Part of a series which examines the impact of Europe Beyond Access I on each of the partner organisations, this case study looks at Malmö-based dance organisation, Skånes Dansteater. Compiled by journalist Bella Todd from interview material with Mira Helenius Martinsson (Artistic Director and CEO) and Tanja Mangalanayagam and Liselotte Lindahl (Project leaders, Dialog department).
The organisation
Skånes Dansteater is Sweden’s only independent dance institution with an ensemble, funded by the Region of Skåne. Founded in 1995 and based at its own venue in Malmö since 2005, it has a contemporary dance repertory ensemble consisting of 17 dancers from more than 10 countries. The company gives over 100 performances annually, including works by both Swedish and international choreographers. These are presented on Skånes Dansteater’s own stage, at Malmö Opera, in site-specific locations and on tour. They also offer an international residency for choreographers and host performances by guest companies.
Beyond performance, Skånes Dansteater puts on community projects, workshops, lectures and conferences via its outreach and community programme, Dialog – including, over the last decade, the annual international DansFunk Festival. It also makes films and has its own podcast, DancePod. Skånes Dansteater has collaborated with disabled dancers and choreographers with regularity since 2014, with the organisation becoming a leading voice in arts and disability in Sweden as well as the rest of Scandinavia.
Key successes over five years of Europe Beyond Access
A major outcome of the Europe Beyond Access project for Skånes Dansteater has been the move into the permanent company of dancer and wheelchair user Madeleine Månsson. Månsson has been involved with Skånes Dansteater as a freelance dance artist since 2012, and performed in three of the EBA commissions – the solo Vinterresa, the duet Fine Lines (which toured all over the world) and the site-specific piece Uncharted. In 2022 she became a company member with a life-time contract, which is unique even in worldwide perspective.
Skånes Dansteater has significantly increased its impact on the wider arts sector, both nationally and internationally, via the three incarnations of its annual DansFunk festival over the time period of EBA – in particular 2021’s DansFunk 3.0, which incorporated the Beyond Access Conference, and over 600 people participated digitally the launch of the Time to Act report.
In terms of organisational change, the implementation of ambassador’s groups towards the beginning of the EBA project had direct and lasting impact. The initiative, which involved gathering input and feedback from different groups with various disabilities, came to a premature end with the pandemic. However its early ambition and energy led to immediate improvements in audience access, and urged a huge learning curve that continues to this day.
Being able to collaborate with other companies has also enabled Skånes Dansteater to reach an audience they did not have prior to EBA, as it allowed the organisation to present performances that were fully or partially produced by an ensemble with ‘norm-breaking functionality’. A huge difference has been noticed in the numbers of disabled audience members in attendance for such pieces.
In terms of boosting visibility and engagement among non-disabled audiences, the site-specific 2019 EBA commission Uncharted is identified as a high point. Taking performance out into urban spaces, it exposed ‘the unexpected audience member’ to the work of disabled artists. The piece was also supported by a creative social media campaign.
Impact of EBA on how the organisation works with artists
EBA has enabled Skånes Dansteater to provide more performance opportunities for disabled artists by making work and inviting choreographers. Through labs and residencies, it has also provided professional development opportunities, hopefully leading to longer careers and more informed artistic processes. As a lone wheelchair user in a mainstream dance company, Madeleine Månsson is felt especially to have benefited from the chance to find and to feel part of an international community of disabled artists.
Artist development was also supported by clever project design. 2019’s Uncharted emerged out of a long creative process during which Skånes Dansteater hosted a lab on site-responsive work and the ownership of space, ‘Unexpected Bodies in Unexpected Spaces’, led by Caroline Bowditch and Luke Pell, followed by a residency on this theme for international artists. The 2022 solo piece Vinterresa, made for Madeleine Månsson by Finnish choreographer Carl Knif, involved the pair working together via Zoom during the pandemic. It also brought Månsson into close creative contact with Joel Brown, at time a dancer with inclusive dance company Candoco, who served as her understudy. Skånes Dansteater additionally facilitated this creative exchange by hosting a guest performance from Candoco.
Involving a disabled artist in a mainstream dance company also encouraged Skånes Dansteater to rethink processes and develop externally sharable information. In response to Månsson’s increased presence they revised the scheduling of daily training practices, the notion of ‘warming up’, and the guidance provided to guest trainers. An information sheet was produced on working with disabled artists and diverse bodies. Guest trainers can then pass this on to other organisations with which they work.
EBA has also had an impact on how Skånes Dansteater works with non-disabled artists, reinforcing the existing mindset of placing access at the core of creative work. Every creative is now asked to think about access, and non-disabled artists are exposed to different audiences and ideas. Relaxed performances, for instance, involve informal ‘encounters’ between audience members and performers in the foyer before the show. Liselotte Lindahl, project leader at Dialog department, says of Skånes Dansteater’s relationship with artists and its commitment to being a catalyst for change: “We try to change the mindset of everybody coming into the house, all the characters coming in. As soon as we get the chance, we try to get all the dancers on board and deepen their knowledge. Sometimes it lands, sometimes they continue with it. But it shouldn’t be foreign to any of them”.
Kit Brown is one non-disabled artist who has embraced the opportunities afforded by EBA to deepen his knowledge about the aesthetics and politics of disability arts, and broaden his creative practice. Brown is a dancer in the company and also connected with the Dialog department. Through attending the EBA labs in Italy and Greece, Brown explored a growing interest in audio description of dance. This has fed into DancePod, the podcast he co-developed for Skånes Dansteater, for which he has conversed with visually impaired multidisciplinary artist Sindri Runudde on the topic of ‘how words can become dance and dance become words’. Brown has also gone on to work with groups including dancers with learning disabilities, and to make a film with disabled, non-professional dancers.
Impact of EBA on the organisation
For Skånes Dansteater, EBA has been about continuation and growth. It has helped the organisation to safeguard a core strand of its work, including over the course of a change of leadership, and to amplify its statement of intent.
It has also helped Skånes Dansteater to build on its work with disabled artists and audiences, delivering projects and activities on a larger scale and across different departments, from artists to communications officers to technicians. In addition, Skånes Dansteater initiated workshops and other training activities in response to a shortage of knowledge highlighted by the Time to Act report. Different departments were involved in this, developing and disseminating knowledge around accessibility, inclusion and participation.
Prompt uptake of the early input from Ambassadors Groups led to improvements in audience access including the readability of the website, the roll out of relaxed performances and the introduction of ‘early boarding’. Tanja Mangalanayagam, project leader at Dialog department, says, “I think working with these reference groups has really changed the whole organisation. They have completely changed the way that we think about developing or making performances accessible”. These connections continue as an informal resource, a sounding board for new ideas and source of fresh perspectives.
Skånes Dansteater describe a growing sensitivity, across the whole company, in relation to both the work of disabled artists and the needs of disabled audiences. There is a sense of this having become a unifying ethos for the organisation.
Wider impact of the organisation’s EBA-related activity
A strong relationship has been cemented with Spinn, a professional inclusive dance company based in Gothenburg, through Skånes Dansteater’s involvement with EBA. Spinn have participated in festivals and labs. They also collaborated with Italian EBA partner Oriente Occidente and choreographer Chiara Bersani on Moby Dick, a piece commissioned under EBA and shown in both Malmo and Italy. While maintaining their distinct artistic territories, Skånes Dansteater and Spinn have further developed as supportive collaborators and allies.
A link has also deepened between Skånes Dansteater and long-term collaborator Kulturcentrum Skåne, a cultural education centre for adults with learning disabilities. 2 representatives from Kulturcentrum Skåne and project leader Tanja Mangalanayagam attended the first EBA lab, hosted by Kampnagel in Hamburg.
Skånes Dansteater hosted three incarnations of their annual festival, DansFunk, over the timespan of EBA. First initiated in 2012, the festival brings together choreographers, dancers, producers, arts administrators and policy makers to improve inclusivity in the dance world. With the pandemic as a backdrop, the three EBA-related DansFunk events acted as a rallying cry, curating a space for emerging conversations to come together, and helping to shape dialogue around disability and the arts on both a national and international level.
DansFunk 2.0, which was held remotely during lockdown 2020, attracted a large online audience including members of the Swedish Arts Council, key Swedish dance academies and universities, and viewers far beyond the arts world. DansFunk 3.0, presented as a hybrid event in 2021, included the Beyond Access Conference, which was live streamed on Vimeo. EBA launched its Time to Act report at this conference, and disabled artists held the microphones alongside national and international policy makers. Kajsa Ravin, General Director of the Swedish Arts Council, was one of the high-profile panellists. The event had a considerable impact internally at the Swedish Arts Council, with quotes from the conference and references to the Time to Act report later appearing in its report on accessibility and cultural organisations’ work on disability issues (2021-2031). Skånes Dansteater’s EBA participation was also mentioned in Region Skåne’s Regional Cultural Plan 2021- 2024.
Lindahl feels these festivals “placed us on the map as driving innovation within this field” – though, as Mangalanayagam adds, the motivation was “to develop the art form, not to develop Skånes Dansteater”.
Future plans and goals
Demonstrating a big institutional commitment to the aims of EBA, Skånes Dansteater will be the lead partner for the next four-year phase. Meanwhile, there is a hope that commissions from the first phase, which had their performance schedules truncated due to the pandemic, will have touring afterlives. Vinterresa is set to return to Skånes Dansteater in Autumn 2023 and Spring 2024. The duet Fine Lines, which was never actually shown in Sweden due to Covid, could be performed on its home stage and tour with more dancers.
“Skånes Dansteater is proud to lead the consortium and be a part of the successful work of Europe Beyond Access. In the next few years, we will continue to support, promote and expose innovative contemporary dance by and with disabled artists. We will produce a large-scale production with our ensemble, led by a disabled choreographer that will be available for touring to larger venues across Europe. We are hoping to inspire and influence other mainstream cultural organisations to employ disabled artists and choreographers.”
Helenius Martinsson, Artistic Director, CEO Skånes Dansteater
In terms of artist development, Skånes Dansteater recently received funding from the Swedish Heritage Fund for a project focused on developing paths into the professional performing arts for artists with learning disabilities. Viaductus is a collaboration with Moomsteatern and ShareMusic & Performing Arts, aimed at developing a recruitment model and guiding tools to support both individual artists and performing arts businesses.
Audience engagement is another ripe area for growth. Skånes Dansteater has some interest in thinking about ways to formally capture and track audience diversity, having noted the spikes in attendance over the course of EBA for performances involving dancers with disabilities. There is curiosity about what positive impact Madeleine Månsson’s permanent presence in the ensemble might have on audience engagement, though it is noted that diversity would not be foregrounded in marketing. There is also an aim to have at least one relaxed performance per production.
Although the impact of EBA has been experienced across the whole company, there has been a natural variation in the degree to which individuals have thrown themselves into the opportunities for learning and development. Skånes Dansteater is also alert to the challenge of knowledge retention within an organisation where dancers come and go, and aware of how its commitment to access for all can waver with the twists and turns of the creative process.
But the biggest ongoing challenges identified by Skånes Dansteater relate to the specificities of the Swedish context. There is a dearth of artists with disabilities in Sweden, and this does not seem to have shifted over the course of EBA – perhaps because Covid disproportionately impacted the project’s support for emerging artists. As the organisation strives to take this work forward, Lindahl also keenly feels the absence of a disability movement to parallel Italy’s Al Di Qua: Alternative Disability Quality Artists. As a result, Lindahl says, “We are much too much the voice of people instead of them being the voice themselves”.
Thus key questions for Skånes Dansteater going forward include how to support more people with disabilities to become artists in the first place, and how to support disabled artists, both in and through the world of dance, to have a voice.
The organisation’s EBA activities
- Artist Laboratory no.2: Unexpected Bodies in Unexpected Spaces, 2019 – Skånes Dansteater hosted the second EBA lab for disabled artists from across Europe. Led by Caroline Bowditch and Luke Pell, it explored how to create site-specific performance and develop work that emerges from its environment, confronting the exclusion and restriction of disabled people in many outdoor environments.
- Uncharted, 2019 – three short site-specific performances for six dancers across three outdoor urban locations in Malmö – a skate park, a park and a town square – responding to the different architecture and energy and exploring questions around who has ownership of space. The commission was a co-production with Sommarscen Malmö, created under the artistic direction of Caroline Bowditch and Luke Pell following a laboratory.
- Fine Lines, 2020 – a duet between dancers Madeleine Månsson and Anna Borras Picó, choreographed by Roser López Espinosa, exploring our differences, our boundaries, and what brings us closer together.
- Vinterresa (Winter Journey), 2022 – a dance solo about the power of memories, choreographed by Carl Knif for Madeleine Månsson. Set in a multi-layered landscape, this autobiographical piece was based on Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise.
- Snaecka! (A wordplay with Swedish words for ‘talk’ and ‘seashell’), 2022 – a community performance by choreographer Sindri Runudde for a group of non-professional dancers over the age of 60. Made in collaboration with composer Marta Forsberg, the piece combined dance, movement and spoken word and saw Sindri develop their philosophy that ‘every body is able and every story has a dance’.
- DansFunk Festival (2020, 2021, 2022) – Skånes Dansteater’s annual festival, dedicated to examining, developing and challenging dance as an artform, and incorporating international conferences as well as performance.