The school management has decided to suspend all classes until the end of the academic year. The safety of students and teachers cannot be guaranteed as social distancing is in many cases not an option for a dance school. Moreover, our studios are not big enough to work with groups of 20 students, while a permanent distance of 1.5 meters should be kept between all dancers.The online classes for the students will continue until the end of June. Many PARTS teachers have made great efforts to adapt their teaching practice to online teaching, including technique teachers for ballet and contemporary dance. The majority of the students of the Training Cycle have now returned to their home country.

Much to our regret, we have to announce that the eleventh edition of SummerSchool 2020, planned from July 13th to August 14th, will not be able to take place. The risk of infection by the covid-19 virus is still very present, and despite a currently slightly improving health situation, there are no guarantees at all that classes and workshops could take place in safe conditions. Provisions for social distancing will almost certainly still be in place during the summer. This makes the dance classes and workshops that were planned impossible. A very intensive use of our studios by a very large group of dancers, in ever-changing line-ups, is completely forbidden according to today's safety regulations, and remains almost certainly not recommended during the summer months.

While we all confine ourselves at home to help stop the spread of the coronavirus, PARTS offers its students an alternative online program with live streamed classes. For the Training cycle we organise daily online yoga classes with Laia Puig Escandell and Stephane Bourhis, a weekly Pilates class with Gabriel Schenker, and 3 times a week contemporary technique classes with Diane Madden, who adapted her class to small confined spaces and remote exchange. For the workshop on William Forsythe’s Improvisation Technologies, teachers Fabrice Mazliah, Tilman O’Donnell and Liz Waterhouse worked out an assignment especially adapted to living rooms, concluding with a collective improvisation on zoom. Furthermore, we started the music project with Noé Soulier and Tom Pauwels, in collaboration with musicians from the Contemporary Music programme of School of Arts Ghent, and the philosophy seminar with Ludo Abicht.All of these live stream sessions are recorded so that the students can access again at a later date.