NRgDance class. Photo: Roswitha Chesher
Over the past four years we have delivered NRgDance under the most extraordinary of circumstances – navigating a pandemic and our emergence from it, a cost of living crisis and a looming war in Europe. We are continually VERY proud of our artists and our young people who have shown such resilience in these challenging times.
In April 2020, we provided 26 filmed tutorials within the first lockdown which we shared with schools for use with key worker children and our young participants. Our artists recorded these in their lounges and back gardens with limited tech experience and support.
Artist Colleen Joseph authored an Online Arts Award celebrating the contribution of Black British artists for people to use at home or in school in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
Colleen created task-based projects for young people as a way of keeping creative and active and the brief they were given was that it had to filmed outdoors.
#MeBeingMe featuring Morgan
#MeBeingMe featuring Yasmin
#MeBeingMe featuring Ida
And as soon as it was safe to do so we moved from virtual back into physical spaces – starting first with school bubbles before we moved, in April 2022, back into the community centres for which the programme was originally designed.
To find out more about the NRgDance programme as it used to run before Covid-19, you can watch this short video where our young people talk about why dance is important to them:
Whilst the programme was hugely impactful, its cessation in March 2023, due to cuts to our Royal Borough of Greenwich funding, has provoked us to think differently about how a youth offer might be designed. Our Artist In Residence: Young People, Elena Alava Hilgert, has been consulting with young people over the past year and will be delivering a project challenging notions of identity this autumn.
Lotus Youth Dance Company. Photo: Roswitha Chesher
“Working with these young people brought me life in the pandemic! It reminded me why dance is so powerful…….at a time where the whole world stood still, WE DANCED!”
Colleen Joseph Artistic Director of Lotus Youth Dance Company
