ABSTRACT
Since a large part of dance is, or should be, about joy and celebration it is no marvel that some dancers seek to communicate this joy to the sick, the disabled and the elderly in many forms. The many forms reflect the many ideas of many people who undertake such caring work. Their multiplicity was outlined in the Carnegie Trust’s report Arts and Disabled People in 1985. One part of the work lies in the world of arts therapy. In its formal sense this involves the arts with hospitals, local authorities, health districts, training establishments and academic institutions. In dance, for example, one of the leading academic courses is the MA in dance and movement therapy at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance in London. Leicester Polytechnic holds occasional disability awareness courses for arts administrators including dance administrators. Hertfordshire College of Art and Design holds a computerized data base of the arts and disability throughout the European Community. This was started in 1984 as part of the European Training Initiative Research Project at the College with funds from the European Social Fund and Hertfordshire County Council. Today its comprehensive directory holds details of over a thousand organizations concerned with the arts and disability underlying, incidentally, the indispensability of cooperation with Europe if this field of care is ever to gain sufficient muscle to induce governments to provide adequate resources. The project publishes also a journal Atria to provide an information Arts and Disability Exchange, Europe-wide, three times a year on a low subscription basis.
