OUR WORK

Second Hand Dance is a disabled-led dance company driven with care by Artistic Director Rosie Heafford and Executive Producer Claire Summerfield. Established in 2013, we create touring shows and digital dance experiences for children and adults. Based in England our work has a growing international profile as well as local and regional impact. We have toured the globe – from the UK to Europe, China, Canada, and the USA. 

OUR VISION

Our vision is a world where dance, empathy, play and exploratory movement are central to the lives of children and adults, as vital and fluent as language. 

OUR MISSION

We create beautiful, sensory dance experiences that are accessible and welcoming to all bodies. Our work is bold, and distinctive, with a rich visual and participatory aesthetic. We use movement and play to create an expanded reality, opening new spaces for expression and feeling that forge connections across generations. We inspire our audiences to carry on dancing long after a performance has ended. 

OUR GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Visceral

We use movement to connect with, feel and communicate through our bodies. We encourage exploration and playfulness to stimulate the senses, discovering ways we can feel, hear, see, and smell dance.

Inventive

We create unique work that is devised by us and inspired by our audiences. It will not have been made by anyone else before. Our work evolves to find new means of expression across different mediums, opening fresh creative territories to explore.  We forge new partnerships, reach new audiences, and ask questions that stimulate empathy and reflection on contemporary society.

Collaborative

Collaboration with audiences is vital in the creation and performance of our work. With every project we make, we engage with children and adults throughout our research, centring their voices in the work. We dance together, we talk together, we observe together, and we allow this to inform our creative decisions.

Inclusive

As a disabled-led organisation we strive to remove barriers to engagement, whether our work is experienced in theatres, festivals, parks, hospitals, community centres, schools or online. We think about access throughout all our areas of operation, from producing to production and performance for our staff, collaborators, and audiences. This means taking time to think about integrated access as a core part of the artistic experience and including rest within our work.

Proactive

We advocate for change and the pursuit of best practice.  We advocate for access and inclusion for colleagues and audiences with invisible disabilities. We advocate for high quality dance experiences for children. And we are developing models for sustainable touring that are ecologically conscious.

OUR DEVELOPMENT

We are committed to improving the way we work, by prioritising the diverse needs of our staff and audiences and developing sustainable models for touring.

We are using the following questions to shape our development:

• What does being a disabled-led company mean and how do we practice this for our colleagues and audiences?
• How can live dance and digital work sit together and collaborate?
• How can we consider environmentally friendly modes of touring within our working model, from digital touring to overseas partnerships?