East London Dance’s Annual Review 2022-23

23 May 2024

Dystopia to Utopia at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, 2022

View the full Annual Review at the bottom of the page or here.

Download a PDF version of the full Annual Review here. 

Intro to East London Dance’s Annual Review 2022-23

What a year to reflect on!

2022-23 was our first full year in our beautiful state-of-the-art home, the Talent House, which we share with music organisation UD. It was an enormous step for us as an organisation to open a building and it’s been a testing ground for us operationally and artistically. 

Leading the team in this first mammoth year at the Talent House has been incredible and from opening until this moment we have welcomed 19,252 people through our doors; engaged 548 participants, provided 1,407 hours of free space to young people artists and producers, and presented 207 hours of artist curated events.

We developed four core aims that reflect our rich history and our blazing ambition for East London Dance and its communities:

1. Ensure the Talent House is an accessible ‘creative home’ for young people, creative talent, producers and our local community.

2. East London Dance is an activating presence; bringing communities and cultural organisations together to champion and grow east London’s dance scene.

3. East London Dance is a sustainable organisation that is good for its people; reinforces our commitment to mental health and wellbeing as well as our environmental impact and how we scale the organisation.

4. East London Dance is active in a national conversation about sustainable creative practice. This is about telling our stories and sharing our best practice models and education and employment success – there is much to shout about.

This year was a huge stretch for the entire team but these goals aligned us. We feel like we have successfully scaled a mountain – there were moments of challenge but we raised the bar and worked together to make positive change.  Mental health and wellbeing has become increasingly important across the whole organisation, and the learning from our youth preventative mental health programme On The Move is informing how we provide emotional and psychological support, resources and training for artists, producers and staff to enable people to thrive.

A giant thank you to our staff, Trustees, building partner UD, all our partners and funders and of course the  artists, producers and young people we work with.  We closed this year in a better position than ever and can’t wait for you to find out about everything we achieved alongside our beneficiaries, in the pages of this Annual Review. 

Tia Hassan & Kate Scanlan, Joint Creative Director & CEO East London Dance