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Seven Bridges are a group of older artists and curators supported by Equal Arts. The group appeared in BALTIC’s Ground Floor gallery with their own flags and performing a new live work involving singing and dancing made with Gillie Kleiman, all of which have been created in response to the exhibition during their weekly meetings at BALTIC.

Juncture was a series of festivals curated for and with Yorkshire Dance, Leeds. The first was curated by Charlotte Vincent, the second by Wendy Houstoun, and the third and final by Gillie Kleiman. Described as 'a festival you do', all of the works in Gillie's iteration of the festival featured the collaboration of non-professional participants. The following is a part of Gillie's opening remarks:

This edition of Juncture presents works made by professional artists where some of the artistic work, usually but not always the performing work, is given to someone who would not consider themselves a professional dancer. There are lots of ways to talk about these works, and cultural policy of different eras would have us filter our thinking about this in varying shades of social amelioration, community-building, and education. A notional 'democracy' looms large, with the suggestion that, in this gesture, everyone gets a chance at something, though I don't know what that something is or or what it does or whether or not we'd want it. Using what you've just done as an allegory, I'd like to suggest that this needs to be rethought as an specialised choreographic practice that can relate to the broad questions of, say, the democratic, in nuanced, challenging and refined ways through each work's specific formal and relational mechanisms. Just like the artists whose work we will see over the coming days, I have given you a form to work with (I've suggested a time, a relation with others, a space, a context, and a medium) and I've given you content, in terms of the topics. I've designed this, and handed the doing over to you. Though, of course, you can choose whether or not to accept my offer, it is my structure to which you say yes or no. I have an agenda to which you will or will not subscribe through your own performance of walking and talking. Just because I have invited you to act, it doesn't mean that this invitation is endlessly open and generous, or perhaps not always in the same way. In short, it's not as democratic as it seems.

Moreover, my sense is that we don't sufficiently grapple with the role and actions of the artist as an artist in the practice addressed through Juncture 2016. We scarcely get to talk about choreography, about dance, about form, when it comes to works that involve non-professionals. So well-rehearsed is dance's collective professional spiel about the social purpose of these practices that we, that I, at least, can become blinded to the formal invention, the choreographic drive, the relational articulacy, the intellectual weight, and the theatrical brilliance of these works. Usually a festival or a season has only one work with this invitation to non-professionals, so it is discussed and remembered through that paradigm alone. In this we all lose out, deadened not only to the disciplinary advancements being made but also to the always newly-arising political potentials. By bringing several of these works together, then, this is unique opportunity to wrestle with our assumptions with what these works have in common, going deeper and further in that set of concerns, *and* a chance to look past some of the surface similarities of the projects and seek to become more articulate about their differences in relation to the disciplines of dance and choreography and in relation to broader, extra-disciplinary concerns.

And these works are concerned with the world. They may not articulate their social engagement through language more familiar in this domain, but each one of them is dealing with concrete political proposals in danced terms. To greater or lesser degrees, the works of Juncture have handles on humongous social issues like gender, feminism, access, diversity, power, commonality, professionalism, age, class and so on, each possessing an angle that I find valuable, on its own and in relation to the other works. There's a tremendous diversity in the method, and indeed in the nuance, but altogether there's a distinct and active politics that appears in the festival as a whole in conversation with each of the individual artistic proposals.

Many of these areas speak to the driving values of the community dance movement, historically and contemporaneously. I grew up in community dance and my perspective on dance has been built through it. When I started to devise the curatorial agenda of Juncture, I remember the exclamation "It can't be a community dance festival!". My response was to backtrack, to find new words to speak to my interest. Now I can say unabashedly that I think it *is* a community dance festival, a dance of multiple communities in relation to the community dance movement. I may be stretching this idea a little, and I don't know to what extent that's a useful move, but I'd like to extend the invitation to think through the festival with this lens. My suspicion is that community dance and experimental dance and choreography have more to say to one another than we would like to think. I, for one, would love to see this conversation grow, so that each can learn from the other, and we can together move away from the conservatisms that each one accidentally or deliberately maintains. I hope that this festival can be a place to do that.

Community dance is a British phenomenon to a degree - other dance cultures don't appear to make the same divides, nor the same advancements, along these lines. In the world of experimental dance and choreography, British dance is very often lamented as being a bit shit. British artists find it harder to get programmed in other countries, and our organisations are often disconnected from relevant co-production or presentation circuits. Juncture is an international festival, though: that was the brief, and I like to think that I answered it. But most of the artists have some relationship to British dance even when they are not based in Britain. I think we really need to stop telling ourselves and others that dance made in or in connection to Britain is any less rigorous, impactful, inventive or really bloody good than dance from elsewhere, but to advocate for those practices that do participate in our community of excellent dance and choreography, and learn to speak better about what they're doing. We're an island in more ways than one, and this can produce fascinating differences as well as frightening ones. Beyond the individual works, I'd say that the festival is a deeply British festival, gathering around concerns that, though not unique to our island or to our dance practice, are certainly more present here. Have it be known, though, that this is not a nationalistic, defensive impulse in the curation. Rather, I'm interested in how artists and the field attend to issues of locality - geographical, social, artistic, disciplinary and so on - without resorting to the same kinds of conservative and mind-numbing but persuasive populism that plague both British dance and British society, and get us into devastating and terrifying political situations of different scales.

As you may have noted, I am indeed using this opportunity to share some of my more emotive concerns. This isn't just a soapbox, though - I wanted to demonstrate how one can apply different filters to the same object, in this case our festival, to think different things, to see new angles or consider alternative perspectives. Each of the topics you have spoken about can act as a tool for the navigation of the festival - maybe you heard a short lecture on karaoke, which I see as non-professional performance out in the wild, or perhaps you spoke about labour, my own favourite filter. I'd love to hear what comes to you as the major themes as the festival progresses, and those who will stick around might like to join us for the closing on Sunday, where we can take another look. We've a busy festival ahead of us, including the incredible immigrants and animals tonight, presenting their work LAURA LAURA DOUBLE PENETRATION with a new duo of locally-based non-professional performers over at Live Art Bistro. Thanks for joining us for this opening moment. Perhaps after another brief drink or chat we can head over. See you there!

A couple of short solo studies derived from group processes.