Manchester will never develop a stronger dance audience or community without a dedicated dance venue or centre and a robust regional dance development agency and a strong commitment, supported by funding obviously, to make a significant change.
So far as I can tell, Manchester City Council has been very resistant to acknowledging this truth, relying on The Lowry to magically provide some kind of dance infrastructure in the city - sorry, the adjacent city.
Dance Manchester lost its funding and passed its mantle on to the city's only dance company of anything resembling national significance, Company Chameleon, which is no solution, maybe actually a bad solution.
Salford University offers dance training programmes but MMU have not only closed their Crewe campus but closed the dance training they provided there. They are building a new theatre in the heart of the city to replace the Capitol but dance will not have a home there. A robust dance culture works better with a community of dance, performance and movement students of all ages from GCE to postgraduate.
The Dancehouse is a dancehouse in name only, home to a mediocre dance school providing dance training for whatever the opposite of the cream of dance students is, and bolstering the dance ranks of regional musical theatre touring and cruise ships entertainment.
In the past ten years I have seen Manchester's once reasonably well-established but weirdly invisible and isolationist dance ecology become even more invisible or increasingly work away from the city. The face that CONTACT's closure has seen TURN - which was the annual opportunity to see what on earth these people you mostly never see at any other time - are doing and working on disappear for two years. The attempt to build and encourage dance in Manchester - Manchester Dance Consortium - starved in face of lack of oxygen or enthusiasm from more than a literal handful of individuals.
Greenroom closed due to funding cuts; despite best efforts audiences seem unwilling or incapable of travelling to Z-Arts or other 'out-of-town'; venues; Waterside , Sale programmes dance but doesn't attract big audiences in my experience, not helped by the occasionally poor quality of their programming; CONTACT left dance high and dry with its potentially risky capital infrastructure plan that has closed it for two years; HOME has largely failed as a self-programming theatre thus far -symptomatic of something of a crisis in creative, less-commercial theatre nationally - and has never supported dance as it promised to; commercial pressures and some incomprehensible programming - not to mention terrifyingly conservative audiences - have knocked much of the dance puff out of The Lowry's sails.
I believe the picture is national to an extent, and I do believe that dance is in some serious trouble caused by a complex matrix of funding cuts, community engagement that only is of interest to the participants; educational strangulation and a failure to feed or stimulate a dance audience at a national level. Dance on TV only translates to support for ballroom styles, cabaret fluff and flashily empty street dance. And people are more interested in dancing in the aisles than watching dancing on the stage.
The only bright spots are (in Manchester) the Factory - if MIF and the artistic and programming team that will run it continue to support dance - and the considerable talent and innovation in this country that continues to thrive in the face of all the forces that suck the life out of dance infrastructure - and the impact of Brexit on this is still hard to fully assess. Brexit could seriously compromise the internationalism and international creative collaboration that makes dance so richly and culturally vibrant.
So, what is the answer? And what are the questions?
So far as I can tell, Manchester City Council has been very resistant to acknowledging this truth, relying on The Lowry to magically provide some kind of dance infrastructure in the city - sorry, the adjacent city.
Dance Manchester lost its funding and passed its mantle on to the city's only dance company of anything resembling national significance, Company Chameleon, which is no solution, maybe actually a bad solution.
Salford University offers dance training programmes but MMU have not only closed their Crewe campus but closed the dance training they provided there. They are building a new theatre in the heart of the city to replace the Capitol but dance will not have a home there. A robust dance culture works better with a community of dance, performance and movement students of all ages from GCE to postgraduate.
The Dancehouse is a dancehouse in name only, home to a mediocre dance school providing dance training for whatever the opposite of the cream of dance students is, and bolstering the dance ranks of regional musical theatre touring and cruise ships entertainment.
In the past ten years I have seen Manchester's once reasonably well-established but weirdly invisible and isolationist dance ecology become even more invisible or increasingly work away from the city. The face that CONTACT's closure has seen TURN - which was the annual opportunity to see what on earth these people you mostly never see at any other time - are doing and working on disappear for two years. The attempt to build and encourage dance in Manchester - Manchester Dance Consortium - starved in face of lack of oxygen or enthusiasm from more than a literal handful of individuals.
Greenroom closed due to funding cuts; despite best efforts audiences seem unwilling or incapable of travelling to Z-Arts or other 'out-of-town'; venues; Waterside , Sale programmes dance but doesn't attract big audiences in my experience, not helped by the occasionally poor quality of their programming; CONTACT left dance high and dry with its potentially risky capital infrastructure plan that has closed it for two years; HOME has largely failed as a self-programming theatre thus far -symptomatic of something of a crisis in creative, less-commercial theatre nationally - and has never supported dance as it promised to; commercial pressures and some incomprehensible programming - not to mention terrifyingly conservative audiences - have knocked much of the dance puff out of The Lowry's sails.
I believe the picture is national to an extent, and I do believe that dance is in some serious trouble caused by a complex matrix of funding cuts, community engagement that only is of interest to the participants; educational strangulation and a failure to feed or stimulate a dance audience at a national level. Dance on TV only translates to support for ballroom styles, cabaret fluff and flashily empty street dance. And people are more interested in dancing in the aisles than watching dancing on the stage.
The only bright spots are (in Manchester) the Factory - if MIF and the artistic and programming team that will run it continue to support dance - and the considerable talent and innovation in this country that continues to thrive in the face of all the forces that suck the life out of dance infrastructure - and the impact of Brexit on this is still hard to fully assess. Brexit could seriously compromise the internationalism and international creative collaboration that makes dance so richly and culturally vibrant.
So, what is the answer? And what are the questions?