CROWD 2021-2024 summary

RETROSPECTIVE

Welcome to CROWD – international dance exchange, a network and residency programme supporting dance makers with a socially engaged practice.

CROWD began in 2021, growing into a network of ten dance organisations working across northern Europe, who wanted to support the development of community dance practices.

With leadership from the Goethe-Institut London, and their Programme Manager (Theatre & Dance) Francis Christeller, CROWD offered research residencies to 26 artists across 2021-2023, some very established in community-engaged dance-making, some new to these practices and with much to learn. The residencies opened space for discussion, peer support and knowledge development, and enabled each artist to expand their professional network.

Along the way, CROWD engaged with many more people as facilitators and guests, audiences and participants. The work has been documented in a variety of formats, including a short film focusing on the 2022 residencies, Gifts From an Unproductive Space: an article for Animated magazine in their winter 2025 edition, CROWD-SOURCED: Notes from the 2022 residency programme, as well as the writings of the artists, our facilitators and others.

This new publication brings together highlights from three years of the CROWD blog, a collection of texts, photographs and films, some authored and created by the artists themselves during their residencies, or in reflection after their residencies had finished, some written by outside eye Maddy Costa, particularly in the final residency year, 2023. The selected texts have been collated and re-edited by Maddy. i

Also included are a set of questions that came up frequently through CROWD, which were collected by Maddy and Francis Christeller and published as a deck of cards for use at Tanzmesse 2024 in Düsseldorf, to inspire conversation.

These questions are dotted throughout this document.

Before diving in, we want to acknowledge the partners and artists who made the project so meaningful. Thank you to many more but especially to the Goethe-Institut (worldwide), Arts Council England (UK), NRW KULTURsekretariat (DE), Nordic Culture Fund (Nordic region), Creative Scotland (UK), Bora Bora – Dance and Visual Theatre (DK), Dance Limerick (IE), Dansateliers (NL), Dansverkstaedid (IS), Davvi – Centre for Performing Arts (NO), FABRIC (UK), Pottporus (DE), TaikaBox (FI), TanzFaktur (DE) and The Work Room (UK).

We hope these materials give you a glimpse into how profound and transformative the residencies were for all who participated in CROWD, whether as artists, facilitators, organisations or guests, and inspire new forms of CROWD to exist in the future.

Maddy Costa and Francis Christeller

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2021 Artists Agnetha Jaunich Victor Fung Pontus Linder Hannah Sampé Emma Lewis-Jones Jija Sohn 2022 Artists Maya Dalinsky Amparo González Sola Bianca Hisse Ásrún Magnúsdóttir Rita Marcalo Alex McCabe Stefanie Schwimmbeck Willie Stark Silja Tuovinen Elsabet Yonas 2023 Artists Hubert Mielke Chelsea Gordon Anni Puuperä Natalia Barua Jacqueline Neuenhausen Dylan Quinn Bakani Pick-Up Shaquille George Lovísa Ósk Gunnarsdóttir Marie Hallager iii

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CONTENTS Welcome Blog Content Emma Lewis-Jones Hannah Sampé Victor Fung, Jija Sohn, Agnetha Jaunich, Merel Heering Agnetha Jaunich Hannah Sampé Elsabet Yonas and Maya Dalinsky Emma Jayne Park Amparo González Sola Anni Puuperä Chelsea Gordon Lisa Reinheimer 2022 Residencies Video Gifts From an Unproductive Space (2024 Animated Magazine article) CROWD-SOURCED - Notes from the 2022 Residency Programme

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Emma Lewis-Jones, August 2021 We had been together (the artists, Hanna Sampé, Pontus Linder and I, and the hosts TaikaBox and Julian Owusu) in Varjakka for a few days when the suggestion arose of working with a small local group. TaikaBox have a growing relationship with some people from Oulu who do outdoor and creative activities together in order to tackle feelings of isolation and anxiety.

This was an opportunity for us to make some new proposals and to ‘deliver’, as we all three are used to doing.

But in reality the arrival of the women to the island was a completely transformative experience. We shifted from being visitors to being truly in residence, within that afternoon. The group helped us to solidify so much of the research we’d done and suddenly collaborating felt organic and fundamental. Combining our individual pedagogical practices and brief knowledge of the place, and the women’s willingness to be present and playful, we each discovered a major shift in the relationship we had to that space and time.

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In particular I found the person who expressed the most anxiety before we began, Riina, to be the most exuberant and perceptive collaborator. She filled our imaginations and the building (Konttori) with new propositions and stories; and told old ones too. She brought new life to the space as well as validating our work so far.

That workshop represented an important milestone in the journey we are on and it was quickly impossible to know the place without those personal expressions of embodied knowledge and the people through whose eyes we looked at that part of the world, momentarily; which left a profound impression.

Riina and I spoke about acknowledging that we are not without our differences; our social, spiritual, political, economic clashes are with us in the work. But I am passionate about difference and hope this project celebrates that.

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Dreaming past the anthropocene

by Hannah Sampé, August 2021 A study on rest / on moulding / on patience / on observing weight / on negotiating discomfort / on softening / on trusting that relaxation will come eventually / on realizing: my body is material, is matter What happens, if we withdraw from producing and leave nature to itself? What happens, if we leave ourselves be? If we rest long enough, what will grow back?

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Victor Fung, Jija Sohn, Agnetha Jaunich, Merel Heering, September 2021 Our two-week residency at Dansateliers Rotterdam was a journey full of impulses, reflections, and interactions that gave us new ways of thinking about our work.

We started thinking about community engaged / based practices as… spending time to find ways of relating to or interacting with people a way of finding our own urgencies and our sense of belonging a strategy to disperse power a way of discovering and sharing joy a way of being together a way of writing new contracts a way of recalibrating and remodeling ways in which we experience the world a way to empower a way of reconnecting – the roots of why we value being part of a community We leave with lots of questions, some answers, and a basket full of food for thought.

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Agnetha Jaunich, February 2022 English translation begins on page 11

Was heißt denn hier Community?!

Community, dieses Wort habe ich, vor meiner Residenz, eigentlich immer ziemlich unbedacht benutzt. Im Tanzkontext meinte ich damit Projekte, an denen NichtProfessionelle Tänzer beteiligt sind, nicht mehr und nicht weniger. Es war mehr wie ein Label für mich, ohne genau auf die Inhaltsstoffe zu schauen. Dies hat sich durch CROWD grundlegend für mich verändert. In meiner ersten ResidenzPhase in Rotterdam wurde mir dies zum ersten Mal bewusst. Im Gespräch mit meinen Kollegen fing ich an das Wort Community mehr zu reflektieren und mich zu fragen, was heißt das eigentlich wirklich für mich?

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Meine ich damit wirklich nur, dass an dem Projekt Menschen beteiligt sind, die mit Tanzen nicht ihr Geld verdienen oder bedeutet es doch mehr? Die Antwort auf diese Frage ist wahrscheinlich leicht zu erraten. Natürlich steckte für mich hinter diesem Wort eine tiefere Bedeutung. Nur hatte ich über diese noch nie so intensiv nachgedacht. CROWD gab mir die Möglichkeit dazu. In den verschiedenen.

In den verschiedenen Projektphasen konnte ich in immer wieder neuen Kontexten, sowohl örtlich, als auch mit immer wieder anderen Menschen, über das Wort reflektieren.

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Schlagwörter, wie Partizipation und Augenhöhe prägten sich dabei besonders stark bei mir ein. Ich merkte schnell, dass Community in meinem Verständnis nicht eine bestimmte Gruppe Menschen aus einem spezifischen Ort oder Bezirk ausschließlich meinte. Das konnte es natürlich auch, war aber nicht für mich das Ausschlaggebende, was eine Community ausmacht. Die Antwort auf die Frage, wie ich Community für mich übersetzen würde, ist so simpel, wie auch für mich einleuchtend. Es geht um Gemeinschaft. Es geht um das gemeinsame Arbeiten, den Austausch auf Augenhöhe, das zu Wort kommen lassen jedes einzelnen und das Wissen, dass künstlerisches Arbeiten nicht von oben herab gelingt, sondern ein gemeinsamer Prozess ist.

Ein Weg, den man am besten gemeinsam geht, damit das volle künstlerische Potenzial, dass in jeder Gruppe verborgen liegt, zum Ausdruck kommen kann.

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Durch CROWD hat das Wort Community für mich eine all umfassendere Bedeutung bekommen. Community engaged dance practice kann die Einbindung von Menschen aus der Gemeinde oder einem spezifischen Ort sein, es kann aber auch alles sein, wo auf Augenhöhe in der Gemeinschaft gearbeitet wird. Und das sagt viel darüber aus, wie ich selbst künstlerisch arbeiten möchte. Ich möchte keine künstlerischen Prozesse eingehen, in denen alte hierarchische Strukturen reproduziert werden. Ich möchte in kollektiven Prozessen arbeiten, gemeinsam nach Konsens suchen und mich von verschiedenen Ideen inspirieren lassen. Und dies ganz unabhängig davon, wer an einem Projekt beteiligt ist.

Die Residenz hat mir die Möglichkeit gegeben intensiv über das, was mir schon immer wichtig war, nachzudenken und dies in Worte zu fassen. Und genau das hat mich in meiner Arbeit wachsen lassen.

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What does community mean here?!

Before my residency, I used the word ‘community’ rather carelessly. In the dance context, I meant projects involving non-professional dancers, nothing more and nothing less. I was using a label without looking closely at the ingredients.

CROWD has fundamentally changed this for me. I became aware of this during my first residency phase in Rotterdam.

In conversations with my colleagues, I began to reflect more on the word community and to ask myself, what does that really mean for me?

Do I really just mean that the project involves people who don't make a living from dancing, or does it mean more? The answer to this question is probably easy to guess. Of course, there was a deeper meaning behind this word for me. Only I had never thought about this so intensely.

CROWD gave me the opportunity to do this. In the various project phases, I was able to reflect on the word in new contexts, both locally and with different people.

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Keywords such as participation and eye level made a particularly strong impression on me. I quickly realized that community, as I understood it, did not exclusively mean a certain group of people from a specific place or district. It could of course do that too, but for me it wasn't the decisive factor that defines a community. The answer to the question of how I would translate community for myself is as simple as it makes sense to me. It's about community. It's about working together, exchange at eye level, letting each individual have their say and the knowledge that artistic work doesn't succeed from above, but is a joint process. A path that is best walked together, so that the full artistic potential that lies hidden in each group can be expressed.

CROWD has given the word community a more comprehensive meaning for me. Community engaged dance practice can involve people from the community or a specific location, but it can also be anything that involves working on an equal footing in the community. And that says a lot about how I would like to work artistically myself. I don't want to enter into artistic processes in which old hierarchical structures are reproduced. I want to work in collective processes, search for consensus together and be inspired by different ideas. And this is completely independent of who is involved in a project.

The residency gave me the opportunity to think intensively about what was always important to me and to put it into words. And that's exactly what made me grow in my work.

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Hannah Sampé, February 2022 As romantic as community- based art making sounds, the role of the conditions of labour and the role of economies around dance projects is not to be underestimated. Our residencies involved countless discussions about the working conditions of freelance artists with regards to travel, accommodation, interaction and negotiations with institutions, economic security, networking, burn-out, overbooking, double booking, unemployment, isolation from non-artistic communities at home, sustainability of their work.

The economic histories of places we were visiting and diving into played a crucial role in the shaping of cultural landscapes we encountered and were extremely prominent in our observations and interactions: Migration and displacement of people, physical ability and protection of certain bodies as opposed to others, absence and presence of people living there or once having lived there, the question of access to certain sites and places, the role and standing of nature.

In most of the places, art seemed to be interwoven into these fields in various ways. Be it the deserted island of Varjakka in Finland or the huge deserted coal mining sites in the Ruhrgebiet in Germany, artists seemed to be very welcome guests. What is this interesting relationship between art and post-industrial sites?

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On the one hand, sites that lost their economic value often provide what is scarce in cities, where many artists work: space. On the other hand, artists seem to be invited to act as the healer of a broken civilization or as the glue to weave nature and culture back together in sites where industry or civilization had a strong impact on nature.

Looking at this critically, the question arises, whether inviting artists to such spaces is simply another way to re-capitalize those places that lost their economic value and desirability?

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And how does this dynamic actually cater to the local community of these sites? Who profits from it, who is even involved and in touch with the art that takes place there?

These thoughts and questions remain from our observations and reflections and are what I would like to keep in mind with regards to my own practice and future projects.

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Elsabet Yonas and Maya Dalinsky, August 2022 Elsa: Did you experience feeling in community?

When/how?

Maya: I didn’t really have any very strong feeling of being in community. Which isn’t a bad thing. I also know from the past – and I guess this has kind of reaffirmed it for me – that I’m someone who enjoys having time to themselves but also having time just one-on-one or in very small groups.

That said, even if I’m with just one other person, there is kind of a feeling of being in community that’s possible. But I wouldn’t say that this one-to-one relationship is like a community.

When I am in a certain situation or with certain people, I am reminded of times I have felt in community. And that’s a very nice feeling. Remembering that is feeling in community.

Even if it’s not the current reality. So maybe feeling in community is something you can have even when you’re not directly involved with a community, not physically present in that space or with the people, or in that task or action or activity.

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Maya: What would you happily do again?

Elsa: The entire residency! But more specifically, I would happily reuse this mindset and approach toward creative process that allows room for the social aspects that feed into the creative exploration. This approach that allows for a balance and includes activities and experiences that are not conventionally considered “working”, because I think it produced really fruitful results.

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Elsa: What will you take away and incorporate into your practice/daily life? What risks could you take?

Maya: One thing that I’ll take away is definitely to not be shy about music. So, integrating music and dancing to music, and that being okay. And one thing I’ll incorporate into my daily life is the popping exercise: keeping tension in the arms and releasing… I’d also be interested in integrating something that Elsa brought into her workshop, which was the piece of paper at the beginning where you ask everyone to write down something that they hope for, a fear that they have, and their intention.

One risk I’d take is to not shy away from leading things more confidently, for instance my own workshop. I don’t have to hide behind goofiness or self-deprecating humour in order to make room or space. I have a responsibility to the people that come into my practice to lead them confidently, and guiding this does not mean that I am not giving them time and space for their experience. On a very concrete level that means just keeping things rolling along. Risking interrupting people, taking risks that are really about staying on task, while also being attentive to people’s need for rest or time to process things.

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Emma Jayne Park, August 2022 Space to develop a practice is crucial, both to the quality of our work as community dance artists and to our collective sanity as an industry. Having no time to reflect, refine and refuel is a sure route to burn out, and with burn out often comes the departure of those who have developed their craft over years – many have often done this quietly as they foreground the communities they work with and exist between – from the sector.

However, the practicalities of these spaces for reflection are far easier to define than the process of developing a practice. In preparation for CROWD, I asked several friends who work in artist development what they might expect to happen over four weeks dedicated to ‘developing a practice’ – none of them could answer clearly or simply.

All were clear that the artists had to drive this (phew!) but in some ways they also anticipated that all artists would have an ordered, reflective praxis for understanding what they need. This unnerved me a little: in my experience as an artist the time to develop a practice is reserved for a few, which is why these spaces are so crucial but also why they might be overwhelming.

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We are working most of the time.

We see the opportunity to develop and feel a pull towards it.

We apply with language that we think might entice a panel.

We are surprised when successful.

We are working all the time and don’t have time to mull it over.

We are grateful so will meet the expectations set.

We take care of the practicalities.

We arrive – and what next?

How can the work of development be truly responsive and emergent, particularly in the context of community dance practice? Because how is it possible to develop a community dance practice without being in and with community?

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It is easy to imagine that we know what we need before we arrive somewhere, and therefore that we can commit to opportunities as a frame for our time. Yet, when you often make things work on less time than is required, how do you know what you need from time without boundaries?

The empty schedule can look like a chasm, and as we plot our desires (and the desires of others) into it, it can quickly become full. So full that we return to the rhythm of not having enough time or not feeling spaciousness in the time that we have made.

And then before we know it, these desires we voiced when we didn’t have time have created an agenda for the week.

What do we do if this is not the agenda that best serves us?

And when in negotiation with another – a new collaborator whom we haven’t met – how do we renegotiate the time, so it offers the meaningful experience that we now desire, dreamt up together?

Is it ethical to organise at the last minute with communities?

Is it ethical to schedule a workshop without the full context of those artists who are developing together?

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I would argue that the process of organising a development residency is not dissimilar to the process of facilitating community projects. The deadlines and outcomes (with a pre-set agenda being a form of outcome) don’t always leave space to respond. And this is not a bad thing, necessarily, but a complicated question that Alex McCabe and Stefanie Schwimmbeck discussed at length. Where is the space to begin, respond and then decide what feels right? Where the time is best spent?

Even in a project as spacious as CROWD the patterns of behaviour that dictate the sector can creep into the room.

There is no judgement in this, it simply is true that everything is a microcosm of the world we live in, unless we shape it otherwise.

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a we

by Amparo González Sola, August 2022 We are in Reykjavik.

We, right now, are Ásrún, Amparo, Ólöf, and Tinna.

We are a temporary we, a constantly changing one.

We don’t know exactly what we will do together.

We delay the moment of making statements.

We decide to think of this encounter as a creative process.

We decide to trust in the fact that the encounter, in itself, will give us clues about how to continue.

We are not expecting big things, we trust in the fact that small movements can produce huge transformations.

We talk about how our practices began.

We realize that there is always a previous moment, a previous encounter.

We do a kind of archaeology of our practices.

We realize the amount of people and places that hold us, that hold our trajectories.

We thank them.

We talk about the politics of quoting, about the politics of acknowledgment.

We talk about voices and which persons we name when talking of what we do.

We immerse in the pool. Under the water everything resonates, under the water the words touch us and each sound is perceived through the skin.

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We talk about what things we notice and what things we don’t, about what becomes visible or invisible to us.

We talk about being able to perceive what seems to be invisible and to give attention to what we didn’t use to see.

We decide to make a list of things we notice these days together.

We do a collective list.

In the list we write places, persons, concepts, gestures, actions.

We make also a list of questions.

We don’t pretend to answer the questions right now, we want to stay a bit with them, letting them complexify our discussions.

We walk. Walking the thoughts move differently.

We walk against the wind, we can’t talk, the wind makes the words fly in the air.

We stay in silence.

We listen.

We discuss what a “community engaged dance” would be.

We ask each other: How do you relate with this concept?

We realize that a lot of prejudices are contained there.

We decide to let the discussion open.

We cook.

We share food.

We meet Vala and Lovisa.

We listen to their stories.

We share memories of the things we had done in the past.

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We share our screens.

We find things in common.

We find things different.

We talk about “context”, about the relevance of giving context, and at the same time the importance of avoiding putting labels or fixed categories to things.

We talk about our own contexts, and backgrounds.

We talk about how to avoid patronizing others, about how to break down prejudices.

We talk about community and inclusivity, about how some words become a kind of empty box.

We share some strategies we have used in our works.

We don’t know many things.

But we also know many things.

We go to swim, under the water we can feel the movement of others, under the water we can feel how our movement affects others and the environment.

Under the water we can feel how the others’ movement moves us.

We hang out in the pool.

We take breaks.

We feel that the breaks are very important moments.

We read Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui.

We talk about curiosity, about trusting in the process, about being patient.

We talk about how to create a collective patience.

About how to create a collective trust.

We wonder how an “extensive process” would be.

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We meet Sara.

We find things in common.

We find things different.

We talk about “context”, about the relevance of giving context, and at the same time the importance of avoiding putting labels or fixed categories to things.

We talk about our own contexts, and backgrounds.

We talk about how to avoid patronizing others, about how to break down prejudices.

We talk about community and inclusivity, about how some words become a kind of empty box.

We share some strategies we have used in our works.

We don’t know many things.

But we also know many things.

We go to swim, under the water we can feel the movement of others, under the water we can feel how our movement affects others and the environment.

Under the water we can feel how the others’ movement moves us.

We hang out in the pool.

We take breaks.

We feel that the breaks are very important moments.

We read Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui.

We talk about curiosity, about trusting in the process, about being patient.

We talk about how to create a collective patience.

About how to create a collective trust.

We wonder how an “extensive process” would be.

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We visit an independent theatre in the city, we talk about the need of creating community to produce social changes.

We walk.

We touch the lava with our hands, it is still warm.

And in the night the earth trembles.

We feel the earthquakes, a lot of earthquakes.

We have fear.

We are excited.

We think about all the processes that are going on on earth beyond our will, things that are happening, most of the time invisibly and silently to us, to think in this geological scale it is a kind of breath.

We decide to write something to share with you.

We create a temporary we, a we that is not homogeneous, a we that is full of contradiction.

This is an I, writing in we.

This is a fabulative practice.

A we as a fiction, a temporary one.

We think of this encounter as a creative process.

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Anni Puuperä, August 2023 Acts of care in Varjakka: Listen to the forest and rainy weather.

Take time to sense the island.

Dance with sticks and stones you have found.

Take care of them.

Give space to others.

Respect them.

I am just a visitor here.

So I choose to slow down and listen more.

I choose to take care of the people, environment and myself.

I spent two lovely and inspiring weeks in rural Varjakka. This was my first time there and also the first time I worked with Taikabox and Natalia Barua. So there were a lot of new situations and places during the residency. I decided that I want to approach this residency open minded and giving time to dialogue and listening. So I didn’t have a clear work plan before starting the residency in Varjakka and I think it was a good decision. This allowed me to practice deep listening and understand the context where I was working.

So what did we do in the residency? Natalia and I worked mainly together, which was great. We talked a lot, shared movement practice, explored Varjakka, had a sauna and dinner together. We also danced in random places and got to know local people.

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We collected materials from the village such as sticks, stones and different kinds of fabrics and took good care of them. During our stay in Varjakka we listened a lot and got inspiration from nature, people and animals. We heard so many interesting stories, found beautiful places and enjoyed the space and the silence.

During our residency we researched themes such as care, rest and listening. One of the key questions for us was how to take care of ourselves, each other and the environment while working. We started to develop different ways to work restfully and also taking care of our boundaries. We talked about rest and recovery with local people and also rested in public space. I think we in a way built circles of care during the residency: selfcare, community care, taking care of the environment and nonhuman participants.

The time I spent in Varjakka got me thinking about the concept of work and what it means to work as a community dance artist. What was special in this residency, is that we mainly worked outside and didn’t have a dance studio. I really enjoyed that. I think that dancing and art got closer to local people that way. This also got me thinking: do we need as community artists a separate dance studio? And what is actually the work we do as community dance artists? For me this residency clarified that listening is one of the most important work methods that a community artist has. Other important things are to have enough time for the process and a possibility to work restfully. For me it was

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really meaningful that the CROWD program allows artists to work without the pressure of some kind of outcome. Really dive into the research.

I am writing this text a few days after the residency ended. I feel thankful and taken care of. At night time I dream about Varjakka and all the people I met there. So I am still in the process of reflecting on the work we did there. My aim is to continue researching acts of care in artistic work. I am really interested in how a safe working environment affects the artistic process. How wild can we be if we feel safe?

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Chelsea Gordon, November 2023 What I’m taking from CROWD still feels like a bit of a blur.

The first residency with Hubert was about realising that anything is possible in a way, anything can be reframed to interpret something different. There was lots of play and rumination. TanzFaktur and our facilitator Nina Patricia Hänel gave us a lot of space to wander and encouraged dialogue within the studio and at home in our shared artists residence. Reflecting back I recognised how impactful it was having people support those ideas that I was still trying to make sense of for myself.

The second residency took place at the same time as some other professional development I was doing, and this all informed each other. There was a real emphasis in Birmingham on how to connect to people, and understanding what the intention is before the work even starts. How do we actually engage with people? How do we build relationships? How do we address what we want before we even approach people? I am learning that with community dance, people feel more confident when you have a realised idea or something that you’re sure about, even if it’s not 100% figured out.

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For people to feel comfortable enough to try and to fail, they need to at least know the skeleton of what they are approaching. They need to feel safe enough to be playful.

I felt I could be more authentic and vulnerable in the second residency, because of the familiarity we had built up in Cologne. On the very first day with Hubert, we went to the studio and were like, what to do?! Then we went for lunch, and an hour turned into two hours, and we didn’t know what we should get back into the studio for, so we went for a walk, explored, got chatting, and I thought: OK, I prefer this way of working. Hubert initiated it, and I felt safe enough to contribute because this was also natural for me. It took a moment for us to realise that there wasn’t any small print: the residency is for us to get to know each other and to explore community dance, and we can explore that the way we both see fit.

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I realised that a lot of the ‘getting to know each other’ involved asking ourselves: why do we do what we do and who is it for? I really appreciated Hubert’s freedom to constantly offer his mind and energy during both residencies, at times I felt very moved that we had connected so well and so quickly. Nina Hänel (TanzFaktur facilitator) put it perfectly: Hubert demonstrates the ‘what’ and I the ‘how’, and for us that worked incredibly well.

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There have been a lot of things that I have learned through CROWD that I didn’t know would be received as artistic or a practice. It’s like improvisation – the practice of “yes, and” – where anything you put into a space, it’s like: ok, let’s explore this. Because of that, you can pull out so much more that you wouldn’t have thought mattered or might be useful. In the second digital discourse session, one of the guest artists - Simone Kenyon - said that her practice involves walking. Walking is something I do habitually, to help declutter my mind or make sense of something: by the end of the walk I’ll have all these ideas and everything ironed out. But I didn’t realise that that can be a practice! Or that this could be a way of building relationships with people before getting into a studio.

I’m from Birmingham but don’t usually work here, so it was very humbling to have a residency here and think in that creative way. It forced me to face a lot of things internally, about how I engage with myself before engaging with other people. How do I get myself into the room? What’s my motivation? There is something important I had to learn about rediscovering your own city and Adam Carver (FABRIC facilitator) played a huge role in helping me reimagine the existing. It was necessary to acknowledge that I am also part of many communities and that how I treat myself will be reflected in how I work with other people.

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Lisa Reinheimer, November 2023 In 2021 I was artistic coordinator at DansBrabant, and one of the artists I was collaborating with, Jija Sohn, joined CROWD in its first year. So I got to see the programme from her side, and how in that period she rethought her practice. What does it really mean to be together in a space? What does it really mean to have different bodies and capacities and capabilities? How can we find ways to give that more equality – and what does that mean? If somebody needs a lot of support, is it always that we go and take care of that person? Or can we find a way to be on the same level, acknowledging that the other maybe needs more physical support, but I maybe need more mental support? In what way can we be next to each other? CROWD helped Jija to open up different perspectives on how you could accomplish that, thinking through how to deepen the practice and find different rules in order to lift the whole space together.

For Jija, CROWD also gave an acknowledgement that this practice is valuable. In the Netherlands, when we say community arts, it’s seen as amateur: the work is valued less. Also in 2021, DansBrabant was involved in a community-building project called Performing Gender – Dancing in Your Shoes, and this intersected with CROWD, helping me to see that social engagement is an important part of the practice that we’re doing and that we need to support. So when I decided to apply for the job of director at Dansateliers, that was one of the things I focused on.

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I arrived at Dansateliers in November 2022, and one of the first people I met was Amparo González Sola, a participant in the second year of CROWD. Amparo has been working with some very different and challenging groups, and goes back and forth, interweaving participation in her practice. In the productions she makes, maybe you can’t see that there was a whole engagement with a community: she gives it another life, both for the community and the work she’s creating. At Dansateliers we’re now writing our new culture plans for 2025-2028, giving an associates group a bigger production budget for four years, and Amparo is going to be part of that.

Merel Heering has been Dansateliers’s facilitator with CROWD for all three years, so for me she was a guiding principle in how this year’s residency could take shape. I brought to her lots of questions about leadership, and how the organisation works, hoping this could be part of Shaq George and Bakani Pick-Up’s residency conversations.

What does leadership mean in different contexts, either with a community or with an organisation or between an artist and an organisation? What is the responsibility that you carry? How much space do you give the other? What does it mean to build this relationship? I was really happy hearing how Bakani and Shaq had touched upon my questions: it gave me a lot of insight and energy in the way we are now refiguring Dansateliers.

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At Dansateliers we now say that we only want to collaborate with artists who are willing to share their practice with others. I really believe that the instruments or tools that artists develop in their practice have a value for our daily lives. So how can we open that up, exchange that on a daily basis, and on a more human, personal level? For some years we have hosted what we call Movement Class for non-professionals, anyone who enjoys movement practices, taught by artists who are working in the house.

Bakani and Shaq taught a class during their residency, which was lovely, and I got a lot of positive feedback from that.

Now we are going to bring in more programmes where we have different groups in the house that could work with an artist, or engage with a practice, or just get in touch with dance and movement, slowly building them up into a bigger community.

It’s also going to be a core value that artists think about audience and context at the start of the practice. Who do you want to share the work you’re creating with? You are never out of context: we want to make that more apparent, so it’s not just coming in at the end when you have a finished show. Once a month the office team join the artists we collaborate with in the studio: we start within their movement practice and then we talk about it, to understand better what it is that they do and how we can share or find words for it. What context would lift it up? Who can we partner up with to have a bigger impact? We find moving together and exchange from body to body very important, so everybody in the house needs to be part of that.

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It’s very inspiring for me to be in these international collaborations, thinking about our different contexts. Why do we organise ourselves in certain ways? A lot of it has to do with how the country is organised, how the funding is organised, how cities are organised – and that’s really different in each European city. When you are with international colleagues you have to really think about how you can inform somebody about these things. There are also differences in how you organise or value community dance, what kind of place it has and understanding how that works. It makes a big difference if you see community dance as a method of how we work as an organisation, instead of as a project that we do. The conversations within CROWD have helped me to form ideas about the context in this city in the Netherlands, and to find new or other strategies and questions to ask.

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2022 Residencies

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This article, first published in the Winter 2025 edition of Animated, is reproduced by permission of People Dancing. All Rights Reserved.

See www.communitydance.org.uk/animated for more information.