The spotlight has recently shone on Indian dance at The Place, one of Europe’s most innovative performance spaces, with shows and workshops programmed to celebrate the British Council’s UK-India Year of Culture 2017.Continue reading Celebrating UK-India Year of Culture at The Place
Arts Council England are set to invest £5 million in a new Birmingham Dance Hub. A total of £3 million will be invested over the next three years into the development of production and administrative space for dance artists and organisations – which will include office spaces, a large studio and meeting rooms which will connect to studio, performance and social spaces within the wider complex – with the remaining £2 million supporting additional dance activity.
Queensland Ballet recently joined 12 other international dance companies to showcase its Dance for Parkinson’s programme on a free online portal, created especially to celebrate the global World Dance for Parkinson’s Day on 29 April. Queensland Ballet’s home is the Thomas Dixon Centre down under in Brisbane, holding weekly Dance for Parkinson’s classes which are renowned as an important way for the company to connect with and enrich the local community and to actively contribute to research.Continue reading Queensland Ballet’s Dance for Parkinson’s programme
A collaboration between One Dance UK (previously Dance UK) and People Dancing (previously Foundation for Community Dance) will aim to encourage primary schools to spend more money on high quality dance provision for their students. The national dance bodies aim to tackle inactivity through the partnership, working to improve health and well-being through dance.Continue reading Inactivity to be tackled by national dance bodies
Aesop’s Dance to Health pilot programme has found dancers can be trained to deliver artistic, evidence-based healthcare programmes. It also found reductions in loneliness for participants, and therefore suggests similar arts in health programmes could become sustainable funding streams for arts organisations, as Dance to Health clearly demonstrated the positive outcomes and the lower overall costs of managing falls compared to the primary prevention programme.
A new bursary scheme has recently been launched that will provide free headshots to 21 students from different drama and vocational schools around the UK. Schools involved in the scheme, which include RADA, LAMDA and Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, will award the headshot session to a current second-year student – or a final-year student for a one or two-year course – based on the grounds of financial need, performing excellence and high academic achievement.
Family Weekend, Sadler’s Wells’ annual two-day festival of family-friendly events, was back on Friday 14 & Saturday 15 April, taking over the theatre building and offering something for all ages with fun activities, arts & crafts and workshops. These complemented Aracaladanza’s Vuelos on the Sadler’s Wells stage, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s quest to make man fly. Suitable for ages five and over, Family Weekend continued to see the theatre transformed into a magical space for children and their families as an unmissable jam-packed day out.
Following successful tours in 2015 and 2016, Flamenco Edition returns in 2017 with the Ana Morales Flamenco Company. Touring to more venues than ever before and following the success of previous tours – Jesus Fernandez in 2015 and Olga Pericet in 2016 – Flamenco Edition 2017 presents Ana Morales Flamenco Company in Reunión – a brand new show for the UK, touring to Newcastle, Birmingham, Derby, Nottingham and Bournemouth between 9–17 May.
The Victoria and Albert Museum and Royal College of Art are set to launch a new performing arts-led archive course, based at the V&A’s theatre collections. It is a new optional strand of the V&A and Royal College of Art’s existing 15 month MA programme on the history of design, and students will be able to dedicate their entire curriculum to performance.Continue reading The history and material cultures of performance
Liverpool is set to install the UK’s first revolving theatre, as part of plans to revitalise Liverpool’s Ten Streets dockland area into a creative hub for arts and technology organisations. The ‘stage-around theatre’, in which seats rotate to face different stages, will be the first of its kind in the UK, as part of ambitious plans for a new creative quarter that officials hope could create thousands of jobs in Liverpool.