How Do You Get Into Dance? Interview with Zoie Golding and Ollie Webb for ARTS PROFESSIONAL
“How do we nurture talent if the pipeline doesn’t exist?”
Zoie Golding and Ollie Webb are 20 years apart in age and experience. Coming from backgrounds where a career in dance would be unlikely, they have taken unconventional routes into the industry, as Rowena Price discovered.
WORDS: ROWENA PRICE FOR ARTS PROFESSIONAL | 6 SEPTEMBER 2023
[Abridged extract from full article]
As we head into the 2023-24 school year in an increasingly challenging environment - socially, politically and academically - dance education provision in schools is rapidly diminishing. There are scant resources for picking up the slack in the community and, for professionals across the industry, there’s concern we're careering towards a point of no return.
Uptake of creative subjects has been sliding and dance courses further along the education chain are disappearing. “We’ve gone backwards”, says Zoie Golding, Artistic Director of ZoieLogic Dance Theatre.
“It’s the very beginning of access to dance that I’m most worried about. If we take privilege and private education out of the equation, it’s state education settings that make options for career paths visible.”
Blurring boundaries
For young people, there’s a world of possibility online. Dancetok, for example, broadens horizons and blurs boundaries between amateur and professional. But that’s no substitute for access to facilities and teachers in schools to hook and hone potential in an artform so essentially physical and relational.
“My secondary school was built with the intention of being given specialist performing arts status”, says Ollie Webb, Project Coordinator at ZoieLogic Dance Theatre. “Now, the dance studio and theatre is being used for kids in detention.”
While this may not be widespread, it paints a dispiriting picture. If the bottom falls out of the industry, who will be dancing, teaching, choreographing, producing, project managing in generations to come?
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Read the full article at artsprofessional.co.uk
Image: ManMade, ZoieLogic Dance Theatre (2019). Photography: Cave & Sky
