Blog

It’s all about Singing & Dancing

Written by Clare for the Moving Roots report. View the full report here

Restoke keeps its mission simple: it’s all about singing, dancing and sharing stories, fundamental human experiences that are part of how we express ourselves collectively and in our communities. 

But, as many of us working in community arts know, the work on the ground isn’t that simple. Once you set up an organisation to fulfil this mission, the admin involved becomes consuming, as does the urgency of the work, how needed it is in the world. We don’t want anyone to be excluded from the opportunities we want to share, but trying to break down barriers for people to access projects, providing travel costs, childcare, food, signposting, a shoulder to cry on – not to mention the fundraising needed to achieve all this... It’s a lot. 

Restoke is an artist-led organisation: our backgrounds are in community arts, making art with people where they are at, including in schools, community centres, care homes, prisons, residential settings. As young adults we had the privilege of meeting so many people in so many places, hearing about so many life experiences that were different to ours – and of course dancing and singing together. Community art is collaboration and it’s raw: we experienced the challenges of these places along with the absolute best of people, and we are better people for it. At its best this work transcends the things that usually keep us separated. For an hour or a year we can co-exist and express ourselves as a collective of people, in a specific place. We can create softness, humour, connection, action, energy… This work turns on our empathy, and can make us feel safe.

That’s why it’s great news that the latest funding strategies favour work like this. But it brings with it new expectations. Over the past few years we’ve realised that in order to prove our worth as community artists, we need to talk about big change. We are encouraged to talk about our art like social care, with data and measurables. And this jars with the fundamentals of our mission. 

It’s not that we don’t have stories of change to share. We see the life-affirming power of the arts every day, we hear it and feel it. But we don’t set out to instigate change: we set out to sing, dance and create together. 

What happens to our responsibility to the people we are working with if change becomes our mission? How do we continue to work alongside each other, in collaboration, and not become a service? 

At Restoke we know that the magic happens when people are together in a room, whether taking part in a workshop or co-creating an epic show. The magic manifests in different ways for different people – and in ways we don’t need to get involved with or attempt to take credit for. The magic is often temporary: projects are temporary, performance is temporary. And yet the experience sticks to people’s hearts. The legacy is within them: it doesn’t need to be micromanaged by the organisation who initiated it. 

At the same time, Restoke have wanted to feel a sense of permanency and deepen our role in a community who don’t let people fall through the cracks. For us, a solution has been establishing a venue. In 2021 we restored and reopened a Ballroom in Fenton Town Hall, a former civic building which had been repurposed as a Magistrates Courts for over 50 years. This Town Hall is a true story of resilience, saved by the local community who it was built to serve. We have had the privilege of building on the community activism that came before us, the graft and collaboration of Stoke people. No longer courtrooms, the Ballroom is once again a place for dance, song and celebration – more permanent than anything else we could have created.