From the editor
Ken Bartlett, Director, Foundation for Community Dance
Recent announcements by the government in both the educational and cultural sectors have articulated the centrality of creativity to the nation's future, and also that artists and the wider cultural sector are crucial in delivering on this agenda.
This is a welcome development from a government that has appeared to be obsessed with targets and in its sound bites generated a narrow set of choices for artists around being for or against 'arts for arts sake' or 'arts for social purpose', a false dichotomy in my view.
This issue of Animated considers the purposes of dance, the roles dance artists and practitioners might play and what impacts dance might have in two aspects of our work - social inclusion and performance for children and young people.
The first section of the magazine is an interim report on the Dance Included initiative, established by the Dance Department of Arts Council England last year to rigorously test the hypothesis that dance can make a real contribution in combating social exclusion. There are six projects in total in the initiative and all are at very different stages of development as well as each having a different focus. Here Lauren Scholey of Arts Council England sets the context for the initiative and Gerri Moriarty, one of the external evaluators, gives an insight into the self-evaluation and reflective practice happening with those organisations taking part.
We are only able at this stage to feature four of the projects, however when the programme is complete we intend to look at the project as a whole and report more fully on its impacts and what it has revealed about the practice of community dance. Here Kevin Finnan of Motionhouse articulates the centrality of art and being artists in their work at HMP Dovegate and Lois Taylor of attik dance describes the developing programme with older people in Devon. Alex Kenyon of East London Dance describes her own learning in beginning to 'think big' to develop 'Physical Justice' in partnership with youth offending teams and Chris Thomson at The Place Learning and Access, illuminates the basis of the partnerships and early processes in developing the Water Project with Cardboard Citizens and reflects on whether through dance we can 'alleviate the effects of exclusion or build up the personal resources that will help someone make a positive decision for change'.
The second section, introduced by an article by Jane Greenfield, director of Dance 4 in Nottingham argues for us not only to be open to new ideas and ways of working but to actively seek them out; she illustrates this with the development at Dance4 of work with very young children and the value she sees in artists bringing new perspectives and original thinking to the wider contexts in which community dance is practiced. We then feature the recent work for children and young people developed by four dance companies. Kwesi Johnson of Kompany Malakhi, Jasmine Fitter of Random Dance, Deborah Barnard of Ludus Dance and James Cunningham and Suzon Fuks of Australian company Igneous, illustrate very different approaches and perspectives to making work with and for children and young people, demonstrating the richness of high quality dance being developed for these important and often neglected but active and enthusiastic audiences.
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Animated: Summer 2003