2025: The Year Dancers Learn to Adapt?
Talking DIY dance spaces, funding crises, and innovation for survival in the creative sector with Aaron Markwell.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives,
not the most intelligent that survives.
It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” - Charles Darwin
A newcomer to the North East dance scene, Aaron Markwell has made waves in his first year in the region by showing true innovation and determination. Using an imaginative approach to business, and an impressive ability to weave himself into the existing creative networks, Aaron has pounced on opportunity amidst a crumbling sector to inject some much-needed momentum. Having worked with Aaron throughout this year and helping to set up DANE (Dance Artists North East) - a collective of artists working towards self-sufficiency - I wanted to catch up with him to really dissect the Why and How behind this work, and to find out more about his ambitious plans for 2025.
A short conversation with Aaron will demonstrate his endless energy for getting things done; with cutting critical ability, and an in-depth appreciation of all things visual, Aaron drew from his training in Dance and Performance Design to carve out 10 years of success as an interior designer in London. Despite this success, Aaron found he wasn’t doing what he loved, and so at the end of 2023, drawn by the appeal of old friends and a seemingly thriving dance ecology, he moved his whole life up to Heaton, Newcastle, and immediately inserted himself into the heart of the dance scene.
Upon arrival, Aaron found there were “slightly bigger gaps in the dance industry than [he] thought”, largely due to the reduction in provisions for professional artists from major institutions, with decreasing budgets and dwindling job opportunities. Finding himself in a new city, hoping to set up a new life, with his expectations seeming to crash down around him, someone less enterprising may have cut their losses and gone back to what they knew.
Aaron however, set to work spinning straw into gold. Alongside a small group of local artists, all hoping to rely less on the big organisations and more on one another, the first step was to establish a DIY Professional Class offering; a weekly gathering of dancers coming together to hone their skills. Like all athletes, dancers need to train regularly to remain fit and ready to work, when the jobs come up. Going to the gym is one thing, but having a specialist space to dance, to work on different physicalities and techniques, and to connect with other artists is integral to a dancer’s livelihood and identity.
In the truest sense of DIY, each member of DANE pitched in, whether it be asking networks for favours, designing marketing content, planning classes, or sending out messages to friends and colleagues in order to provide and populate this essential training space. Partnering with Newcastle College, Aaron was able to exchange his time as a student mentor for use of a dance studio to run weekly classes out of. Proving true the popular phrase “It’s not what you know, but who you know”, in a very short time Aaron was able to make all the right connections to get something off the ground; thus, Dance Artists North East (DANE) was born.
“And then it kind of snowballed from there, really, and started becoming a business idea around how to create a dance offering in the North East that was specifically for dancers based here”
“We're setting up an agency to represent dancers in the North East. Essentially, the aim of the agency is to provide more commercial-style work than Arts Council-funded project work. [We’re] specifically aiming for TV, film, music videos, advertising, and PR activity, looking at how we can use contemporary dance for that in the North East.”
There is a solid market for such work in London, where contemporary dancers have found themselves busy with jobs for major film studios, appearing in recent blockbusters like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Wicked. As the British film industry expands north, it makes sense for dancers based here to seek out a similar market, and Aaron has pioneered a business model around precisely this.
“So, part of the plan for it is that we're starting to expand that and talk to other businesses around what we can offer. I think it's a really good time to do this, as we're finding investment within other sectors of the cultural industries, expanding their funding and ability to operate in the North East. So now that the budget is confirmed and the TV center is happening in Sunderland, it means that there are going to be more opportunities for dancers based here, and we’re setting up a business that is supporting dancers in these new frontiers of performance opportunities here in the North East. I think it’s really exciting.”
Sunderland’s Crown Works Studios is set to be a major new film and TV studio complex, creating 8,500 jobs as a ‘game-changer’ for the region, opening by 2027. As artists struggle in a landscape of dwindling public funding, it is essential to move towards innovative ways of funding creativity. Hopefully by the time the TV centre is built, we will have something that is fully formed and ready as a business offering.”
Aaron - Still Image from Highlight / Lowlight. Choreography and Performer, Aaron Markwell. Videography by Jasmine Stephenson. Commissioned by North Shields Cultural Quarter.
With his background in private business, Aaron speaks coolly and with confidence about his plans for the agency.
“I've gone from working in startups to them making, like, four or five million pounds per year in the time that I've been there, and helping to develop the branding, and product offering and service offerings for those businesses, I realised that actually, this is something that can be applicable to dance. Which I don't think really happens anywhere else. Particularly for contemporary dance, everyone's very focussed on securing Arts Council funding, but not necessarily thinking about models of financial independence. Thinking of who’s looking at applications, it’s really other people deciding the fate of the dance industry, when they're not in the dance industry. And I really don't like that idea.”
I was interested in finding out where Aaron thought this dependence on public funding started from, and what kind of solutions might exist.
“I can say this from my first-hand experience, I don't think dance education provides business skills. I think a lot of dance education is obviously, and rightly, around technique and choreography and artistic practice, and all of those things are fantastic until you get out into the world and realize that actually, most of a dancer’s time is taken up doing admin and running themselves as a small business or a freelancer. Nobody, nobody tells you how to do that.”
Lack of education leads to a lack of confidence, and it’s true that most dance education does not focus on the reality of working as a freelancer or business owner. But do other art forms do this better?
“Going to Central St Martins, for example, was a really big eye opener for me, because I went to an arts institution where you were expected to sell your artwork, even though I was working within performance [MA Performance Design and Practice]. They were very much focussed on making incredible work, but then it was also how you market it, how you get paid for that work.”
Aaron has certainly taken this learning forward into his career, and is now using it to build a tactical dance agency, focussing on contemporary artists in the North East. A merging of experience as a performer and choreographer, and a business owner, Aaron’s approach will hopefully also lead to better working conditions for the artists that the agency eventually represents.
DANE has already created several opportunities for local artists, not only classes but a scratch night, networking events, and paid work in the form of a commission from North Shields Cultural Quarter. The resulting 5 short dance films focus on a variety of North Shields landmarks including the Wooden Dolley and the iconic Fish Quay, celebrating local industries like weaving, and capturing the essence of the North Shields community.
“That's what I'm most proud of, I think, what we managed to do in such a short space of time is really impressive, actually. And then also having a really good creative team as well that just comes into the room and, like, understands the vision that I had in my head for this very weird week of work. We worked on five pieces in a week, and they're all short, but they all have their own identity. Also just being able to have a budget for nice costuming and stuff like that has been really important. So thank you to Karen and North Shields Cultural Quarter for allowing us to do that.”
The films will premiere at Screendance Social, on Tuesday 28th January (Tickets still available here).
Drone - Still Image from Untitled Dance Work, Concept by Aaron Markwell. Dancers and Choreographers Top to Bottom: Olivia Paddison, Megan Brown, Aaron Markwell. Videography by Jasmine Stephenson. Commissioned by North Shields Cultural Quarter.
But, as well as celebrating the successes, I’m interested in hearing more about the challenges Aaron has come across, and what DANE is doing to help provide solutions.
“I think the lack of classes is really key. And I think although we're addressing that well in terms of offering, I don't know whether we've hit the mark with it yet, and I would like to find out more as to why people aren't necessarily engaging with it as much as certainly I would like, but also maybe that they would like as well.”
Despite the efforts of the collective to organise weekly training, over time numbers have been low, so DANE has pivoted to offering a longer, monthly training session instead, which includes professional development in other areas such as business, bid-writing, and skill sharing for freelancers alongside the class offer.
Aaron hits on a key issue, that even though artists would like to attend class, often this becomes impossible when balancing the life of a freelancer, who may be working many jobs with irregular hours, last minute changes, early starts and late nights; all on top of the usual life challenges like household work and children. The hope is that this more in-depth session on a monthly basis will enable more artists to make time to attend, without becoming a burden.
As we talk, I ponder on how it’s becoming evident that artists’ lives are changing in response to the times. It’s not easy to balance precarious work around a regular schedule, so regularly scheduled classes or events are not going to fit easily into an artist’s life. Despite consulting local dancers and aiming to meet their needs directly, there are simply too many barriers; whether they be financial pressures, time pressures, or the psychological pressure of finding motivation to keep training when performance jobs are sparse. The landscape of the arts has changed massively even in the last 5 years, with competition high and funding low. Many artists have been forced to take on permanent or full-time roles in adjacent fields like arts admin, many others in unrelated fields, or retraining completely. It’s no longer enough to have the stereotypical ‘bar job that pays the bills’. Artists don’t just want to scrape by, they need security and forward progression. Aaron’s dream is that DANE will provide that, and more.
“I think one of the issues in the dance community here is around community building. I think a lot of the conversations I’ve had are around how people want to build more community among different - I'm going to use the word factions - of the dance industry here, and actually, there is far more conversation in common than not. I think this is one thing that we have done successfully, is bridge the gap between getting to know everyone and having conversations with everyone in a way that's equitable and fun, and not necessarily about work or competition or trying to get funding, because we're not trying to do that. So actually, we're not another dance company setting up in the North East to compete with people for funding.
“We're here to work with them to help them get what they need. For example, if you want this piece of funding, but you're not eligible to apply for it? Come and have a conversation with us, and we'll figure out how to do that together.
“And I think that's really what I'm aiming for, obviously this is very long term goal making, but, the aim here is that the agency model is completely self sufficient and actually provides work for dancers in the North East, as additional income generation for them. And of course these big agencies in London can do that, but there's nothing on a local level where they're also involved in the local community. Or even the local performance community. They don't provide space, and I know we can't do that right now, but the plan is that we will.
“We're doing everything by Equity standards as minimum, in terms of pay, our contracts; we do IP agreements where DANE and the artists maintain intellectual property of the work that's created and how it's licensed. That's something I'm very keen to make sure of, that performers can use footage for self promotion. There's so many things that we're building into our policies and our contracts now, in order to prepare for something much bigger, and making sure that the dancers here are looked after, and not exploited or not paid fairly. I think this is a really beautiful part of the idea of DANE.”
It’s encouraging to have an optimistic conversation about the dance sector, for once, and I wanted to end on a positive note by asking Aaron about his dream vision for DANE.
“My dream project, and you know, this is very much dependent on whether the dancers in the region think that it's a good idea, but my dream project is a dance space in Heaton that has two studios, where one is for the community to use, and the other is for professional artists to use, with a co-working space. So really, anyone can come there and work without having to come into the city, with some DANE offices, and a really nice cafe, with really good coffee.”
Simple yet idyllic, let’s move into 2025 with these dreams and ambitions hopefully taking steps towards becoming a reality, through more collaboration, more innovation, and plenty more hard work.
You can find out more about DANE’s work and events here: https://www.danceartistsnortheast.com/
DANE is launching Dance Community Evenings once per month, which will include a professional development activity, a technique class and a creative workshop. Suitable for professionals and dancers in vocational training.
All sessions will be held at Newcastle College from 5-8pm.
£10 per session.
Discounts available for BA Students using code STUDENT at checkout.
Another informative and detailed piece Pagan, which was interesting to read.
If Aaron could find some people interested in the Arts, who would like to invest in Dance in particular, this could possibly be a way of building a pot of finance to support dancers and free up their time, for learning blocks.