Working Long-Term, Growing Long-Term — A Culture of Reconfiguring Around Each Individual
Interviewees: Lucy Bennett (Co-Artistic Director), Cherie Brennan (Community Engagement Artist)
Date: March 2, 2026
What emerged through Stopgap was the way inclusive dance is sustained not as an isolated program, but as a company culture in which employment, training, creation, and development are deeply connected over time.
By employing dancers over the long term, maintaining ongoing company classes, and allowing extended creative periods, Stopgap has cultivated a choreographic vocabulary in which movement is continuously translated between different bodies. In recent years, it has also begun to approach accessibility not as something added outside a completed work, but as a creative principle capable of reshaping the internal structure of the work itself. Alongside this, the company has developed its own inclusive dance syllabus, IRIS, which supports pathways toward future roles for young people.
At Stopgap, being inclusive is not limited to a philosophy or the name of a program. It appears in how people work, how rehearsals continue, how performances are created, and how knowledge and practice are passed on to the next generation.
Working Long-Term as a Way of Sustaining Practice
The first point Lucy emphasized was that Stopgap is one of the few companies in the UK that employs dancers on a long-term basis. This form of employment is not simply organizational stability. It serves as the foundation through which practice is maintained, refined, and gradually transformed.
“I think we are one of the few companies in the UK that employ dancers full-time, and for long periods.
Christian has been here for 10 years, I have been here for 23, and Chris Pavia for 27.
If we only met once a week, we couldn’t sustain the practice. We have company classes several times a week, and long creation periods—six weeks, twelve weeks—through which the practice slowly evolves.”
The continuity being described here goes beyond simply sustaining activity over many years. Through repeated classes and extended creative periods, ways of moving, relating, and making artistic decisions accumulate and are passed on. Lucy compared this to the way Japanese craftspeople inherit technique through repetition and refinement of practice over time.
For Stopgap, being a company does not simply mean employing dancers. It also means creating a structure through which artistic quality can be cultivated over the long term.
Not Making Everyone the Same, but Reconfiguring According to Need
When describing its culture, Stopgap often used the idea of an equitable culture—a culture that reconfigures itself around each individual. Rather than ensuring everyone participates in exactly the same way, the company reshapes conditions, roles, and environments so that each person can work under the circumstances they need.
“We call it an equitable culture.
More than being inclusive, it’s about making sure people can work in the conditions they need.
Chris may need an access worker. Hannah may only need one when touring. Nadenh wants to become a choreographer. We think about each person differently.”
This principle extends beyond systems of support and into the aesthetics of choreography itself. At Stopgap, dancers do not simply copy a choreographer’s movement in identical form. Instead, one dancer’s movement or material may be translated through another dancer’s body.
“We do a lot of reinvention.
For example, we might create a phrase based on Nadenh’s movement, and standing dancers then translate it through their own bodies.
That is how Stopgap’s particular style emerges.”
This attitude also appears in the language used during class. Rather than asking everyone to reach the same endpoint—for example, “touch the floor”—teachers might say, “Today, stretch downward as far as your body can reach.” Different bodies may reach different places and move differently, and this is assumed from the outset.
What matters is not that everyone takes the same shape. Through differences in height, direction, movement quality, breath, and relationships to one another, dancers move together through their own bodies. Those differences themselves generate Stopgap’s choreographic vocabulary.
Weaving Access into the Internal Structure of the Work
One of the major recent shifts described by Stopgap was the move toward embedding accessibility within creation itself, rather than adding it only after a work is complete. Previously, audio description or captions were often introduced once a piece had already been made. However, during the pandemic, new encounters with disabled audiences through online engagement led to a significant shift in thinking.
“Over the past five years, our thinking has changed dramatically.
We used to make work first, then add audio description or captions.
Now we have the role of an Access Artist, and ensuring access has become something we take responsibility for ourselves.
And it also becomes a force for innovation in our practice.”
The Access Artist is not simply an external advisor. They enter the rehearsal room during the creative period itself and think through the work alongside choreographers and dancers. If, for example, someone proposes a blackout, questions arise: how might this affect neurodivergent audiences? If spoken language is introduced, does it belong meaningfully within the work? Should audiences be brought physically closer to experience bodies differently? Such questions begin to reshape the structure of the work itself.
Accessibility, then, becomes not merely an audience service, but a creative force capable of expanding performance into new forms.
Creating the Next Role Beyond Participation
Through Cherie’s reflections, it became clear that this culture is also deeply embedded in youth development. At the center of her work are the weekly youth company and long-term relationships with young people and their families.
“At the center of my work are the young people, and their families.
Some of the children who were 11 when I first met them as university placement students are now 25 or 26.
We ask what they want, what they need, and we look for opportunities. That relationship becomes the foundation of everything.”
For Stopgap, development is not a short-term educational program. It is closer to accompanying young people over time, together with families and support networks, while considering what kinds of roles they may want to move toward.
In this context, its own inclusive dance syllabus, IRIS, becomes particularly significant.
IRIS is structured in four stages: Include, Respond, Integrate, and Specialise. It begins with foundational practice as an entry point, then moves toward increasingly individualized technical development, stages of entering classes beyond Stopgap, and eventually pathways toward professional roles such as artist, teacher, or choreographer.
“There is no fixed timeline in IRIS.
People take as much time as they need.
What matters is that young people learn how to dance together and develop a flow of movement.”
Particularly striking was the use of the phrase “a day to celebrate achievement,” rather than the language of examination. If words like test or assessment can create anxiety or fear, then language itself can be rethought. This does not mean standards are removed. Rather, there is an understanding that just as non-disabled young people often progress through exams or qualifications, disabled young people also need systems that recognize accumulated experience and allow them to carry it forward.
Here again, Stopgap does not stop at participation. It looks beyond participation toward how roles, skills, pathways, and working lives can be created.
■ Research Notes
What Stopgap demonstrates is the maintenance of inclusivity not within a single space or program, but as a company culture connecting employment, rehearsal, creation, and development.
Who is able to continue working? Who inherits the practice? Where can young people move next? At Stopgap, these questions live within everyday working structures, ongoing rehearsal processes, and artistic creation itself.
The same applies to accessibility. Rather than adding audio description or captions only after a work is finished, Stopgap asks from the earliest stages of creation: What kinds of audiences will receive this work, and how? Once that question enters the process, the language used, the distance between audience and performer, the construction of scenes, and even the structure of the work itself begin to shift.
Reconfiguring space and roles according to each individual is not simply a matter of accommodation. It is a practice that simultaneously reconsiders artistic quality and the conditions required for people to continue working within it.