Empowering mixedabled/inclusive dance across international communities
Partners: Anjali Dance Company (Derby, England) and com.dance (Horben, Germany)
Image © Jennifer Rohrbacher
“Anjali Dance Company and com.dance will work together to explore each other’s unique, artistic ways of working with and for our communities of diverse artists. As well as online meetings, both organisations will visit each other to exchange practice face to face and will develop an international dance network for sharing knowledge and advocating for the talents of diverse artists on a wider scale. This activity allows us to initiate what we hope will be a long partnership that sees us actively working to promote the possibilities of diversity within dance, in our communities and beyond.”
Anjali Dance Company and com.dance
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In June 2024, three Anjali dancers, three team members and three parents visited com.dance in Horben, Germany for the first of their exchange visits.
About the partners
Anjali Dance Company is a small yet ambitious charity celebrating the extraordinary creative potential of people with learning disabilities. We empower individuals as creative artists, supporting them to demonstrate their extraordinary talents, develop their professional skills and, by doing so, transform the landscape of the arts industry to be more accessible and open to innovative ways of including a wider range of people within its eco-system.
Established in 1995, Anjali has become a leading force within dance and disability, utilising its expertise in these areas to create positive change within an often-marginalised area of arts and wider society. Alongside a successful education and outreach programme, the Anjali company creates and performs high-quality, original work, in collaboration with renowned, world-class choreographers.
We are committed to challenging preconceptions about disability; actively contributing to social cohesion by advocating for greater inclusivity and accessibility within all areas of society and supporting the people we work with to overcome barriers so that they can transform the current disability narrative to one that celebrates difference and creates a positive impact in the way society works.
https://anjali.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/AnjaliDance
https://www.instagram.com/anjalidance
https://www.facebook.com/anjalidance
https://www.linkedin.com/company/anjali-dance-co/
com.dance
The essence of our artistic work is to bring life, not perfection, to the stage. Dance as an art form is a privilege for all people. Our path and our goal are to bring lived diversity in the art-dance-space, further into society, into the public sphere, to entrench this lived diversity in the art-dance-space and to make it tangible up close, actively or in the audience space. This implies questioning categorical thinking and prejudices, breaking down and ultimately eliminating fears through new experiences at eye level. Our quest is to establish a normality of differences. We bring inclusive contemporary dance art to people as active participants or as audience with our inclusive dance projects for the stage, with the dance projects we organize outdoors, such as the mobile summer dance floor in public space, with a regular mixed abled training group, and with participation in public events, e.g. Freiburg Museum night (2022).
Image © Anjali Dance Company, photographer Judie Waldman
