This is the first of two chapters which look at what we mean by the term ‘community dance’. It includes definitions by a range of practitioners and other thinkers who have written about community dance over the years. In this chapter I also introduce some questions relating to key themes which will be addressed throughout the book.
- What is the purpose of community dance? What are its qualities and core values?
- Who is delivering community dance and what should we call them?
These questions are explored further in subsequent chapters – particularly Chapter 2, where Sara Houston looks more closely at definitions, and Chapter 11, where I look at the role of the community dance practitioner.
- Community dance? What’s that?
- Well it’s, you know, working with different groups – doing dance projects.
- What sort of dance? Ballroom dancing? Street dance?
- Might be – it depends on the group and why we’re doing it… Sometimes it’s not a particular dance style – it might be helping a group make a dance piece about something they want to say.
Defining community dance has always been something of a challenge. Since the mid-1980s there has been critical debate about the purpose, practice and defining values of community dance. As there is considerable diversity of practice in the profession there are inevitably differences in philosophy and approach amongst people who are involved in the work: as participants, artists, employers and agencies commissioning projects.
Definitions of Community Dance
People Dancing, which is the lead body for the profession, offers the following definition:
Community dance is about community dance artists working with people. What makes it ‘community dance’ as distinct from other kinds of participatory dance activity, is determined by:
On their website People Dancing gives further details about the range of settings where community dance takes place and the values that underpin the work. Often community dance takes place outside statutory provision such as education or professional performance contexts and financial support may be provided by grants from funding organisations.
In 2006 a survey of community dance workers produced these responses to the question ‘What is community dance?’ (Amans, 2006):
Community dance is working with people using movement. Community dance can include set dance steps and free movement, it inspires and motivates. Community dance gets people moving who may not normally dance.
Dance which mainly takes place with non-professional practitioners (though often facilitated by professional artists/teachers).
Any dance activity, led by professional dance practitioners, which involves participants from an identified community and which is publicly funded, is community dance.
Creating opportunities for anyone, regardless of gender, race, religion, physical or mental health, and ability, preconceptions (their own or others) or anything else, to be able to participate in a group dance experience that is positive for them.
Community dance is about dance not being elitist … it can be about creating pieces of work that break the stereotypes of what dance is and what dancers are, it can be about performing dance in non traditional places. It can be anything that we, the community, want it to be.
The people who produced these definitions reflect a cross-section of the profession and include lecturers and artistic directors as well as dance artists delivering projects. They were asked to attempt a definition for someone who has never come across community dance. Compare their responses with these comments written twenty years earlier, when there was already discussion about the nature and purpose of community dance.
What Is Community Dance? What Is Its Purpose?
In 1984 Sarah Rubidge outlined the following aims and objectives of the ‘community dance movement’ (Rubidge, 1984):
- To de-mystify dance as an art form.
- To provide opportunities for as large a part of the population as possible to engage in dance activity of some sort or another, irrespective of their age, class, or cultural background.
- To reinstate dance as an integral part of the life-style of our society.
Chris Thomson’s article, given at the 1988 Dance and the Child international conference at Roehampton Institute, made an important contribution to our understanding of what community dance actually is (Thomson, 1988):
the community dance movement in the UK sees itself as offering dance to everyone in a given community, on the premise that dance is the birthright and the potential of all human beings, and that this fundamentally human activity is in our rational and logocentric culture undervalued and marginalized the experience of dance is often simply unavailable. The community dance movement… has been seen by many as having the potential to redress the balance in favour of dance, to start bringing dance back into the mainstream of our culture
In 1996 the Department of Dance Studies at Surrey University hosted a conference Current Issues in Community Dance. The speakers raised questions that continue to be debated.
Twenty years on and though we have some broad agreements in community dance there are apparently almost as many philosophies as individuals involved in the work. We have not yet agreed a public account of the aesthetics and philosophy of community dance. (Peppiatt, 1997)
Community dance has its own values, principles, methods – and it is more than education. It is also about converting the population, establishing dance colonies across the country and creating a dance empire. (Siddall, 1997)
The definition of Community Dance is an ongoing debate because of the apparent diversity of practice in the field: how is it possible to define something that by its very essence is individual to different geographical areas, funding structures, populations and aspirations of practitioners? (Jasper, 1997)
Community Dance Qualities (What Is It About?)
As part of a Professional Code of Conduct People Dancing has included a section on Definitions and Values.
Community Dance is about:
Who Delivers Community Dance – and What Should We Call Them?
- Are they artists, dance teachers or therapists?
- It depends on what the individual wants to be called. Definitely not therapists – although practitioners often say there is a therapeutic value in their work.
- Artists then? What’s artistic about doing a session with special needs children or old people?
There are a number of terms to describe people who work in community dance. Originally the term dance animateur was used to identify dance practitioners who were working in community contexts. They were usually in full- or part-time posts supported by public arts funding. Thomson (1988) pointed out that some community dance workers preferred not to be called ‘animateurs’ – a term which the community arts movement had been using in the 1960s:
… interestingly it was not long before the word was seen as patronising in its assumption that communities needed ‘animating’ and it was dropped in favour of ‘community arts worker’.
Other job titles at the time included ‘dance co-ordinator’, ‘dance development officer’, and ‘dancer in residence’. Since then workers in the field have adopted a range of job titles including community dance practitioner, community dance artist, dance teacher, dance artist, dance worker, community dance leader and community dance worker. In 2006 ‘Communit...