ABSTRACT
Set within a wing of a prison in Staffordshire, England, the performance given by inmates in conjunction with Motionhouse Dance Theatre was the culmination of eighteen months of contact improvisation workshops.1 The project, Dancing Inside, was characterised by its funder, the Arts Council England, as a social inclusion initiative giving those socially excluded from society – in this case, men serving long sentences in prison – a chance to experience art and potentially gain social and personal benefits from participation. In a long line of such community dance initiatives stretching over a period of approximately thirty years, it provides a focus for this chapter, the aims of which are to:
examine the concept of participation benefit as it has entered political • thinking, particularly within the framework of policies concerning themselves with social inclusion and exclusion; discuss the implications for choreographers working with the socially • excluded within the context of the ongoing discourses concerning both inclusion and exclusion.
