Caring Cultures in Dance: helping you feel more balanced, resilient, and reconnected to yourself

In the rush of everyday life, wellbeing is often the first thing we put on hold. Caring Cultures in Dance, a one-day programme, led by three incredible practitioners, offers a compassionate, body-aware journey into wellbeing, self-care and the care of others. You will be expertly guided to explore how we relate to our minds, bodies, and identities when health, injury, pain, or neurodivergence shape our experience.

Delivered by Dancers’ Career Development & One Dance UK, this event is supportive and empowering - helping you feel more balanced, resilient, and reconnected to yourself. Open to all, this is an invitation to be curious about your sensing, knowing body. The day will end with a panel discussion and the opportunity to learn more about Dancers’ Career Development, One Dance UK and the ways in which they can assist you to build a sustainable dance career.

Please note, some of the content is informed by the speakers' lived experience and will include personal accounts of coping with mental health challenges (anxiety, PTSD), autism and pain management. Workshop timing: 10.00am-5.30pm.

By attending this workshop, you will:

• Discover the hidden psychological impact of injury, long-term conditions or illness, and how it shapes recovery
• Master practical strategies that support your own wellbeing and help those around you
• Gain insight into the application of movement practices to support self-care for dancers who are neurodivergent and/or living with chronic pain
• Explore strategies for working with neurodivergent and/or injured dancers to support sensory integration and pain moderation
• Gain deeper understanding of autism, particularly sensory differences, stimming, and pain perception, in the context of dance and performance
• Emerge with a clearer sense of what Somatic Experiencing can help with

What level of experience is this workshop aimed at?

This event is open to be people at all stages in their career, from recent graduates to established practitioners. It will be of particular interest to dancers (and those supporting dancers) who have lived experience of chronic pain, and / or diagnosed as neurodivergent.