Category: News

View our newsletter here – Find out how you can join us at The Big Feast 2023 plus information about our Connected Communities Summer Celebration Project!

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Read / listen to our latest newsletter here:

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Connected Communities is our Summer Celebration Project, where we celebrate who we are, engage with new participants and audiences, and explore something new each year. It’s about collective joy, meeting new people, learning new things and achieving together!

Throughout the project, FRONTLINEdance will celebrate the Stoke-on-Trent community’s rich culture, heritage and green spaces, by creating a cross-art form celebration event of dance, music, song, costume, spoken word, and creative writing; inspired by and co-created with the local diverse community in which we’re based.

It will be the result of a community participatory programme to encourage different communities to come together to celebrate and share connections, and traditions: Click on this link to find out how you can join us! This is the link to the timetable.

In a spirit of joy and friendship, this project will culminate and be celebrated over the 3 days:

1. Appetite’s Big Feast on 26th August: snippets and tasters of the work created will be performed in various outside areas of Hanley – Stoke on Trents’ City Centre between 11am and 4pm. We’ll also join the Windrush75 parade.
2. Tunstall Park on 9th September: A FREE performance and participatory arts event where the audience will be led around different areas of the park where they will be met by a multi-cultural cast of musicians, singers, dancers, and poets. Poems and creative writing will be attached to trees and benches, and a treasure trail will be created. Workshops will take place in the flora hall throughout the day as well as on the grass areas and under the trees.
3. Inside Social Club type of venue TBC on 10th September: audiences, staff, volunteers and the cast will come together to celebrate what we have achieved with food, conversations and dancing. Pop-up performances will take place throughout the event by the cast, conversation tasks to get people talking to each other and share, along with playing traditional games from different cultures suggested by the cast.

We’ll positively impact the local community, address inequalities, and improve community cohesion. Participants will form new friendships, and understanding, experience collective enjoyment and achievement, celebrate things that are important to them, share them, and engage in the arts and new people for the first time.

The physicality of dance, the creativity of writing, music and song as a fabric of community, the culture marker of costume design, and artwork for promotion, will result in a multi-faceted creative artistic experience full of benefits to everyone who experiences it!

Individuals’ voices, culture and lives will be celebrated with equity and enjoyment.

Connecting Communities: Participants Sessions

IMPORTANT: Due to the nature of the project resulting in performance, the timetable is subject to change. We’ll let you know at least one week in advance of changes. FRONTLINEdance is also waiting for confirmation on the lead musician so that is why there is a (?). You are more than welcome to attend all the sessions even if you are not performing with us. Where it states, ‘Rehearsal for performances’ you can still attend as a volunteer? We’ll have several volunteer jobs for you to do. You can attend as many sessions as you like. Each session will be different. Like all our sessions, all our summer project sessions will be inclusive and you can take part sitting. If you require a BSL interpreter to be at any of the sessions, please let us know as soon as possible.

If you have not already registered with FRONTLINEdance then you are required to do so here: https://forms.office.com/r/fZQdcbTMQM

These sessions are open to all, so please invite your friends, families and colleagues to come and join us too! Just forward this document to them.

Any questions please call Rachael: 07484 874335 or email rachael@frontlinedance.co.uk

All sessions are intergenerational, therefore approximately 5-year-olds to 85-year-olds will be enjoying and achieving together. For Safeguarding, those under 13 years old will need to be accompanied by a parent/carer/older friend or family member. Remember family and friends can join us too.

Lastly, a reminder that we will not be providing any medical or personal care. Therefore, if this is something that you require then you will need to attend with a person who supports you with this.

Thanks for your patience and support, Rachael and the FRONTLINEdance Team.

To view or listen to our newsletter, please click on the links below;

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Read/Listen to the article written by Caroline Butterwick following a conversation she had with our Artistic Director, Rachael Lines and dancers Matt Byatt and David Jowett.

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‘Disabled children need to know it is an option’: co-creating the future of dance’

FRONTLINEdance works in communities to remove barriers for disabled people and those with long-term health conditions – and there’s no distinction between teacher and learner

Several adults form a circle in a community hall, swerving their bodies and linking arms. One spirals around a chair, using it as part of their movement. This is Breakthrou’dance, a group in Stoke-on-Trent for disabled participants. They come together each week to do what Frontlinedance founder Rachael Lines calls “dancing with”, rather than the traditional model of following an instructor.

Co-creation – making work with people, rather than telling them what to do – is a concept many arts organisations aim for. Lines talks through a recent project that involved working with members of local disability groups. “We had conversations about different themes, challenges, things they would like to share, or to tell people about. We looked at the social model of disability, and how we could use that.”

The group explored movement together that emerged from the discussion, with Lines asking how the body might feel with different emotions. “They would generate the movement, and then I would develop that, keeping all the key themes and finding commonalities, what visually looked exciting,” says Lines, who co-founded Frontlinedance in 2001.

In developing one performance, visually impaired dancers shared how they get pushed in crowds, inspiring the choreography. “We created those barriers, the hustle and bustle, moving together with dropping, falling and catching, and knocking,” Lines explains. The raw experience of what it’s like to navigate public space as a blind person is reflected in those movements in a way that is visually interesting while highlighting something many don’t realise.

Co-creating brings together different viewpoints – “there’s a richness in everybody’s life,” says Lines. “Historically, disabled people have had less of a voice, and fewer opportunities to be makers, dancers and choreographers or even audience members.”

Lines trained at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds. In the mid-90s, during her studies, she watched the integrated dance company Candoco perform: “It was so fresh, nobody else was doing it.” Lines had a back injury, and she experiences hemiplegic migraines triggered by light, which led her to decide against making a career performing on stage and helped her see the challenges disabled dancers face.

She resolved to form an artist-led contemporary dance company that placed disabled people and those with long-term health conditions at the centre. She now runs projects everywhere from neurology wards to Stoke’s Potteries Museum, and in ongoing groups such as Breakthrou’dance, involving those who traditionally feel out of place in dance.

Frontline also works with local arts organisations, with disabled people advising on everything from audio description to physical accessibility. It’s helped create a community, with people coming together to attend shows and arts events they once felt excluded from.

Dancers from Frontline recently took part in The Pig Walk, a parade in the Stoke town of Longton. Dancers David and Matt tell me how being part of a shared experience – the walk attracted thousands of people – was empowering. “Proud,” David says, communicating through speech and Makaton.

Matt has been involved with Frontline for 21 years, starting as a dancer, receiving training which led to him supporting classes as a workshop assistant and creative enabler. “I’ve come a long way,” he says. “I love the work I do. I was proud when I got to paid status, that was a big achievement.”

Many dance training schemes require a level of academic attainment that excludes a lot of people, and Frontline is starting a new training programme that it hopes to launch next year, to address this. “We’re seeing Paralympians on Strictly, which is good,” says Lines. “But there’s still the barrier of it being seen as a possibility. We need more disabled children and young adults to see and know it can be an option for them.”

There are barriers to disabled people taking part in dance, from inaccessible rehearsal and performance spaces to attitudes about what disabled dancers are capable of. There are also challenges in meaningful co-creation: some dancers need concrete instructions, while others prefer the freedom to move how they want. Lines says tailoring to individuals and not making assumptions helps.

“The work we’re doing is breaking down negative preconceptions people have. And I think that’s a positive thing, even though it’s a frustrating thing, because, well, why don’t you think someone with a disability can achieve or be brilliant?” says Lines. It’s an ongoing question for disabled artists: how to highlight disabled voices and challenge negative ideas, without falling into tropes of “overcoming”.

Lines has seen the company’s impact on both dancers and audiences. When they perform in hospitals to people stuck in bed, “they say we made them feel like they were alive and part of the world, which is brilliant – I really can’t ask for more.”

Our latest Newsletter is now ready to view, please click on the link below:

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Join the FRONLINEdance Explorers Team on their multi-sensory, wondrous adventure!

Flyer below with all the information you’ll need:

Image description:

To the right, in a dark orange circle, three dancers wearing yellow and green costumes are dancing in a library, with a small blonde girl wearing a flowery dress watching them. Far left, one dancer is crouched while he points and grins, in the middle another dancer is lying on her back gasping, and the final dancer is standing over her looking at the girl and signing “D” in Makaton.

Text to the left of the image on an orange background: Join the FRONTLINEdance Explorers Team on their multi-sensory, wondrous adventure, where you get to help bring to life two stories, with dance, colour, sound and teamwork! This fully inclusive performance and participatory show is relaxed, accessible and fun!

Performances

Tuesday 21st February: 11am – Tunstall Library / 2pm – Bentilee Library

Thursday 23rd February: 11am – Stoke Library / 2pm – City Central Library

Friday 24th February: 11am – Longton Library / 2pm – Meir Library

Wednesday 1st March: 1:30pm – Just You at Just Families, CIC Bridge Centre, Birches Head

Saturday 25th March: 11am – Staffs Down Syndrome Group (Members Only), Trentham Scout Hut / 2pm – Potteries Museum & Art Gallery

Sunday 26th March: Time TBC – Urban Wilderness ‘PIG Walk’ Festival, Longton Exchange Shopping Centre

Access Icons Featured in the flyer:

* All venues are fully wheelchair accessible.

* We sign Makaton* Relaxed performance

* Touch Tour

* Easy Read Visual Story

* BSL interpreter

* Audio Description

Text on a blue background with a QR code linking to FRONTLINEdance website (www.frontlinedance.co.uk)

Cost: FREE (We welcome a donation) Placed limited.

We recommend that you book in advance: https://www.eventbrite.com/…/the-explorers-public…

Show lasts approximately 40 minutes.

Funded by Stoke-On-Trent City Council’s Cultural Grants Programme.

For further information: hello@frontlinedance.co.uk | 07484 874335Facebook, Twitter & Instagram: @frontlinedance1 Logos: FRONTLINEdance, Strong Together and City of Stoke-On-Trent.

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