Dance UK was set up in the early 1980s by a group of dancers who felt they needed an organisation to represent them, explains Helen Laws.
Our 130 corporate members include the majority of UK dance companies and vocational schools. We also have around 800 individual members ? dancers, dance teachers, choreographers, dance medics and scientists. The organisation works to promote a healthy, diverse and dynamic future for dance. We aim to advance the well-being and careers of individuals working in dance and to improve the conditions in which dance is created, performed and experienced.
One of our three main programmes is the Healthier Dancer Programme (HDP). Dancers? health and well-being has always been one of our key concerns and a medical advisory panel was set up in 1986. In 1990 we organised the first Healthier Dancer Conference which was a landmark in bringing together members of the dance profession with sports scientists. This was followed in 1993 by another conference, Training Tomorrow?s Professional Dancers, and then the National Inquiry into Dancers? Health and Injury. The findings of this major research were published in 1996 in ?Fit to Dance??, and key recommendations inform the educational activity of the HDP.
Thanks to funding from the Mackintosh Foundation, since 1999 we have been able to provide talks for the majority of vocational dance schools in the UK. These happen once a year at the beginning of the academic year and are generally for students in their first year, although increasingly we are asked to provide more in-depth refresher talks for the other years too. We cover the basics of all-round fitness for dance, warming up and cooling down, nutrition and hydration and injury prevention. The talks serve as an introduction to keeping healthy and injury-free, and are usually followed up by further seminars and workshops provided by the schools themselves.
Since the mid-1990s the HDP has organised day-, weekend- and even week-long events. These are collaborations with companies or schools as in-house development for their dancers, or with dance agencies or teaching societies as open events for dancers and dance teachers. We work with a range of dance science and medicine practitioners to provide tailor-made events. These cover a range of subjects, in different formats, and at different levels: from a day made up of a dance class, a workshop on injury prevention and a fitness session in the pool, to a full day on the psychological aspects of elite performance.
Dance UK publishes a set of information sheets, many of which cover important aspects of dancers? health and injury prevention. We also publish books on dance teaching, dancers? health, dance floors and practical information for choreographers and administrators. The HDP?s core educational activity is informed by regular meetings with our physiotherapy advisory group and medical advisory committee and regular contact with our members. Current projects include follow-up research to ?Fit to Dance??.
The Healthier Dance Practice National Survey 2002 of dancers, teachers and managements is now complete. Initial findings were presented in New York last year, and can be found in Dance UK News (issue 48). Over the next year or so, the programme will collate and disseminate the full findings of the survey, with any new recommendations arising from that and other recent dance science research. We will also be working with physiotherapists at vocational schools and many of the larger dance companies to streamline the recording of injury data. This should provide the dance profession with a much clearer picture of trends in causes and types of injury and the (hopefully positive) effects of injury prevention programmes within companies and schools.
The programme continues to encourage and facilitate effective communication between and within the dance and dance medicine and science communities, with the aim of giving dancers the knowledge and understanding they need to keep dancing stronger and better for longer!
Helen Laws is Healthier Dance Programme Manager at Dance UK. t: 020 7228 4994;
e: helen@danceuk.org