Community focus

2016
Various London Venues

A variety of dance projects for young adults with Mental Health Needs and SEND; Over the last 5 years I have created many movement projects with Community Focus, below is a small selection of these.

Zoom Project . August 2020

As Lockdown restrictions began to ease across the UK over the summer of 2020, Community Focus hosted an online creative week where Young People could connect and explore creative activities. We worked on building lots of energy within our dance sessions, learning movement phrases and offering the young people the opportunity to build their own ideas. We explored the idea of pedestrian movement and the ‘everyday’ using choreographic tools to turn this into more interesting movement.

Costume and Dance Creative Week . February 2020

The young people on this project explored dance from different cultures, creating short routines from different traditional dances. The young people gained important cultural capital as we watched dance from around the world and had images of different styles of dance around the studio. Alongside an art tutor the young people created costumes for each of their short routines and the week culminated in an outside performance for friends and family.

Half Term Creative . October 2016

Over the course of the October Half Term myself, Becky Leslie (assistant on the project) and around 6 young adults began a creative week of dance, based around the idea of the migration pattern of birds during this time of the year. We looked at the movements of the Swallow bird that travels across the world from parts of Europe to Africa and used creative tasks to explore our own choreographic ideas. We created a wealth of material and the young adults taught each other their own creations which was great for practicing their public speaking and communication skills. We used a different music as stimulus and feathers as props to inspire our choreography and had open showing to family and friends on the last day. Family and friends were then invited to come and dance with the feathers and explore for themselves some of the creative processes we used across the week. The young adults really enjoyed passing on the knowledge they had gained from the week to their friends and family at the end of the last day. 

Dance Against Stigma . October 2016

A 3 day intensive project for around 10 young adults to promote World Mental Health Day and to fight stigma against Mental Health issues. We created a hip hop dance piece and worked on an explosive dance battle showing off our best moves, highlighting the strength and confidence we have to fight stigma in society. We took this dance piece to the streets of North London in 3 different locations, to promote World Mental Health Day to the general public, and received a great feedback from the crowds we drew. The young adults also went into supermarkets and coffee shops to ask if we could leave flyers promoting other events in the borough centred around World Mental Health day. This was a great day out for the whole group raising self-esteem and working on independence and communication skills too.

 Spires Shopping Centre . March 2016

Over the course of 3 weekends a group of around 15 young adults created a site specific dance piece using colourful scarves to perform to the general public in the Spires Shopping Centre in Barnet. Myself and Becky led creative classes to bond the group and extend their movement range and implement healthy dance practice. I taught the class a piece of teacher led choreography and then set up creative tasks for the young people to create their own movement material. The participants got a real sense of achievement from taking what they had gained from our classes to the general public and we received great feedback from those who took part. This project was featured in the Young Barnet Foundation's launch video to highlight 4 local community projects and their importance to young people in the area.