From the editor
Ken Bartlett, Creative Director, Foundation for Community Dance
We have been considering for some time how to make Animated more user friendly whilst maintaining its challenging edge. This issue, we hope, is a positive step on that pathway. The Foundation for Community Dance believes that Animated should fulfil a number of roles: profiling the diversity of dance happening in community settings, the diversity of the people taking part and the wider issues with which our work connects. However, we see it primarily as a conduit between practitioners and their developing practice - celebrating the best of work happening across the UK and beyond, promoting the sharing of ideas, offering opportunities to learn from each other's experience, challenging our preconceptions and profiling initiatives that shift the boundaries of what the work might be. Most importantly we seek to celebrate the diverse practice of community dance placing the individual drives, passions and voices of practitioners at the heart of Animated.
We have changed the format of Animated to give a tighter 'focus' together with what will become regular columns - comment by dance writer Donald Hutera, an interview with an individual working in the field and an international perspective. In this issue Donald looks cheekily at the potential for 'Oversize Arts', and Scilla Dyke interviews Kate Castle, the recently appointed director of Dance South West, about her aspirations for its future.
Our focus looks at methodology; we commissioned well-known and respected dance education consultant Marion Gough to be our associate editor and sought out people from across the sector working in different contexts - prisons, schools, health and older people etc., and people with different purposes behind their work to present their ideas in response to questions about how they choose to work the way they do. In Marion's words '...methodology is important, it reflects who we are and sets out our priorities and the way we work'. But 'it should not be a static state but one that evolves and changes as you and your perspectives change.' The focus demonstrates the passion for dance of the contributors, their desire to transmit this passion to the people they work with and reveals the continuing curiosity of the writers that stops them from becoming complacent.
Disabled artists working across the arts seek to be recognised and valued for the quality of their work, and whilst dance has developed a range of opportunities for disabled people to dance professionally and non-professionally, there are few opportunities to develop the skills of disabled people as choreographers. Magpie Dance along with other disability dance companies are helping to make this happen and Julia Potts, chair of Magpie's Trustees reports in this issue on their pilot initiative to include disabled people as choreographers as well as dancers.
For our international reports Judi Van Zile raises important questions about cultural authenticity, cultural diversity and ownership in the dance of Korean people in Hawai?i, and Caroline Plummer and Ralph Buck write about learning about community dance in New Zealand. Caroline died of cancer in April last year and in her honour the Caroline Plummer Dance Fellowship has been established at the University of Otago, New Zealand, to support the expansion of the practice of dance by people in the community. This fellowship is available to dancers, teachers and researchers internationally and is an extremely exciting and important development for the status of community dance. Thank you Caroline and congratulations to Ralph Buck and the University of Otago for working so hard to establish this opportunity.
We plan to include a letters page in future issues and actively welcome responses to individual articles or writer's points of view: our working title is 'readers write back' though it'll only work with your input.
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Animated: Spring 2004