“On a personal level it’s made me realise how much I need to move and dance in my life and be around people like you. It’s had a massive impact on my health and wellbeing and feeds into my day-to-day life. It keeps me alive." Dance On participant
As someone leading an organisation who previously worked as a community dance artist, I’ve retained my passion and commitment to expanding opportunities for people, in all stages of life, to engage with dance. Alongside this, is the determination to contribute to the evidence base, ensuring that dance is not only recognised and championed in relation to art and creativity, but also in relation to health and wellbeing.
Yorkshire Dance has a strong commitment to working with communities, and engaging older adults has been central to this. In 2013, we launched a partnership with University of Leeds and Leeds Public Health focusing on researching the impact of dance on the health and wellbeing of older adults. A pilot research project, Dancing In Time, was established, to engage older adults from lower socio-economic backgrounds, who have little access to dance. The findings demonstrated that a dance programme can positively affect the physical activity, sitting behaviour, falls related efficacy, mobility and incidence of depression in older females, which could reduce their incidence of falls.
Following the success of this project, we began to explore what a dance programme for older adults could look like at scale. In collaboration with Jan Burkhardt, who brought expertise from both dance and health sectors, we explored how we could design a community dance programme for older adults, which promoted physical activity, whilst being adaptable to a range of health needs. We wanted to consider the strategic development of dance for older adults across Yorkshire, working with larger population groups and forging partnerships with community-based organisations and cultural partners. We held the ambition that a grass roots programme delivered at scale, could lay the foundations for greater engagement and development of more ambitious artistic projects which provide progression routes for people discovering or re-discovering, dance at an older age.
Sport England had recently published a new physical activity strategy, recognising dance, alongside more traditional activity such as football, rugby and netball. Sport England’s Active Ageing Funding seemed a key opportunity to maximise the recognition for dance, whilst addressing our ambition to design a programme that had the potential to be adopted regionally and nationally.
Central to this, was the long-term hope that dance for older adults could be commissioned by the NHS – and, by designing a programme which contributed to the evidence base, we hoped we could prove our assumptions about how dance could be a life changing activity which improved the physical and mental health of large numbers of inactive older people.
Importantly, we wanted to work with communities from lower socio-economic areas and those with long term health conditions and disabilities. A particular interest was creating a programme that appealed to women over the age of 55 – a group widely recognised as being statistically less active.
We built the programme through a development phase in which we used co-design principles to inform the content, look and feel of the programme. Even the title, ‘Dance On’ evolved through community consultation, replacing the catchy ‘Dance Activator Programme’ that Jan and I had previously conceived.
The other thing to acknowledge is that Dance On is built on the foundations of decades of community dance expertise, not least collaborative research projects between Yorkshire Dance and the University of Leeds, which were the forerunners for Dance On.
Dance On has had a huge level of success within the communities it serves. Even throughout the Covid pandemic, Dance On continued – with sessions happening online and often on doorstops, in driveways and in public parks. We have danced with over 1,200 older adults in community spaces across Leeds, Bradford and Doncaster – delivering 3,500 sessions with a talented team of freelance dance artists.
With the support of Sport England and Public Health in Leeds, Bradford and Doncaster, we have built a robust programme, which continues to positively impact on those who have taken part. The research findings have demonstrated that Dance On increases physical activity, improves wellbeing and is cost effective - offering potential cost-savings to the NHS. A successful funding bid to National Lottery, Reaching Communities, now continues the success of this programme for the next 3 years.
Whilst Dance On began its life as a physical activity intervention, it’s led to many artistic and creative opportunities for those who have taken part, such as choreographic residencies with international artists, flashmobs and performance sharings. It also influenced the development of Yorkshire Dance’s Ageless Festival, a biennial festival which brings together local communities with regional, national and international artists. All of these experiences have brought our Dance On groups together to connect, celebrate and challenge stereotypes and expectations of ageing.
In October 2023, in collaboration with Darts, One Dance UK and the University of Leeds, we launched the Dance On toolkit, a document which contains the knowledge, research, resources and recommendations from the project. It exists as a digital resource which we hope can raise the profile of this significant piece of work and pass on valuable learning to artists, community organisations and those working in health, wellbeing and social care.
The toolkit is designed to be accessible, easy to use and it’s free of charge. We hope that by sharing the learning from our journey, we can support others to develop their own work to support people to access dance into older age: yorkshiredance.com/project/dance-on-toolkit
Photo credits: Group image - Dance On. Photographer: Paula Solloway. Headshot - Hannah Robertshaw, Creative Director, Yorkshire Dance. Photographer: Anthony Dunn.