From the editor
Ken Bartlett, Creative Director, Foundation for Community Dance
Sustaining a career as a community dance artist is an amazing achievement - keeping true to yourself, your art and the community you live in, as a mature/older/senior artist is even more amazing. So,how do you keep creative and fresh, what keeps inspiring you and what are your reflections about yourself and the people you work with?
For this issue of Animated we asked a number of our most experienced practitioners each with over 30 years experience to describe some of their recent work and to reflect about themselves, their practice and the communities they work in. All of them choose to work with other older people, but not exclusively. Tim Rubidge and Virginia Kennedy working in the North East of England describe their work in relatively small communities whilst Bisakha Sarker, Tamara McLorg and Cecilia Macfarlane work in more populous Liverpool, London and Oxford. Each of them has an original story to tell, each of them has found a unique way of working and each of them has responded to the task of thinking about their work in very different ways. However, what they all have in common is their passion for dance, it's place in their lives, the lives of the communities they work in and the tangible changes they have made happen through their work.
Taking us outside the UK, Pegge Vissicaro from Phoenix, Arizona in describing her work with refugees to the USA from Africa - people traumatised by the places they have left behind and by the dislocation from those places - illustrates the vital importance of dance in re-making self and community and provides a solid intellectual framework for what she and her company Freedom Inc.is undertaking. We hope that this is of value to practitioners elsewhere who are choosing to work in this 'edge' of community dance. Paula Varanda in Portugal not only describes establishing a programme of contemporary dance in the isolated rural community of Mertola but more importantly how she manages to use the vernacular of social dances as a key entry point.
Carl Reid responds to the article by Jo Parkes, New Victories, published in the last issue of Animated, and argues as a writer for his right to make work that speaks of his own experience(s),unmediated by the rules others set, as he doesn't want to fight 'Old Battles'. Deborah Baddoo gives us an update on The Mission, the black dance initiative that has been creating new opportunities and new audiences for black dance across the country. Jo Verrent updates us on the latest developments to support disabled people choosing to seek places at dance and drama schools within the Dance And Drama Awards scheme (DADA) and Katie Phillips reflects on the issue of 'quality' facing the disability dance companies in the Xposure festival. Paddy Masefield, tireless disability arts campaigner and until recently a member of the Board of the Foundation for Community Dance, opened the international disability arts festival Above and Beyond insisting that the Festival be held every year - 'just like the Edinburgh Festival. So that every year disabled people have a central, national and international platform; a vibrant ghetto-blasting platform for display and for demands, for demonstration and for debate, for sharing, for joy, for celebration, for love.' In his article Paddy writes about what has been lost for disability arts as well as what has been gained and re-asserts that 'only the arts lead humans to an experience of being other people, of understanding other perspectives - only the arts hold us back from pulling the trigger on the gun.'
This issue of Animated provides a platform for the individual voice within community dance, voices that inspire, challenge and champion. Voices that continue to make a difference and want more not just for themselves but the people and communities they work with and write about. But let us not forget as Sarah Houston articulates in the opening article and Maria Benjamin in the final article, community dance is also about the seriousness of having fun and the sheer pleasure of dancing.
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Animated: Winter 2004