This week I went to a wonderful seminar to hear about Let’s Dance, the campaign to get the nation dancing, with a National Day of Dance on Sunday 8 March, which was recently well described in The Guardian. It was a dream of a panel with National Treasure and formidable dance champion Angela Rippon, arts and health guru Daisy Fancourt and Jennifer Jones from my favourite dance company The Company of Elders. It was chaired by the Artistic Director of Sadler’s Wells, Alistair Spalding, who has done more than anyone to bring quality creative dance of all types to the UK.
Being at Sadler’s Wells brought back happy memories of supporting the launch of their Older Dancers’ Festival – Elixir – ten years ago which is still going strong and will appear again soon Elixir Festival – 2026 – Sadler’s Wells. Dance was an important strand of our creative ageing programme from 2010 to 2019, with many gems such as: Moving Memory Dance Theatre, Green Candle Dance in East London and Dance for Parkinson’s.
When first moving our funding programme to creative mental health in 2020, I was surprised at the relative sparsity of work involving dance. It seemed to me an obvious art form for our new field and I was aware of powerful professional work such as Botsova’s Black Dog and the Royal Ballet’s Sink or Swim.
But we have come a long way since then and funded some inspiring participatory work. We have funded organisations of different sizes from Keneish in Birmingham and Akademi working with CAMHS in London, to East London Dance which has its own studio, and even Rambert, working In Manchester with Mind. Hip Hop has been prominent with Tyler Atwood’s work with Your Next Move in Gloucester, and Kiz Manley establishing a Trauma Informed Hip Hop Academy. We have been supporting Kevin Edward Turner to work in schools in Manchester with Company Chameleon (Movement for Mind) and he has even succeeded in taking this work to Germany and to Colombia. Kevin will be known to some readers for his exceptional biographical dance, Witness This, about living with Bipolar Spectrum disorder. It is noticeable how much of this work is with young people with mental health problems and indeed we started but funding Scottish Ballet to hold a two-day symposium in 2021 on this topic.
With adults we have been funding Dance United Yorkshire to work with men with addictions in their Men Do Dance project. Recently I was privileged to observe a rehearsal of work we are funding by Fallen Angels Dance Theatre in Liverpool. The Company specialises in work with people in recovery from addiction and it was fascinating to see how the dance related to this theme.
Dance with these expert organisations offers a safe, healing space for participants to express themselves, experience joy, socialise and just have fun. It becomes an essential part of life for many and a lifeline for some. We need a lot more of it.
As Angela would say – Let’s Dance!