Dance Mapping - Arts Council England

A changing UK demographic has influenced our artists and arts organisations and this has
had a fundamental influence on what we currently define as contemporary dance. Artists and
companies including Shobana Jeyasingh, Jasmin Vardimon, Kim Brandstrup, Jonzi D,
Adzido, Kokuma, Sampad and Deborah Badoo are a few examples of this. An increasingly
shifting demographic impacts on diverse practice and the dance aesthetic. At the same time,
diverse practice in relation to disability has strongly impacted on the diversity of the dance
field – Wolfgange Stange, Cecile Dandeker, Adam Benjamin, Common Ground Dance
Theatre, Stop Gap are a few key examples of this. This diversity has been supported by
strategic agencies throughout the period: the formation of Akademi (Academy of Indian
Dance) in 1979, ADiTi and the Black Dance Development Trust in the late 1980s and now
Association of Dance of the African Diaspara (ADAD). This diversity of style, aesthetics and
people is one of the dance field’s major strengths.
Different forms of dance have always relied upon ingenuity and willingness to take risks.
Dance has often been vulnerable to cuts in public subsidy because of its lack of dedicated
buildings for performance; it has led the arts in participation practice with longstanding
initiatives through education, community and participatory work since the 1940’s.
Thus, it is clear that any environmental analysis of the dance field will be strongly influenced
by the publicly funded dance sectors supported by Arts Council funding. These sectors of the
dance field are in the main artist-led and concerned with the creation, re-interpretation and
performance of contemporary dance and ballet. As we can see from the timeline (Appendix
Four), independent funding for dance through the Arts Council only began in 1984 as prior to
that dance funding was managed alongside music. This may be why there was very little
investment in dedicated venues for the performance of dance prior to the advent of lottery-
funded capital projects from the mid-1990s. The Victorians built theatres, concert halls and art
galleries, but not dance houses. Dance has always been perceived as an activity that all
could take part in and so we saw the rise of dance halls, and then discos and night clubs.
This manifestation of dance as ‘dancing’ is explored further in Part Seven.
This growth and expansion in dance activity and the infrastructure can be illustrated by
looking at the growth in dance funding over the same period. Table 2 illustrates this growth
and is taken from Appendix 2 in 21 st Century Dance: present position, future vision by
Jeanette Siddall (Arts Council of England, 2001).
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