As part of our ongoing commitment to critical debate in community dance, the Foundation for Community Dance partnered up with De Montfort University, Leicester to host New Directions in Community Dance: a one-day research forum, held on 6 May 2006, to bring together community dance practitioners, teachers, students and academics to present, share and debate ideas.
With a focus on current practice and research in community and participatory dance, the forum presented an opportunity to engage face-to-face with peers and colleagues, to grapple with up-to-the-minute issues and to grasp the initiative on future directions and new developments.
New Directions marked our first venture with the dance team at De Montfort University and heralded the beginning of what we hope will be a continuing relationship with this, our ‘local’ higher education institution and close neighbour. De Montfort (whose old premises at Scraptoft Campus were the first home of the Foundation for Community Dance!) is a Centre of Excellence in Performance Practice, and its dance staff claim an impressive track record in research as regular contributors to the body of theoretical and action-based research in dance practice. Add to this their new facilities in Leicester City centre - studios, performance spaces, conference rooms - and De Montfort revealed itself as the ideal host venue for the research forum.
The presentations:
Craig Hutchinson: From the Outside, Looking In: Dance Visibility in the Practices of Organised Development
Jane Scott Barrett: Creative Dance and the Knowledge Society
Kevin Finnan: Dance and Spectacle
Kerry Chappell: The Dilemmas and Decisions of Teaching for Creativity: Insights into Three Expert Specialist Dance Teachers’ Practice
Catherine Young: The Work of a Youth Dance Company set within a Rural Welsh Context
Rachel Elliott: Listening Eyes
Heidi Wilson: Community Dance in Performance
Georgia Giotaki: Developing Community Dance in Greece
Cecilia MacFarlane and Crossover Intergenerational Dance Company: Triptych
Download the programme, full-length presentations and presenters biographies below.