© U-Dance @ Southbank - Roswitha Chesher
© Renacer at Bankside
© Renacer at Bankside
© U-Dance @ Southbank - Roswitha Chesher
© Renacer at Bankside
© Folk Dance Remixed - Craig Newman
© Folk Dance Remixed - Allan Hong
As this AHRC networking project draws to a close we invite you view the recordings of events, the online map and information on the community page. You may still add to the map and the community page. We hope the project continues to inspire traditional, folk and national groups to dance with each other and to carry on the discussions opened up over the last year.
1st June 2024 at Cecil Sharp House, Camden, London.
The Workshop Day was the culmination of the Dancing Dialogues project which brought together members of traditional Brazilian, Polish, Peruvian, Iberian and Hawaiian Hula dance groups as well as dancers from Border Morris, Cotswold Morris and Appalachian Clog Dance.
The day was planned collaboratively with Jen Cox from our partnership with English Folk Dance and Song Society and with contributions from Kerry Fletcher from Folk Dance Remixed and Kelly Donaldson from our partner Creative Lives. Our aim was to pilot a method of working that prioritised dance sharing and exchange to address the project’s research questions. The videos, contexts and taught steps from each group provided rich terrain for further questions and exploration in small groups finishing with choreographed short dances.
Over a joyful day of dancing significant points of discussion emerged on the relationship of each dance group to it’s locality, history, national origins and the complex idea of ‘Englishness’. We found how the different dances were immersed in myths, religion, old and newly formed stories as well as being significant cultural survivors of border disputes and political and colonial upheavals.
To see more on this, visit the Events page where video documentation of the day (with captions) by Roswitha Chesher are available.
Missed the Dancing Dialogues event on 17 Feb 2024? Find the recordings from the sessions and learn more about the project's aims to research traditional, folk, and national dance groups of all cultural identities, to facilitate discussion and sharing between dancers and academics.
Add your dance group right away with your location, activities, photo and contact details onto our new online map for dance groups.
This project is designed to develop a network of dancers and dance researchers interested in discovering and sharing more about traditional, national and folk dancing activities happening in three regions in England.
Who we are and how to contact us
Dancing and dancers are at the heart of this proposed practice-based network that seeks greater understanding of traditional/folk/national dance forms currently practiced in England. Engaging key current research trajectories of diaspora, community, regionality, and urban cultures and identities, this project recognises and values the breadth of dance practices taking place under the headings of 'traditional', 'folk', 'regional' and 'national', and will foreground their complex, often contested, associations and histories.
