Hidden Movement: Contemporary Voices of Black British Dance is the legacy of a two day conference held as part of LDIF 2013, the Let’s Dance International Festival in Leicester, which aimed to shed light on the untold personal stories, the trailblazers, struggles and successes of Black Dance in the UK, and in so doing preserve a piece of social history. This article attempts to shed light on what inspired me to organise the conference and to bring together and edit the different contributions into the subsequent publication.

LDIF (Let's Dance International Festival) was approaching its third year in what had become a very young people’s festival, in terms of opportunities both on and off stage. What had become clear over the few years of working in diversity and dance was how little of the history students, dancers, funders and programmers were aware of when it came to presenting, performing or working in the sector of Black British Dance. Everyone seemed to think they were the new great idea, with no consideration of what might have gone before, or the struggle that had taken place which now gave opportunity for a fresh, uniquely Black British, aesthetic.

If you asked a class-full of students about, for instance, Brenda Edwards or Namron you would get a blank expression. It felt that these voices were missing from the contemporary history around dance. What motivated them, what role did they play, has anything changed or is there still a struggle to be seen? The politics behind Black dance can be understood in parallel with the development of the race and equality agenda, but the subtlety of cultural policy and mainstreaming of cultural practice has always presented itself with image over substance. On the surface there are great strides forward but underneath when you listen to the voices full of strength, pride and tenacity we begin to recognise the real struggle there has been to be seen and heard. It is against this backdrop that it became my motivating factor for trying to ensure that we fill in the gaps and create a historical picture that is reflective of the new cosmopolitan landscape of Britain.

Hidden Movement needed to take the past as a starting point with an ambition to connect with other major initiatives that have a similar aim of creating a fuller picture of contemporary dance practice today, such as York St John University’s and De Montfort University’s initiative of British Dance: Black Roots or State of Emergency’s Black Dance Archive. The project then became very clear to me that I had to find a way to create access to a part of contemporary dance practice that had played, and still plays, an important role in bridging cultural divides and creating a contemporary language reflective of complex hybridity to be found in cultural politics.

I feel like a walking piece of history having worked or played a role in the development of diversity and the arts in so many key arts centres. It is with this knowledge that I recognised missing pieces of history when looking at dance. My motivation for doing Hidden Movement can also be found from my work for the Nia Centre, the Peepul Centre and Rich Mix, as well as supporting the development of Kuumba (Inkworks), the Bernie Grant Centre and the Drum - all key culturally diverse venues that have played a major role in the development of contemporary popular culture and all the brainchild of visionary leaders, who recognised the need to showcase the talent and richness of the changing landscape of British popular culture. All the voices found in Hidden Movement reflect leadership, vision, strength and determination as they put markers down that captured a new mood, a new era, a new direction, with the marriage of culture and style creating a new vocabulary around a cultural practice and policy that opened up access and created space for something new.

I was really keen to ensure that although Hidden Movement is art-form specific it told stories that linked the sector together. So Hilary Carty gave a historical perspective around the development of Black dance, while Bob Ramdhanie presented the mechanics of putting something in place that would grow and support the sector and Jackie Guy looked at the struggle to move from community to professional. Each voice captures a significant step change for them and for dance as they pushed forward. A lot has been written about dance or Black dance by academics but very little by the practitioners themselves. Hidden Movement moved away from theory to placing the voice of the artist, producers and practitioners centre-stage.

The challenge then was whether this would be of interest. Who will want to read a publication like this? How do you get the artists to engage with a project that asks them to tell their personal journeys? Where do you find the visual imagery to support their stories? However, galvanizing the artists around a two-day conference that was going to look at their careers appealed, as most of the artists wanted to put forward their story, their perspective, and their voice in a context where they would be heard. Finding archive photographs was a lot harder, as the rights for images are with a range of people and organisations. Interestingly, a lot of the artists do not have or own images of themselves as performers.

Thankfully, the publication has been received very well, with considerable demand from the academic sector as it fills in the gaps in theory around Black British Dance and has created space for a more complete story around this element of contemporary dance history. Now, having started on this journey of giving a voice to the missing and hidden voices that played a inspirational and innovative role in the development of dance, the next steps are to support the artists in ensuring they are not only recognised but acknowledged for pushing the boundaries and bringing something unique and fresh that reflects the cultural landscape of the UK.

So what next? Creolization of Dance in a Global Age: a symposium where dance practitioners, academics, policy makers and funders will share their thoughts and practice on the complex relationship between ‘creolization’ and dance. Going to the heart of the multi-cultural, multi-lingual Caribbean, Creolizing Dance will bring together for the first time in Britain key speakers from North America and the Caribbean: L’Antoinette Stines, Artistic Director of L’Acadco: A United Caribbean Dance Force; Patrick Parson, Artistic Director of Ballet Creole; Gladys M. Francis from Georgia State University; Aisha Khan from City University of New York; Hilary Brown, programme manager for Culture and Community Development at CARICOM. Also speaking are myself; Roshini Kempadoo, UEL; Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Director of Modern Moves, King’s College, London. The symposium will examine the meaning, relevance, impact and potential of ‘Creolizing Dance’: dance that creolizes, and the creolizing of dance. Through a unique combination of practice and conversation between academics and dancers, it will reflect on and reveal the spectrum of inter-racial, inter-ethnic, and sometimes paradoxical collaborations and affiliations embodied within the dynamics of Caribbean dance.

It has been a journey for all concerned and in many ways it is just the beginning.