Business
Diversifying the talent pipeline Sho Shibata shares his perspective on how it makes business sense for us all to work together to close the opportunity gap.
Sho Shibata ISTD Trustee and Executive Producer at Stopgap Dance Company
I believe that the ISTD and its members can play an important role in levelling the playing field.
We all know that participation in dance can improve people’s mental and physical wellbeing and help them develop social skills like teamwork. I believe this is a big part of why most of us are in this business. The academic evidence for the wellbeing benefits of dance continues to grow, but so too is the evidence of the considerable imbalance between who gets to participate. This should concern us all – it means that we are inadvertently making dance inaccessible to some people and thus are being selective about who gets to enjoy it and its benefits. If we all agree on the potential impact of our artform, why would we want to make participation exclusive? I believe that the ISTD and its members can play an important role in levelling the playing field. As well as being a trustee of the ISTD, I am the Executive Producer of the inclusive dance company Stopgap. The company is well known for nurturing disabled people in the community and turning them into internationally acclaimed professional dancers. I know from anecdotes and seeing the lack of diversity in some dance schools that the syllabi the teachers use and the environment we promote are exclusionary for many disabled people. The big motivator for me to join the board of the ISTD was to try to address this, and I am very excited by the changes we are exploring as a part of ISTD’s work towards equity, diversity and inclusion. I genuinely believe that it makes sense to engage disabled people in dance. First of all, the industry has been moving towards inclusion for a number of years. I was thrilled to find out that the disabled dancer Musa Motha is due to join Rambert this year,
and Maiya Leeke’s participation in BBC Young Dancer was another landmark. Stopgap is also seeing more and more casting agents from dance, opera, theatre and television connecting with us to get disabled performers into their projects. The demand has grown to the extent that we cannot service all the enquiries. If the profession is demanding better representation, then the ISTD and its members (the de facto suppliers of talent to the industry) should surely respond. Participation of disabled people makes sense from a business perspective too. Many local authorities give significant autonomy for disabled young people to spend their allocated funds on activities that they want to do, and many of their parents are looking to give their disabled children the same kind of opportunities as their non-disabled peers. Over the last decade or so, all kinds of consumers have been moving towards choosing to spend their money on businesses that are socially aware, and all kinds of companies are realigning to be inclusive and responsible to gain a competitive edge. The Purple Pound campaign says that the spending power of disabled people and their households is worth £274 billion per year to the UK market. There is help out there for you to access these income streams too. If you are so inclined to turn your school into a charity, you can access grants from local and national trusts and foundations to start your outreach work to disabled communities. Or how about working like a social enterprise? If you can demonstrate the need from underserved communities and use the growing evidence of the benefits of dance as
10 Dance | Issue 496
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