Dance City has been awarded £240,000 from the Culture Recovery Fund via Arts Council England, to support the organisation through the COVID-19 pandemic.

This represents a huge amount of confidence in, and support for Dance City’s work in what has been a challenging year, and with many challenges still to come.

Dance City is one of the few cultural organisations in Newcastle to reopen its doors to the public, with socially distanced dance classes. Many classes are now hybrid, meaning audiences can ‘be in the room or on zoom’. We  have transformed our education delivery to enable blended or fully online teaching to our Centre for Advanced Training (CAT) students, and our BA and MA students, all of whom passed their courses against the odds. This summer we also opened up studio space for professional dance artists to use free of charge, and we have programmed (and sold out) our first socially distanced theatre performance.

The grant provides us with a healthy chance of survival through the next phases of the coronavirus pandemic, which seem likely to involve sustained periods of restrictions on social, educational and leisure activities.

We will spend the money on vital activities which will enable Dance City to keep delivering live programmes of dance activity for our customers, students, and the professional dance artist community in the North East.

We will invest more in technology that allows us to offer more online dance provision. We will be able to mitigate the impact of higher delivery costs against lower income. We will continue to deal with coronavirus restrictions creatively and proactively to offer a robust programme as can be possible, to serve artists, learners, participants and audiences with all we can.