Animated Edition - Autumn 2025
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Focus on: Dance, health and wellbeing
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Welcome to the second 2025 edition of Animated where we’re delighted to introduce an exciting and timely focus here at People Dancing: Dance Health and Wellbeing.
Yaël Owen, Head of Dance Health and Wellbeing and our Deputy CEO, introduces and curates this issue’s special feature with eight wonderfully wide-ranging articles from academics to artists on the ground. They are gathered together here to offer a rapid overview
of this field as useful for those who already specialise as for those simply keen to keep up with this hottest of topics in dance and the arts.
Elsewhere, the magazine is no less full of vitality as we celebrate, as ever, the variety and impact of community dance practice around the UK. Your upcoming delights include a delve into the Cornish landscape, a national network for dance in museums and heritage settings, literally putting participatory dance practice on wheels for rollerblading project to welcome refugees and asylum seekers plus an important provocation to truly test the strength of our community dance conviction that every body is truly welcome in dance.
Across miles and across generations, we hope news of all these projects, performances and practices continues to affirm the value of your own work and connection we share through People Dancing. Do check these pages and the rest of our website to stay connected and keep up with current offers like our increasingly popular qualifications and brand-new
Friends Scheme.
We wish you a vibrant Autumn, a positive ending to another undeniably challenging year in the arts – and hope to meet you here again next Spring with a very special Animated for our 40th Anniversary year!
Chris Stenton
Chief Executive
Louise Katerega
Head of Professional Development
Cover photo: Earl Grey & Fifty Shakes Event.
Photo: Idriss Assoumanou.
Cover quotation: Sandra Golding. See p.45.
In this issue
Read and download the complete Autumn 2025 digital edition of Animated magazine online in a flipbook.
Katie Green is a choreographer, educator and Artistic
Director, with a passion for the past. Here, she shares
the short history – and hopefully long future – of
The Imagination Museum, a creative exploration
which became a national network for dance and
heritage sector professionals interested in collaboration.
Based in Newcastle upon Tyne, Gillie Kleiman, works with and in dance
and choreography, creating performances, texts, events and pedagogical
encounters. In 2020, she initiated a new cycle of thinking and working about
fat and fatness(1) and reflects with us here, drawing on those five years of
artistic, scholarly, and community-based work. Challenging the dance world’s
pervasive fatphobia, she invites us imagine a better one by inviting a robust
re-examination of who and what dance is for, our definitions of inclusion and
the art form’s true potential.
Dancer and Choreographer
Kyra Norman is our guide to Deep
Time Moving, an ongoing movement
exploration inspired by the unique
geology of the Lizard peninsula where
she lives in Cornwall, UK.
Natalie Haslam, Co-Director of
That! Dance, describes how this
local West Midlands inclusive
dance organisation grew out of an
international event and the way
in which its latest project keeps
participant voice at its heart from
concept to completion.
Green Candle Dance Company is one of the UK’s longest surviving
community dance projects. Based in the East End of London it runs a wide
range of participatory programmes, as well as professional productions
aimed at particular community audiences. Join Fergus Early, Artistic Director,
dancer/choreographer Jreena Green and musician/composer Martina
Schwarz here as they discuss their latest show, Adelaide and Noel.
Skates4Mates is a South coast-based project that uses
roller dance as a powerful tool for community building
among people seeking asylum instigated by Independent
Dance Artist, Jennifer Irons. Herself an ‘immigrant’ to the
UK, in this article, she shares how she put her community
dance skills on wheels to foster connection, belonging,
and self-expression among People Seeking Sanctuary –
which has challenged both their own and others’
perceptions of identity and inclusion.
Pioneering Dance in Education
company Ludus reached its 50th
anniversary in 2025. Trustee Linda
Jasper and founding member, Chris
Thomson look back together at
how it all began and how Ludus
Dance, still based in its home city of
Lancaster in the North of England,
hopes to keep changing the world.
Amici Dance Theatre Company’s
Tribute to Wolfgang Stange.
DANCE, HEALTH AND WELLBEING
Yaël Owen, Deputy CEO and Head
of Health & Wellbeing at People
Dancing introduces this timely
collection of informative, inspiring,
and current writing across dance,
health, and wellbeing...
Where does dance feature in the evolving landscape of arts and health? Dr. Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt,
research lead and author of the
seminal report Creative Health:
The Arts for Health and Wellbeing,
traces the development of dance
within creative health, considering
its contribution to wellbeing across
many communities, and the potential
of the arts to support health,
wellbeing and equity for everyone.
Executive Director of the Culture,
Health & Wellbeing Alliance, Victoria
Hume reflects that the real power
of Creative Health is “not in its ability
to distract us from pain or difficulty,
but in the ways in which it can help
us see what is really going on.”
Dr Sue Smith considers the imperative to create and
establish healthy learning and practice cultures that
support dance students in Higher Education – our future
dance workforce – to flourish and “be present, be brave
and take risks”.
Performer, practitioner, researcher
and writer Sandra Golding shares her
practice and perspectives on African
Holistic Dance, highlighting its deep
roots in wellbeing and community.
In these spaces, dance becomes a
language of healing, a celebration of
survival, and a pathway to liberation.
Dr. Bethany Whiteside, specialist
in the field of Dance for Health and
Senior Lecturer at Royal Conservatoire
of Scotland, shares an emerging
partnership-based approach to
dance research methods from
co-creation through collaboration,
the dance score as an artefact, and
capturing the dancing danced.
Heidi Wilson reflects on her shifting learning across ten
years of Strictly Parkinson’s Powys in mid-Wales and
how dance is all about ‘meaningful and genuine human
connection’. Are we brave enough to characterise Dancing
with Parkinson’s as a practice with love at its centre.
Daniel Fulvio of major UK
contemporary dance company,
Rambert and Julie McCarthy of
Greater Manchester Combined
Authority / NHS GM share their
reflections on a unique partnership
project in early years settings,
which is not only supporting school
readiness but inspiring the creativity
of early years practitioners.
As she moves on to a new role as
Lecturer at the Center for Arts and
Medicine at University of Florida,
USA, after seven years dancing
together, Dr. Anna Carapellotti
reflects with her participants on their
inspiring time as they all say:
“Thank you for dancing, thank
you for the music.”
In their book Dancing: A Guide to
Movement for Health and Wellbeing,
Noyale Colin and Kathryn Stamp
respond to a need they recognised
in their work for an accessible,
research-informed guide on how
dance can support physical, mental,
and social wellbeing.
Animated articles are for the benefit of People Dancing members.
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