Participation in community dance: A road to empowerment and transformation?

The community dance movement in the United Kingdom has been very active in organizing and delivering dance projects for disenfranchised communities and individuals for several decades. But initiatives have gained momentum following a shift in policy for arts funding after the 1997 General Election. This article examines how dance social-inclusion projects seek not only to allow those excluded from mainstream opportunities to participate in dance, but also to empower them. The aim of the paper is critically to examine these aims while acknowledging the work that the dance community has done in welcoming participation from groups traditionally not associated with the art form. Sara Houston firstly sets the political and social context that welcomes notions of empowerment to take root within arts projects, then goes on to debate what practitioners mean by the term within the context of championing a social inclusion policy, and discusses how examples of claims manifest themselves in practice, if they do at all. She examines one three-year initiative for residents of a sheltered housing unit and an eighteen-month project in an adult male maximum security prison, outlining what the projects offered and considering the limits of recording evidence of empowerment. Sara Houston lectures in the Department of Dance Studies at the University of Surrey. Her work on social inclusion initiatives in dance has been published by Animated, Primary Health Care, and has also been utilized in a Government White Paper.