On Sunday 24 June at Temple Newsam park, Leeds is celebrating the visit of the Olympic Torch to the city in a sparkling event which is one of only four special city celebrations across the country.

As we welcome the Torch to the stage, it promises to be an unforgettable evening with headline bands and thrilling dance, music, singing and poetry performances. The event will buzz with the magic of London 2012, showcase some of the city’s amazing talent and create a mass participation experience that’s never been seen before!

And we want you to get involved too!

Space2, a Leeds based arts organisation, have been commissioned to recruit 1962 enthusiastic Leeds residents to join 50 young dancers to create a mass dance with 2012 people to be performed as part of the City’s dance showcase and Olympic torch celebrations. This will be a once in a lifetime event and your opportunity to be part of the Olympics, whilst showing the nation the best of Leeds. All ages and abilities welcome.

To find out more and register for a dance workshop, click here.

Yorkshire Businesses are invited to join in a World Record Breaking Simultaneous Dance

At 1pm on Friday 18 May 2012 – the day the Olympic Torch arrives in the UK – thousands of schoolchildren in the UK and across the world will join together to take part in a world-record breaking dance, created especially for them by Wayne McGregor CBE with an original score by Scanner and Joel Cadbury. The Record Attempt is a worldwide warm-up for Big Dance 2012, which is to run from 7-15 July 2012 and is part of the London 2012 Festival.

The event is not restricted to schools, though – Yorkshire Dance (the dance agency for the whole Yorkshire region, and co-ordinator of Big Dance Yorkshire events), invites the region’s companies, large and small, to register and join in.

Greggs are on board in Newcastle and Gateshead. Nissan plant staff in South Shields are taking part. Five NHS sites in Cumbria are, according to a spokesperson, “going wild for it.” And the Ambassadors Theatre Group (the largest in the UK) are encouraging their box office staff in the West End and around the country to join in.

What an opportunity to be seen promoting healthy activity and community engagement as part of the Cultural Olympiad!

Over 166 organisations in Yorkshire, most of them schools, have committed to taking part in the world record attempt, with a conservative estimate of 27,000 individual participants. Schools, businesses and other organisations are still signing up. Nearly 2100 schools nationwide have committed to taking part (around 10% of all the schools in the country), meaning over half a million participants will be dancing simultaneously – with the number growing every day.

With the support of the British Council, the dance will take place simultaneously not only in the UK, but across Europe, USA, South America, South-East Asia, the Middle East and the Far East. Each organisation will learn the same piece of choreography, created by Wayne McGregor, which is available to download from the Big Dance website now on www.bigdance2012.com/schools_and_teachers.php

The current world record for the largest simultaneous multi venue dance is held by the Netherlands, with 1,472 locations and 264,188 people dancing.

Contact Clare Huby at Yorkshire Dance, 0113 243 9867 to find out more.

The judging panel of Fresh 2012, our showcase of youth dance companies from across the Yorkshire region, are delighted to announce the result of their deliberations. Nine groups performed at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, on Sat 17 Mar, competing for a performance slot at Youth Dance England’s U.Dance 2012, a three day event at The Southbank Centre, London, this July.

And the winners are…

Momentum Dance
www.momentumdance.co.uk

Momentum’s piece, Identity is an abstract contemporary dance that explores the notion of ‘identity’ as an individual and as part of a community. It explores our own individuality and idiosyncracies – what make us unique? Juxtaposed with this is the exploration of community identity – what relationships exists? How do we influence one another? Solidarity, friendships, love, a sense of unity.

Momentum Youth Dance provides professional Contemporary, Urban and Ballet training, choreography and performance experience for dancers aged 14+ from across the Yorkshire region. Identity is the first performance by this cohort of Momentum dancers.

Youth Dance England’s Sara Reed, one of the independent judges, commented, “As always, at these events, it was very hard to make decisions and I have been hugely impressed by the continuing rise of standards in youth dance performances across the country in recent years and Saturday’s performances were no exception.”

Kirsty Redhead, Yorkshire Dance’s representative on the judging panel, added, “We’d all like to extend our congratulations to Eddie Copp, Keith Luke Gillott and the dancers of Momentum. Their performance was outstanding, and though the competition was very fierce indeed – and the judges really had their work cut out – Momentum are very worthy winners.”

Yorkshire Dance is very pleased to announce that Mind the Step, our weekly creative dance class for adults with learning disabilities, is one of Waitrose Leeds’ Good Causes of the Month for March 2012.

Shoppers at the Meanwood branch in Leeds are handed a green token at the checkout, and given the opportunity to drop it into one of three charities’ boxes. At the end of the month a pot of £1000 is divided between the three charities in proportion to the number of green tokens each has been given by shoppers.

We’d be delighted, if you’re a shopper at Waitrose in Meanwood, if you’d allocate your green tokens to us this month. You would be lending invaluable support to Yorkshire Dance’s work with adults with learning disabilities, allowing us in small but very significant ways to enrich their creative experience at Yorkshire Dance. Please help!

This half-term, Young people from the Seacroft area of Leeds are developing their filmmaking skills as they take part in a three-day film challenge at Yorkshire Dance and produce a short movie about hip-hop dancing.

The teenagers are all members of East Feast, an initiative set up in east Leeds which enables ‘hard-to-reach’ young people to participate fully in arts and cultural activity and help shape local decision making about creative provision. The project is run by Space2, a local charity which uses the arts to promote positive change.

The half term project is one of many cultural activities the youngsters have been taking part in over the past few years. They are filming members of Yorkshire Dance Youth and Yorkshire Dance Youth Juniors – two urban dance companies mainly made up of young people from the Seacroft and Richmond Hill area of Leeds.

Space2’s Young People’s Project Co-Ordinator Emma Hopkinson says: “The aim is to give these young people the confidence, knowledge and skills to access arts provision locally and across the City, to have their own opinions and a means of influencing local decision makers.”

In some cases the project has enabled individuals to take big steps in their personal development, including returning to school, applying for college and volunteering on local programmes. The project particularly targets hard-to-reach young people and those already interested in arts and culture.

The biggest achievement of the project was the selection, 18 months ago, of four members of the group to represent England on a cultural exchange trip to France, where they presented their art work to HRH the Prince of Wales.

Several participants have pursued further training in media and one has overcome exclusion from school to return and complete her education. Many of the group now access other arts provision both locally and in the city centre, including guitar lessons, East Leeds Youth Theatre, Carriageworks Theatre Group, Breeze Arts Foundation, school productions and the Seacroft Voices of the Day community choir. All the participants have received Bronze Arts Awards and are now working towards their Silver Awards. Four of the young people’s achievements have also been recognised at city level with three bronze PAYP (Positive Activities for Young People) Awards being won and one Gold PAYP Award.

The film challenge project is funded by Jimbos Fund and the finished film will be shown at Hyde Park Picture House in April.

Yorkshire Dance is proud to announce a new association with Luca Silvestrini’s Protein. As a Yorkshire Dance Partner, Protein will be developing a series of exciting new performance projects in Leeds and the county of Yorkshire over the next few years.

The partnership is the culmination of a decade long relationship with Protein which began with the commission of Publife in 2001 and has continued with a series of highly successful participatory and professional development projects. Most notably, the Yorkshire Dance commission of Protein’s inter-generational work Alfresco has been hugely influential, leading Luca Silvestrini to produce a series of such projects internationally, most recently with Greenwich Dance in London and Mercat de las Flors in Barcelona.

Luca Silvestrini released a statement saying: “This partnership strengthens Protein’s relationship with the county of Yorkshire and Leeds which has always been very important to the company. Our shared commitment to dance work grounded in the everyday experience of participants is the main focus, and we believe that, with this joint ethos, we will create work for Yorkshire which is accessible, relevant and defines innovative contexts in which to enrich the dance experience of participants and audiences. The partnership complements Protein’s continued associations with other key dance agencies, The Place, Greenwich Dance and DanceXchange.”

In the run up to the formal start date for the partnership in April 2012, Protein is in Yorkshire with performances of its critically acclaimed work, LOL (lots of love) at Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield (2 February) and Sheffield Lyceum (3 April).

Protein: www.proteindance.co.uk

The Big Dance 2012 Handbook is out now!

Join us and get involved in the UK’s biggest ever celebration of dance. Yorkshire Dance is part of the Big Dance Hub for Yorkshire, planning events between 18th May – 9th September 2012 to give everyone the opportunity to get dancing.

Yorkshire Dance is currently recruiting volunteers for Fresh 2012, a showcase of the best youth dance from across Yorkshire.

Fresh 2012 will take place on 17th March at West Yorkshire Playhouse.

For more information log on to: www.yorkshiredance.com/youth/fresh-2012/

We are looking for motivated and enthusiastic volunteers aged 18+ to help us with a variety of responsibilities on the day.

Whether you are interested in dance, theatre, performance, event/stage management or you are just good-natured we want to hear from you!

Call us on 0113 243 9867

or email

fresh2012@yorkshiredance.com

Join us for a weekend with Candoco Dance Company and Yorkshire Dance
for GCSE dance teachers and all dance practitioners and students

Sat 5 Nov, 11.00am – 5.00pm
INSET day for GCSE dance teachers

Sun 6 Nov
Artist Development Day, 11.00am – 5.00pm
& Celebration of the 3-year Yorkshire Dance / Candoco Moving Bodies project, 5.30pm – 7.30pm

Includes a free ticket to see Candoco’s Turning 20 – Anniversary Programme
at The Riley Theatre, Leeds, Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Sat 5 Nov, 7.30pm

www.yorkshiredance.com/candoco