6 minute read
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.
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.
Stopgap Dance Company’s youth dance classes
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 the answer to their problems, you will find many different ways to attract funding to kick start your inclusive group. Many businesses have used a move towards inclusivity as an astute business development trajectory to diversify income in the short and the long run. Dance schools and companies are not operating in a different landscape.
In addition to my involvement with the ISTD and Stopgap, I am an Area Council member of Arts Council England in the southeast. Over the last few years, I supported the development of Let’s Create, the Arts Council’s new 10-year national strategy for cultural development. In a nutshell, Let’s Create aims to: nurture Creative People everywhere in the country to develop Cultural Communities, which leads to a Creative and Cultural Country that is happy, healthy, and productive. The strategy is built on the positive impact that arts participation can have on individuals and their communities. However, it also points out the serious inequality of opportunities. It evidences many incidences where people’s identity, background and postcode determine their ability to access the arts, and it sees this inequality as one of the reasons why the country as a whole is not happier, healthier and more productive.
Stopgap Dance Company’s youth dance classes
Arts Council England is one of the most open-minded Government Agencies for arts in the world, and it welcomes funding applications from charities, individual practitioners and producers as well as a wide range of unincorporated or noncharitable organisations. They are actively looking for opportunities to invest in projects that bring creativity to underserved communities. Proposing partnership working with your local specialist companies with a track record of reaching out to your target groups would be a huge plus, especially if you can demonstrate your commitment to learning from the partnership to make your provision inclusive beyond the project. Using the Active Lives Survey, the Arts Council has also identified areas of low cultural engagement and grouped them into ‘Levelling Up Places’. If you are making an application from these areas or propose to do work there, you are more likely to receive funding.
Businesses within and outside of arts and culture are very much moving towards inclusion, and it is important that we and our members are aware of this to remain relevant in the 21st century and thrive within it.
