The Place – London’s creative powerhouse for dance development – has been leading the way in dance training, creation and performance for 50 years.
With a mission to power imagination through dance, The Place is inviting artists to apply for the Work Place Associate Artist programme.
Work Place is The Place’s unique programme of tailored support for professional choreographers. It creates a home for a community of artists, helping to sustain them and provide conditions for their work to grow and flourish.
Work Place recognises that each artist is different. What an artist needs depends on the type of work they make, their experience, ideas, ambitions and the barriers they may face along the way. Work Place artists will receive bespoke support alongside a structured programme of creative and professional nourishment over a 5 year period.
The new Work Place programme will be open to UK-based artists working with any kind of dance practice, style or format engaged with contemporary ideas. Artists should have been creating dance based performance work in a professional setting for more than 3 years. The Place is keen to hear from artists they we haven’t worked with before as well as artists that have existing relationships with the organisation.
The new Work Place cohort will represent the range of artists in the UK, and applications from those who are currently underrepresented in the dance sector, including but not limited to, disabled artists, artists from financially disadvantaged backgrounds, artists who experience racism, artists with care responsibilities and artists who are LGBTQIA+ are strongly encouraged.
Interested artists are asked to apply with a short Expression of Interest. Applications will close at midday on Wed 9 Dec 2020.
Eddie Nixon Artistic Director of The Place says,
The Place is a home for dance that we share with many artists, but none more closely than those in the Work Place. Over the last 8 years we have learned, created and grown alongside our last cohort. Now, we are looking forward to working side by side with a new group of artists over the next 5 years to reimagine and reshape each other’s work.
A New Affiliate Artist Scheme
Alongside Work Place, the new Affiliate Artist scheme will support several former Work Place Artists, some of whom have been supported through Work Place since its inception in 2011.TheAffiliate Artists form a community of critical friends to The Place, as they continue to develop their own choreographic practices and work. The Place will remain a home to these Affiliate Artists, helping to sustain and enable them to evolve their own work, and their ideas, expertise and experience will continue to shape our creative programmes and our vision for the future.
Ben Duke, founder of Lost Dog and Affiliate Artists says
The Place has been the single most important partner in my development as an artist and in the development of Lost Dog as a company. From the beginning of my career, The Place showed a willingness to trust what I was trying to do and have offered financial, logistical and emotionalsupport through the various ups and downs of my trajectory. I only realise now how important it has been to have the support of an organisation who believed in the work I made. With each project and with each stage of life, The Place have offered help depending on the changing needs of the work and the company. What I value is the people who make up this organisation. They have been Lost Dog’s long term allies, and I owe them a huge debt.
Affiliate Artist Frauke Requardt says
My time as Work Place Artist was much more than having someone to help with admin and produce my work. It’s also been a choreographic home which is a rare thing given the often somewhat ‘homeless’ nature of the profession. To have an institution believe in you and have your back is deeply encouraging and creates the conditions for good work to happen. Meeting regularly with fellow choreographers meant that I felt held in my development as artist within a community- it opened new horizons as we all care about different things in our art. I am grateful to continue to work with The Place as Affiliate Artist – they are incredibly open to new ideas and able to pull them off!
Former Work Place Artists include:
Tony Adigun, Amy Bell, Rosemary Butcher, Rob Clark, James Cousins, Claire Cunningham, Ben Duke, Simon Ellis, Vicki Igbokwe, Frauke Requardt, Rosemary Lee, Eva Recacha, Luca Silvestrini, Moreno Solinas, Vera Tussing, Igor Urzelai
More information about the Work Place programme and the application process can be found here.
Feature photo:
Lost Dog – Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me). Photo by Danilo Moroni