested in the inclusion of segments of modern dance in their daily activities, educational or other. With this workshop, we continue to build an environment in which the children are perceived as equal individuals and important participants in our society.
Workshop leader was Ilijana Lončar. Ilijana Lončar was born in 1973 in Osijek. She is a solo artist and since 1997 a member of the Croatian Freelance Artists Association as a professional contemporary dancer. She also studied at the Alvin Ailey Dance School – New York (USA), Vlaamse Dance Academy-Brugge (Belgium), Arena Dance Theater – Amsterdam (Netherlands), the aerobic convention in Essen (Germany), and a number of Croatian dance seminars. In 2000, she founded the Dance Workshop Ilijana Lončar in Požega, which brings together more than one hundred and fifty dancers preschool, school and secondary school age.
Creative expression through movement and dance plays an important role in a child’s life, especially in the development of positive self-image. For children, it is an important to become aware of themselves as beings that grow and develop. In creative dance child is the only source of evaluation, where nothing is “well-correct” or “wrong – not correct”. Teaching creative dance facilitates us to engage the part of the child’s personality in which we find the authors and creators, and not exclusively performers.
The aim of the workshop was through creative dance to:

• stimulate the children’s desire and ability to express through movement,
• motivate movement,
• find out how and in what way to stimulate children’s imagination and creativity in expressing emotions, moods and ideas,
• find out how to use other forms of art (literature, painting …) combined with dance and movement,
• find out how children develop and implement choreography.

Throughout the two-hour workshop, we danced, hung out, got to know one another, learned new things and learned from each other.