ABSTRACT
Like the community arts movement the numbers and achievements in Britain of artists of all kinds from Asian, Caribbean, African and other backgrounds outside Britain are much greater than usually is acknowledged. These are British artists, often second, third, fourth or more, generation citizens, enriching Britain’s culture and economy as the Huguenots did in the seventeenth century and Jewish and other immigrants did in the nineteenth century. Today’s British people descend from a very, very mixed past. At present, however, the hegemony of British society works against artists from Black and Asian backgrounds so that their arts become marginalized in the same way that community arts tend to be marginalized. There is, too, undoubted and continuing discrimination throughout British society. One of the most significant achievements of the Arts Council’s dance department during the last twenty years, therefore, together with Regional Arts Associations, the Gulbenkian Foundation and some other funding bodies, is that against this hegemonic tendency they have helped to establish Black and Asian dance firmly within the day-to-day practice of dance performance, teaching and workshops alongside other dance art forms.
