The idea of co-creation is compelling, but a practice cannot operate on ideals alone.
Working collectively does not mean that everyone participates in the same way or occupies the same role. Across the organizations we visited, there were multiple forms of contribution: people who generated material, people who noticed and developed emerging ideas, people who connected different elements, and people who took responsibility for making decisions.
Co-creation, in this sense, appeared less as a principle and more as a set of practical skills. It involved editing, facilitating, selecting, connecting, and sharing responsibility so that individual contributions could become part of a coherent artistic process.
Co-delivery does not mean blurring roles
At DanceSyndrome, multiple dance artists shared responsibility for facilitation and support, meeting regularly to exchange information, review progress, and maintain continuity across sessions.
In this context, “working together” did not mean diffusing responsibility. Rather, it functioned as a way of clarifying individual roles while ensuring that the overall experience remained coherent and connected. Shared responsibility became a means of sustaining consistency, care, and collective ownership of the process.
“That’s us being that co-deliverer but as a support role rather than me feeling like I need to have my name on the piece or whatever.”
—— David Darcy, DanceSyndrome
Naming Roles, Shaping Relationships
The way we name roles reveals how relationships are understood within a practice.
As David’s use of the term co-deliverer suggests, in collaborative ways of working, the language used to describe people’s roles matters.
Broad labels such as “teacher,” “participant,” or “assistant” can obscure how people actually contribute, what responsibilities they hold, and how influence is distributed within a space.
At DanceSyndrome, the distinct roles of dance artist and dance leader illustrate this clearly. A dance artist is a professional practitioner responsible for shaping the overall creative process and structure of a session.
A dance leader, meanwhile, is a person with an intellectual disability who helps lead the work through their own experiences, perspectives, and interests.
Rather than positioning disabled people solely as participants, this framework recognises them as people who actively shape and influence the space.
The term dance partner used by icandance was equally striking. Adults are not positioned simply as instructors guiding children. Instead, they are understood as partners who receive, mirror, and respond to movement, building one-to-one relationships through the body. In this relationship, the child is not first and foremost someone to be supported, but someone with whom a relationship is created and who actively influences the shared experience through their own movement.
Similarly, Stopgap’s roles of access worker and access artist go beyond the idea of assistance. Accessibility is not treated as an additional service provided for a particular group. It is understood as something that shapes working methods, creative processes, and the ways in which artistic work reaches audiences. The existence of dedicated terms reflects the significance of these contributions.
Names are not simply labels.
They express how a person is welcomed into a space, what kinds of responsibilities and agency they are recognised as having, and whose movements, experiences, and voices are understood as capable of shaping the work. In this sense, naming makes relationships visible.
Co-Creation Requires the Work of Gathering, Selecting, and Retaining
AMICI often begins with improvisation, gradually identifying movements, relationships, and emerging character qualities that stand out, and developing them into scenes over time.
A similar openness can be found in Magpie Dance’s creative process. At the outset, a wide range of questions, ideas, and possibilities are explored. Yet not everything that emerges becomes part of the final work. Through experimentation and dialogue, dancers and staff together consider what functions effectively within a scene, what should be retained, and what should be let go.
Co-creation, then, is not only about opening up space for contributions. It is also about making decisions—about what remains, how material is shaped, and how different elements are connected to form a work.
“We do an improvisation and something’s very strong, it’s very striking … and then we might take that bit out. It’s quite an organic process, really.”
—— Elaine Thomas, AMICI Dance Theatre Company
“If there are so many ideas, how do you decide? You try it all out. And actually, if it works, we keep it; if not, we leave it.”
—— Amy Lovelock, Magpie Dance
A Voice Becomes a Work Through Support
One of the most striking aspects of Magpie Dance’s practice is the way dancers’ own voices and lived experiences are placed at the centre of the creative process.
Yet this does not mean that personal experiences are transferred directly onto the stage in their original form.
Research must be conducted. Dialogue must be sustained. Audiences may need context for what they are encountering. Boundaries around content, distance, and emotional exposure must be clarified. Structures for safety and dignity must be in place.
Only through these supports does speaking take artistic form on stage.
To respect a participant’s voice is not simply to ask them to speak. It also means sustaining the structure through which that voice or lived experience can reach an audience as work.
■ What Emerged
In DanceSyndrome’s “iCreate”, dancers’ interest and desire to become involved in choreography became the starting point for creating small-group opportunities to actively experiment with choreographic work.
What mattered was not simply listening to interest, but connecting it to a space where it could actually be tried.
At AMICI, powerful moments that emerge unexpectedly through improvisation are gathered and developed into works with narrative force.
At Magpie Dance, words and emotions that arise through research and dialogue are drawn back into the dancers’ own bodies and voices, then reorganized into forms that can live within the work.
What becomes visible here is that co-creation does not simply emerge if participation is left to unfold on its own.
Someone receives and recognizes interest. Someone notices the seed of creation. Someone carries it forward. Someone edits it into work.
Only when these layered roles overlap does co-creation become a tangible collaborative practice.
■ Returning to Practice: Questions for Your Own Context
In the spaces we currently call co-creative, who is holding the space?
Who is noticing emerging interests and fragments of material?
Who is connecting them, who is editing them, and who is making decisions?
And are those roles visible enough?