About

About the artistic research

Research Abstract

Positioning the concepts of care and place at the heart of community dance practice, this enquiry explores two curiosities.  First, when the artist negotiates their positionality through a practice that foregrounds care and place, how does this inform the development, implementation, evaluation and legacy of local and sited community dance? And second, how is community dance conceived when there is a shifting of care and attention to place, site and situation? – How does this impact the understandings, visions, values, definitions and processes of community dance; its artistic, social and wider civic agendas?

Several scholars and practitioners have called for a new ethics and politics of care to be brought to the heart of our everyday lives. These calls have been extended to argue that care has an aesthetic, embodied and sensory dimension (e.g. Thompson 2015, 2023). This sited, local, artistic project — Woolwich Wandering — recognises and responds to this need and thinks through community dance as a practice of care and place by putting ‘care aesthetics’ to work. As well as contributing to community dance and socially engaged arts scholarship, the research is pulled through contemporary thinking about care, urban design and placemaking.

Embracing the hybrid role of artist-ethnographer, this iterative, practice research draws on a bricolage of tools across practice, literature, auto-ethnography, and arts-based ethnography, over five phases: 1. Preparation, 2. Execution, 3. Exhibition 4. Final Evaluation, 5. Legacy and Transition, through the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. Driven by place-based practices of care — walking-wandering, pausing, resting, and writing — alongside creative ethnographic research activities with 25 residents, multiple practices, research tools, and voices were distilled into a multi-modal narrative of care. These methods produced diverse outputs that embrace storytelling as a way of knowing and sharing: an Interactive Online Map, a Podcast Series entitled ‘Sensing Woolwich’ and an ‘Open Letter and Care Manifesto for Public Space’. These transdisciplinary wanderings reveal a new narrative of Woolwich, Southeast London, identifying it as being a place that is both wounded and an environment of care (Till, 2012). The research makes methodological, scholarly and practice based contributions to community dance: it expands the radical potential of community dance from a socially engaged to an ecologically engaged practice, and recommends a shift away from its anthropocentric definitions; it positions community dance artists as place makers; it proposes the inter-dependent artist as an alternative to the independent artist todraw attention to the human and non-human entanglements of the practice; it affirms the importance of accessible and context specific movement practices —  e.g. pedestrian movement —to welcome newcomers into dance and everyday choreographic thinking; it proposes that a deep immersion in the contexts in which community dance artists work (or wish to work) can be achieved through a slow, durational, pre-production research approach; it proposes a practice that can confidently embrace and acknowledge agonism as a productive position. This research contributes important new knowledge to the pluralistic narratives underpinning the visions, values and definitions of community dance, and expands its interdisciplinary potentials.

Ethics statement: The research for this project was submitted for ethics consideration under the reference DAN 19 / 041 in the School of Arts and Digital Industries and was approved under the procedures of the University of Roehampton’s Ethics Committee on 30 October 2019 (original application), 22 March 2021 (amendment) and 19 July 2022 (amendment).

About Lizzie

Lizzie Fort is a dance artist, researcher and educator based in Woolwich, SE London. She is driven by challenging assumptions about who dances, what dance looks like and where it takes place, championing artistic potential in everyone. She teaches in community and school settings, working with people of all ages and abilities, such as the Vietnamese Women’s Group at Woolwich Common Community Centre, previously working with Greenwich Dance, leading online parent-baby classes, weekly outdoor family classes and dance walks; Amici Dance Theatre Company; and Magpie Dance.

Her 10+ years in Higher Education has focussed on teaching artist development and dance education, such as: MA/MFA Dance Leadership and Community Practice at Trinity Laban Conservatoire for Music and Dance; and previous roles with Royal Academy of Dance (RAD) (2012-2019), Imperial Society for the Teachers of Dancing (2018) and Canterbury Christchurch University (2011-2012); guest teaching at Roehampton University.

Lizzie has presented her work at conferences and written about inclusion and community dance for Animated and the RAD’s Focus on Education. She is trustee for Amici Dance Theatre Company.