Local charity Yorkshire Dance is helping people to dance their way through lockdown, all from the comfort of their own homes.
The charity is getting people of all ages, learning (surprisingly!) Bollywood, voguing and breakdancing in a growing movement which asks people to get involved in #GiveBack2020 on 1 December, Giving Tuesday.
Rachel Kingdom, Development Manager: “Giving Tuesday is a global movement and a great opportunity to take something positive from what has been a difficult year. With donations from local people, we can together ensure that nobody will dance alone in 2021.”
Hannah Robertshaw, Programmes Director explains how the online dance movement began: “Normally we run dance sessions for thousands of people across Leeds each week, so when lockdown started everything stopped overnight.
We were phoning our participants to see if they needed anything as we’re aware of how many people were alone. They were just telling us how much they missed dancing. Our dance sessions aren’t really about learning steps, they’re about coming together, socialising and having fun. It was obvious we had to do something.
Moving onto Zoom was a risk. We’d never done it before and we had no idea if anyone would show up. But 6 months on I can’t believe how much it’s taken off. One of my absolute highlights was Voguing run by local artist Darren Pritchard with a group of our older adults – my face hurt from smiling so much. We’ve even had entire care homes of staff and residents joining in.
At the moment, thanks to our fantastic donors, we’re busy organising virtual Christmas dance parties. Although we don’t yet know what will happen in 2021, we do know we’re committed to helping our community stay connected and preventing people feeling isolated.”
We’ve heard so much about care home residents and others not being able to see their families this year. Your donation could help brings smiles to their faces over the coming days. Dance, like song, can do so much to restore hope and cheer to people who are separated from those they love.
You can watch Yorkshire Dance’s appeal here.
Please donate to Yorkshire Dance here.”
Photographs provided by Yorkshire Dance.
