Notes on partnership, care, and how we learn together

Across two days at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance — Better Together: Rethinking Practice through Partnership and The Art of Recovery — I found myself returning to a deceptively simple idea: we are better together, but only if we take care with how that togetherness is built.

Not as a slogan. Not as a funding phrase. But as a practice.

“Partnership isn’t a shortcut. It’s a way of working.”

What stayed with me aside from visceral insight into existing effective examples and discussions, was a set of questions that felt deeply familiar — questions I’ve been circling for years through my work in dance, education, and community contexts.

Partnership is built on trust

One of the strongest threads from Day One was a challenge to how we often understand partnership. So often, and understandably, partnerships are framed around efficiency, reach, or outputs. But it is also important we slow down to ensure we are building meaningful connections.

Real partnership, we were reminded, is built on trust, time, consent, and responsibility. It allows people to enter, step back, or stay. It doesn’t rush people into participation and it encourages curiosity, collaborative problem solving, new habits and a willingness to change for the better.

It recognises that process itself is the practice.

This resonates deeply with how I work — and with what I’ve learned through international exchange spaces like BIDE’s B>Lab methodology, where learning emerges through encounter, dialogue, and experimentation rather than fixed outcomes. In those contexts, knowledge is not delivered. It is co-constructed.

“Not everything meaningful can be measured.”

Key Takeaways: What Makes a Meaningful Partnership?

• Built on trust, not transaction

• Rooted in time, not speed

• Centred on choice and consent

• Acknowledges distinct responsibilities

• Values process as practice

• Human-centred, not outcome-obsessed

Creative health is not a category

Day Two deepened this conversation through the lens of recovery, care, and creative health. The themes of agency and collaboration were again, paramount.

Creative health was framed not as a service, a category, or an intervention, but as a spectrum of human experience — relational, embodied, contextual, and often quiet.

There was an honest acknowledgement of the need for mixed evidence (qualitative as well as quantitative): we are often asked to evidence impact through numbers and outcomes, while knowing that much of what matters happens internally, invisibly, slowly.

Reconnection. Agency. Belonging. Permission to be.

Helena Gaunt, Principal of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama made a key point when reflecting on collaborative partners becoming resources of hope in her keynote on day one:

“Hope is not passive. It is an active practice.”

What struck me was how aligned this felt with ideas from progressive education — particularly the work I explored during my postgraduate study in Academic Practice, where I focused on autonomy, agency, and learner-centred approaches with Level 4 students.

Many of the ideas now being considered in creative health spaces — co-creation, reflective learning, embodied knowledge, relational practice — are not new. They’ve long existed in pedagogical thinking. What feels powerful now is seeing them re-emerge and exist across sectors. In Eastern Philosophies a holistic approach to health and wellbeing is intrinsic to many teachings. I believe one reason for the power of arts and creative collaboration across sectors helps to nurture and aid the dynamic balance between mind, body, spirit, and environment. A women’s health doctor once told me that Eastern practices have roots in preventative, rather than reactive approaches to ailments. Again, this leads to a human centred approaches.

Key Reflections: What We Need from Creative Health

• Space for complexity, not simplification

• Respect for lived experience

• Practice that is embedded, not parachuted

• Time for process, not just product

• Recognition of embodied knowledge

• Long-term thinking

• Approaches that support agency, not dependency

• Care-centred, not target-driven models

Education, community and creative health are not separate

One of my strongest takeaways was how much these conversations transcended boundaries.

Education. Community. Creative health.

They are not separate worlds.

Much of my own practice sits in these overlaps: choreographing, producing, facilitating, teaching. Whether working with university students, community participants, or professional artists, the same questions surface:

Who holds knowledge here?
Who decides what matters?
How do people retain agency within the process?

I’ve often found it hard to wear just one label as an artist – “I am a dancer” – my practice is interdisciplinary and responsive to a complex range of factors and variables, very much dependent on each process.

In higher education, I’ve long been interested in learning as something that is experientially constructed together, rather than delivered from the front of a room. What I heard across these two days was a shared desire for this kind of relational learning to exist beyond academic spaces.

“Learning is not a product. It is a relationship.”

This is where I see huge potential for the arts — not as a solution, but as a space where people can explore, rehearse, and reimagine ways of being together. In an ever increasingly technological world, the need for human space, connection and time is essential for both mental and physical wellbeing.

BIDE and B>Lab: partnership in practice

My experience with BIDE and the B>Lab methodology has shown me what this can look like in real terms.

International, yes — but human-scale.
Process-led, not product-led.
Rooted in exchange, not expertise.

Rather than exporting “best practice,” B>Lab creates conditions where artists, educators, and communities learn with one another. Risk is allowed. Uncertainty is welcomed. And meaning emerges slowly.

It’s a powerful reminder that partnership is not about control. It’s about listening. It’s about learning. It’s about sharing.

What I’m still holding

I didn’t seek to leave these two days with answers. I left with better questions.

How do we protect slowness in systems that reward speed?
How do we ensure we model our values through our own practice and approaches?
How do we design partnerships that don’t quietly reproduce the same hierarchies we claim to challenge?

And perhaps most importantly:

How do we keep the human at the centre?

“Care is not neutral. It is a choice.”

For me, this is where practice lives — not in certainty, but in curiosity, responsibility, and human connection.

For Dance Ahead, this feels like a moment of clarity. These two days didn’t introduce new ideas so much as give language to instincts we’ve been following for years — about co-creation, agency, and learning through doing. As we continue to develop projects across education, community, and creative health contexts, we’re choosing to foreground partnership not as a mechanism, but as a practice. One that is shaped by context, responsive to need, and grounded in mutual respect.