Health, Wellbeing & Engagement Update | Spring 2025

About Health, Wellbeing & Engagement at Dance Base  

At Dance Base, we’re on a mission to help dance flourish and change lives.  

Dance Base’s Health, Wellbeing and Engagement (HWE) Programme utilises dance’s potential to support people’s health and wellbeing and sense of belonging. Projects focus on engaging people with neurological conditions, mental health conditions, other long-term illnesses and people from socially excluded or protected groups. We partner with local health and social care organisations to reach the people who need our work the most.  

Let’s Dance

We’re really excited to be part of Let’s Dance, a UK-Wide campaign to inspire everyone to embrace dance as a way to improve their health, connect with others, and have fun (all things that drive what we do at Dance Base!). We’re using this campaign to highlight the ways we make dance more accessible to everyone. Why don’t you take a leap this week and try something new?

For the launch of Let’s Dance, on Sunday 2 March, we held another fabulous Dare2Dance extravaganza, welcoming 18 dancers to spend the whole day taking five different classes.

Later this week, we’re running a ‘Let’s Dance’ inclusive dance workshop for Get2Gether– a local charity who run social activities for disabled adults in Edinburgh and the Lothians. Our weekly inclusive dance classes continue on Tuesdays and Fridays for disabled adults and their carers.

The Let’s Dance campaign is also helping to spread the word about the growing evidence of the powerful impacts of dance for health and wellbeing. Find out more about the benefits of dance by taking a look at the Sport and Recreation Alliance’s ‘Social Value of Movement and Dance’ (2023) report. Recent research from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and Frontier Economics (2024) also found that:,

“Arts engagement can help to reduce unnecessary pressure on health services, through helping individuals to manage their own health more proactively, such as staying physically active and socially engaged, and reducing the need for inpatient hospital and nursing home stays.” (Fancourt, in Campbell, D., 2024, The Guardian)

Dance for Health and Wellbeing 

In January, we launched the second phase of our Dance in Hospitals project in partnership with NHS Lothian Charity (Tonic Arts). Two teams of dance artists, accompanied by our student placement volunteers from the University of Edinburgh, will be working with elderly patients every week in the Western General Hospital and East Lothian Community Hospital for the next six months. Our sessions use dance as a vehicle to improve the health and wellbeing of elderly patients with a breadth of mental health and neurological conditions, including people living with dementia and people recovering from strokes. These uplifting sessions are quickly becoming the highlight of our weeks, where we see the power of enriching, non-medicalised experiences on patients during their hospital stay. 

Engagement

This spring, we’ve been working with our colleagues in City of Edinburgh Council’s Wider Achievement team to establish a new youth project in Northfield and Willowbrae. Aiming to revitalise Northfield Community Centre, and support local young people to improve their wellbeing, ‘East Side Moves’ has taken our team out into local primary schools and established weekly community-based youth provision in the area. We can’t wait to see what this new group of young people create through this project! 

We’re also delivering a new mini-project this term in partnership with Edinburgh’s Active Schools to create a short piece with pupils with additional support needs at St Crispin’s School, which will be performed at Oaklands School in April as part of a wider Dance Festival for schools in Edinburgh’s special needs cluster. 

Lothian Youth Dance Company have been busy (as usual!) performing at Glasgow Theatre Royal’s Go Dance festival in January and rehearsing for YDance’s Destinations in April. We’re also delighted to announce that, after running an open call out for a choreographer to work with the group, which included a final stage panel decision made by our young people, the wonderful Marc Brew will be creating a new piece with the dancers during their next residency in April.