English Dance and Song August 2024
This news item was published in English Dance and Song, the magazine of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. The world’s oldest magazine for folk music and dance, EDS was first published in 1936 and is essential reading for anyone with a passion for folk arts.
We're delighted to announce our new Guidance on Inclusion and Accessibility in Social Folk Dance.
Many festivals, events, and clubs have been producing policies and documents on this topic recently, and we wanted to capture and distil some of this great work as a reference guide for those looking to ensure their events and practice are as inclusive as possible.
The guidance has sections for event organisers, for dance teachers and callers, and for dancers themselves. Approaching accessibility and inclusion can be daunting. The approach we’ve taken is not to list every small detail of good practice, but to discuss reasons behind thinking in certain ways when approaching putting on events, and to hopefully start to raise awareness of some of the issues around accessibility that might impact people engaging with social folk dance.
Our social folk dance world is incredibly diverse, and it’s a real pleasure to see the results of good inclusion practice filtering down to people enjoying themselves on dancefloors – from wheelchair users who are able to safely access dance events, to young people of all genders and backgrounds who feel comfortable joining in with an activity if they can dance with their friends, or older people who can be accommodated at a safe pace and continue dancing for as long as possible.
When running your events, good, transparent information about what people can expect is key – not only to ensure people feel like they’re in a safe and well organised environment, but also to keep your artists and performers well supported and enable them to put on a great dance for you and your participants.
We've included a section for dancers which is designed to make people think about how they approach dancing at an event, be they an experienced dancer or someone coming into dancing for the first time. In the main, this section for dancers is offered as a template for organisations who might want to produce their own dancefloor policies.
The guidance concludes with some links to further reading and the policies of other organisations, which we hope people will find interesting.
Read the guidance in our Policies section
Jen Cox, Dance Development Manager, EFDSS
Photo: Family Barn Dance by Brian Slater
