Dance Residency: Movement, Choreography and Community (Young People’s Programme)

This residency invites a choreographer, dancer, or movement-based artist to explore how dance can bring people together - centering movement as a shared, social, and creative act. At its core, the residency will focus on how choreography can create spaces for connection, exchange, and collective expression, positioning dance not only as performance but as a way of gathering, making, and building relationships. This residency will be embedded in the V&A Young People's team, working with young people as collaborators. The residency will prioritise co-creation and participation to support them in developing their own creative practice, increasing their creative confidence, and seeing performance as a safe space to discuss pertinent issues.

We are particularly interested in practices that support young people to shape and contribute to the work - exploring how movement can be a tool for communication, resilience, storytelling, and creative ownership. This may involve workshop-based processes, informal sharings, or evolving group-led outcomes that emerge over time. We are particularly interested in choreographic practices that are experienced live and in relation to place, exploring how dance might occur across and beyond gallery settings, inviting artists to consider how dance and movement might activate the museum’s galleries, courtyards, and surrounding environments, even where elements of the work are later captured or documented.

The residency should demonstrate a strong commitment to inclusive practice, engaging young people from a wide range of social, economic, and educational backgrounds, recognising dance as a vital space for cultural expression, identity, and community. We encourage artists to think about how their practice reaches, includes, and resonates with a broad range of participants, and how choreographic processes can support inclusive, accessible ways of working. Drawing on the resources and context of the V&A’s Theatre & Performance Dance Collection, the residency offers an opportunity to connect contemporary movement practices with wider questions of belonging, participation, and how young people come together through dance.

While the brief is intentionally open, artists might draw inspiration from forms of collective gathering - such as festivals, social dance, or carnival - where movement, music, and participation intersect. Equally, we welcome approaches that explore how choreographers build communities through ongoing collaboration, shared authorship, and co-production.

More information and how to apply here:

Residencies  · V&A

Note, these calls are aimed at early-to-mid-career artists/practitioners. We are unable to engage with anyone who already has work in the V&A collections.