People Dancing

Hopefully you will have noticed that we have made some changes to Animated. These have been in the pipeline for some time to make the magazine more accessible so we hope that Animated is now easier for everyone to read.We also hope that the new size gives us design options that make it a more visually stimulating and interesting magazine in the future, so what you see here is one step on this journey. This issue largely follows the format of more recent issues, however in the future we will be developing the structure of the magazine to more accurately reflect the concerns and priorities of the Foundation and its membership.

The focus for this issue, careers in community dance, was stimulated by the response of Cheshire based artist Ruth Spencer and Scottish artist Kally Lloyd-Jones to a provocation at one of the 'Scotlandances' seminars held in Dundee earlier this year: who's in charge, you or other people? Both gave clear and passionate presentations about the careers they had and how they had developed them. This stimulated a discussion about career paths in dance so we decided to ask people at different stages of their careers in community dance to give their personal perspective of what working in the sector meant to them.

This issue also features conversations with Kiki Gale Artistic Director of East London Dance and Alysoun Tomkins, who until recently led community dance studies at Laban, looking at where community dance has come from and where it is at, from their particular perspectives. The Foundation for Community Dance itself has made considerable progress in its work in developing a professional framework for community dance, and this issue updates you on our latest thinking and plans following excellent contributions from partners across the sector. Finally we are pleased to include a report from Siobhan Davies Dance about embedding themselves in the immediate community at their recently completed home base.