About:
About the Festival – Its Background and Aims
Why a Festival?
Back in early 2006, DanceXchange (dx) and Birmingham Hippodrome hatched the idea for a significant new dance festival for Birmingham, an event that would really make its mark, both on the dance scene and on the City itself.
This was prompted by a number of factors. Firstly, it was in recognition of the great wealth of dance organisations and venues in the West Midlands: Birmingham was already a major centre for dance activity from Ballet to Contemporary to South Asian Dance, and the West Midlands had the highest concentration of major dance artists and companies outside London. The festival concept was developed to bring worldwide attention to this amazing resource, building on dx’s previous success in managing dance festivals such as British Dance Edition in 2002 and The Big Mission in 2005, and also on Birmingham Hippodrome’s WideWorld International Performance series, which had been very successful in introducing the theatre to a vibrant young audience. A festival would enable the partners to take this to a new level and be more ambitious in their dance programming than ever before.
Secondly, over recent years, Birmingham had made great strides in its urban regeneration and cultural renaissance – and it had become widely recognised that a thriving portfolio of distinctive festivals could play a vital role in driving this forward. dx and Birmingham Hippodrome wanted their dance festival to play a major part in this, highlighting Birmingham as an international cultural city.
What is its focus?
The Festival partners always intended for the programme to be of exceptionally high quality whilst remaining accessible and inclusive. Hitting on the ‘international’ idea brought the whole concept into sharper focus, as this really enabled something different: with no UK dance festivals of this scale and quality with an exclusively international focus, there was a real opportunity for this Festival to become a market leader. There would be an international dimension to everything in the festival. It would bring international artists and companies to perform in Birmingham and would have a special focus on fostering collaboration between UK and international artists. Internationality would be its unique angle, as would the sheer diversity of styles embraced by its programme.
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Both the partners and the funders were keen for the Festival to build new audiences and reach people from a diversity of social and cultural backgrounds. Indeed, this intention underpinned the Festival programming, as it was hoped that the broad range of styles on offer, including popular dance forms such as Salsa and Bollywood, would ensure the accessibility of the programme to non-dance audiences. As such, the Festival would enable audiences to see a vast array of stimulating international work that would otherwise be out of reach, and would open up new ways to introduce people to healthy dance activity through a range of participatory projects and workshops.
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An overarching goal of dx was the development of the dance ecology of the West Midlands, and their central aim was to nurture professionals and bring talented artists to work in the region. With this in mind, professional development became a central strand of International Dance Festival Birmingham, with extensive opportunities created for artists through the international commissions and partnerships at the heart of the festival, and through masterclasses, lecture demonstrations, networking and debates.
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With all this in mind, the Festival partners have worked hard to shape an impressive and inclusive programme, which is truly international in scope – and that they hope will pave the way for future festivals in 2010 and 2012, the Olympic year.