Community Dance Project

I have just started a new community dance project that has got me thinking about new questions within my practice.

I will be working with 3 different age groups, a youth group, adults group and elders group, within our local community (mainly people with little or dance experience). All groups will work separately for the first 6 weeks and then we will come together and work as one big group for 6 weeks to produce a performance piece by the end of the project. It is an issue based project and out theme is Age/ Ageism – positive and negative experiences.

I think it will be a really interesting journey working with these different groups and their different views and experiences around the theme, and then watching how they all come together and develop new relationships that will maybe change or challenge some of their views and ideas about age.

I have some experience within community dance but his project will be a good challenge for me and it may prove to be an area that I would like to work more in in the future. With all this in mind I started to think about questions I would like to research within this area of dance.

I came across this website http://www.communitydance.org.uk, where their “vision is for a world where dance is a part of everyone's life, our mission to make participation in dance important to individuals, communities and society”

Linking back to some of my other inquiry questions, one was about the benefits of dance, so I could look at this more specifically as the benefits of dance within a community?

These are just my initial thoughts on this topic, i need to do some further research and have some face to face talks with some of the dance artists i work with who have more experience in this field.