“This way, please…” You are entering Studio 1 of the PACE building De Montfort University Leicester on Tuesday 26 July for your lunchtime performance at People Dancing in The Summer. You take your place on the shallow raked seating of the informal, unlit performance set up. It's a room, at first glance, of many apparent differences.
It's my first real sense of a real-life cohort of people gathered to learn, as opposed to lists of names signed up for separate courses. I see representatives here from all around the UK, across career stages, cultures, dance styles and interests; some 50-odd of you passing through for a day or more, happy to invest in us, in self, in time to dive deeper into your or other’s participatory dance practice - all despite our summer of discontent, economic challenge, tail end of COVID restrictions and major rail strike disruption. It’s beyond good to see you and that our approach has yielded a hoped-for variety.
Even in this building, though, you arrive here not just from different physical spaces, but literally different worlds of dance.
Maybe you’ve spent the morning marvelling at the global influence of African Diasporic dance forms; or perhaps you came for a first insight into dance involving people living with Parkinson’s, enriched as it was by an unusual combination of simultaneously live and electronic music by Azizi Cole, in his first, though hopefully not his last, contribution to our programmes.
Maybe you are new to the field and just completed our half day Community Dance Core skills course with a pertinent side order of introduction to the Participatory Arts Qualifications. You may have been surprised and delighted to find yourself there amongst seasoned and internationally respected practitioners or performance company leaders. This, for me, was one of the ultimate compliments to PDiTS - beginner and advanced practitioners alike seeking out the same learning spaces; the living embodiment of the importance of lifelong professional development, the range of participants who feel welcome with us and each other.
Perhaps you are sitting contemplating what’s next: evaluation on the core skills afternoon companion course? Inspiration from international guest speaker, François Matarasso, zooming in from his French home (still available online to members). Then there’s tomorrow’s explorations around well-being or dancing outside for most of our last day. These last two proved our most populous courses, programmed, as they were, in response to issues that came to the fore emotionally and practically in our post-pandemic arts world.
But right here and now, how are you in relation to everyone else?
On this first day, you might still be the only person you know. Possibly, you struck networking gold early, though and are already chatting with a fellow course member from another part of the country, but with whom you’ve just discovered common passions, issues or experiences. I witnessed lots of this over the three days. Every time I turned a corner someone was swapping details! With full half-hour breaks between sessions and this extended lunchtime, this is exactly what we hoped would happen and was a response to your previous feedback asking for more time to forge connections. This said, we never ever found ourselves chasing anyone late back into sessions. You enjoyed meeting each other clearly, but were wonderfully focussed and respectful about being there for the learning too.
I wonder too if any of you, like me (even though this is my home turf), feel a little overwhelmed to be away from your usual base, back in studios, full of people - people you are not just allowed but might be encouraged to touch after lockdown? Then again, you could be a veteran of our summer events, glad we’ve returned, yet calibrating some of the practical changes. You sitting here, waiting for this sharing of work, is one of them. Knowing the great facilities for catering on campus and accommodation around the city, we’ve repurposed the energy we used to put toward hosting, into bringing you more interesting, unusual or exemplary examples of participatory dance; examples uniquely needful of a platform without pressure; which merit national recognition, though not at the cost of stress on vulnerable participants and deserving of an informed audience, who see process and value purpose as much as, if not more than, a show.
Our performers today are participants in a dance and health initiative for South Asian women at risk of long term health conditions run by Aakash Odedra Company (AOC) in the Belgrave area of Leicester (also famous for generating the biggest Diwali celebrations outside India.) They meet weekly for Bollywood dance classes led by Jayna, from the company’s partner Shaimak. The programme is less than a year old and works in tandem with Leicester Diabetes Research Centre using dance to measure and improve the overall health and well-being of participants in this community. So far so quintessentially community dance. Education & Participation Manager, Mae Grocock, herself an alumnus of People Dancing, offers up quite the programme note to live up to though:
“(This groups is)…the heart and joy of our dance and health programme at AOC and after performing in our summer showcase for the first time over the weekend, we know that their performance is going to fill you with so much joy and remind everyone that everyone can and should be able to enjoy dance.”
The 12 or so dancers take their positions. The music begins.
And then it happens.
A few bars in, my eyes whip from the stage to all you audience as a wave of smiles and forward-back head bobbing sweeps the room. A few more bars and there’s definite seated grooving going on, some of the most flamboyant from one of our visually impaired participants egging on her neighbours. By the time the group launch into their hip hop section, a minute in, whooping erupts, a rhythmic clapping sets in and builds to a continuous crescendo by the time they take their bow.
Gratitude, good will and respect combine as the group over-deliver on the promise of that programme note, having united a room of disparate strangers, reminding us why we do what we do, love what we love and believe in its power to reach parts of us and of real lives in real worlds, no other dancing can.
In three minutes the community values that gave birth to that group, re-birthed ours and made a group of out of us. Three minutes ago we were disparate strangers, at best tentative duos or awkward threes. This moment, this art, made of us a community, a community of community dancers who saw mirrored in those three minutes our own experiences of the deeply human pleasure great participatory dance and only participatory dance bestows whether we are giving or receiving of it.
Likely all of us in that space were there because at some point we experienced this joy of dancing with peers in an informal context for an audience already onside and ready to receive; or been in that audience and thereby drawn to the dance form. Some of us have organised and created such moments and/or enjoyed the special cross generational admiration with an adored dance leader, mentee or mentor like that we saw so clearly in the group’s bond with Jayna. She beamed continuously from the back seats and gracefully supported an animated post-show talk centred on how much dancing - doing it as a group and group with common cultural heritage - had come to mean to them. And some, like me, who have been around long enough, have been lucky enough to experience all of these. I now re-experienced them as curator of this moment refracted, like a hall of mirrors of my every favourite dance experience. So as full stop to the post-show chat, I spontaneously asked them to dance the piece again. We possibly enjoy it all the more for knowing what we had coming.
As you audience exit the space, I contemplate reflection and refraction. The latter by definition describes how the change in speed - often a slowing - of the speed of light, when passing through a refracting medium such as glass or water, shifts and changes what we see, reveals component colours, sends the beams of light onwards in altered directions. Rather beautifully, us humans tend to agree.
For the first time, in five flurried months of programming, this sharing became encapsulated in a ‘refracting moment’; slowing me down just long enough to glimpse the power, beauty and complexity of the event and of those gathered, something more than the sum of its parts, just as you, by the passion and presence you bring to our events, are always so much more here with us than a fee and a name on a list.
And as I close the studio door it strikes me that PDiTS, and intensives like it, are vital reflective and refractive mediums, which define and illuminate ourselves and our practice; places we pass through together and continue on from, shifted in our ongoing directions, all the better to carry our lights with us and to others through the work that we do.
All images: People Dancing in the Summer 2022. Photographer: Rachel Cherry.