In this special episode, we talk to two artistic directors about the current funding crisis ravaging our sector. Back in May, when the Greenwich Dance team was having funding applications repeatedly rejected, we were relieved to see renowned theatre director Nicholas Hytner's Guardian article "The arts in Britain are teetering on the brink. Here's my plan to save them". Here at last someone was talking about the dire situation the arts are in and, just as importantly, offering up with ideas about how to do something about it. And it turns out someone else had also been thinking constructi ..read more

In this episode, we talk to Valerie Ebuwa and Kwesi Johnson about making positive change. Valerie Ebuwa sets about to ‘make shit happen’. She has written articles about ‘how to grow wings’ and ‘knowing your aesthetic’ and has urged readers of her blog to ‘lead with your strongest foot to ensure a solid journey to the skies’. Kwesi Johnson believes creativity and innovation are the highest uses of intelligence. “It begins as a thought and becomes reality, that is the power of imagination and desire,” he says. So this was always going to be an enlightening conversation! We st ..read more

In this episode, we talk to Charlotte Vincent and Robert Clark about parenting in the arts.   Becoming a parent changes the lives of all who do it, but artists often need to make huge decisions about how they will balance the responsibility of caring alongside a profession that requires touring, weekend and evening work and situations where ‘WFH’ just can’t come into play. So how best to navigate these changes?   We start off by finding out what Charlotte and Rob’s dancing lives had looked like pre-children and then probe a little deeper into the conside ..read more

In this episode, we talk to Rosie Heafford and Neus Gil Cortés about making accessible work.   Today, there probably isn’t a company or organisation that would say they didn’t want to make accessible work, and yet there are still people excluded from it: be they performers, collaborators or audiences. We talk to two artists about their approaches to making work accessible and get some tips about how we as a sector might do this better.  We begin by asking our guests to talk a bit more about the work that they do before jumping right in to discuss the almost ..read more

In this episode we talk to Marla King and Adam Benjamin about environmental responsibility. Many of us have long recognised our role in protecting the planet but perhaps the last two years of the pandemic – when we lived in our parks and gardens, saw our skies fill with birdsong and our roads quieten – has unlocked a willingness for more of us to take action. But what does action look like for our sector? We start off by discussing what had changed for us in the past few years, how we came to notice our damaging behaviours (such as extensive travel) and how the climate cris ..read more

In this episode, we talk to Harriet Waghorn and Kamala Devam about their experience working across different genres of dance. As dancers we often train in streams of dance genres – often there are expected routes mapped out for us and aesthetics we are expected to achieve. It’s therefore refreshing to find artists whose work transcends those divides, fuses aspects of styles together to make new aesthetics, new vocabulary. What does that mean in terms of training for themselves, as well as making work, working with dancers who may not have the same experiences? We begin by a ..read more

In this episode, we talk to Deborah Light and Tom Hobden about building audiences for your work. We make art for people – and if we have no audience, what is the reason for the work? How do we then bring audiences to the work? How do we introduce dance to people who haven’t had an opportunity to discover it? And what do we want of them other than to be spectators? We begin by asking our guests more about their work and the work itself – Deborah making work in Wales with the company Light, Ladd and Emberton as well as being an independent maker and discussing the part instal ..read more

In this episode, we talk to Karthika Naïr and Eva Martinez about the role of dramaturgy. An artist’s creation space is a rather special place to inhabit. It’s vibrant, exciting, tense sometimes nail-biting. And it always feels to me to be an honour to be there. But by the same token, it comes with much responsibility particularly if you are invited not as an onlooker but as a contributor. One role, increasingly in use within the creation process is the role of the dramaturg. But what exactly is this, how do you become one and what benefit can a dramaturg bring to an artisti ..read more

In this episode, we talk to Katie Serridge and Nafisah Baba about Breaking Through. This episode was put together at Katie’s request, who took the initiative and emailed us offering to talk about the challenges she has been presented with as a young artist trying to break into an industry that effectively shut down only minutes after her graduation. Nafisah Baba, BBC Young Dancer 2017, joins us to share her observations of the world of work thus far. We start off by discussing how Katie and Nafisah came to dance, the courses and training they embarked upon to prepare them f ..read more

In this episode, we talk to Nancy Hirst and Dan Canham about Co-creating with Communities. Building cultural communities is at the heart of Arts Council England’s Let’s Create strategy and for many organisations, this kind of work is at the very heart of what we try to do. But it’s not easy… it takes time, patience, diplomacy and care to do well. And sometimes, the funding and expectations of stakeholders around us, plus perhaps our own over-eager enthusiasm causes us to make mistakes. So we ask our guests to tell us more about how we might do this work better. We start off ..read more