The Rural Touring Dance Initiative (RTDI) is a national project that supports dance artists & rural promoters to make great dance performance events happen in rural spaces. It was launched in 2015 and was made successful by working with established rural touring schemes.
Since 2015 the scheme has worked with 40 companies, promoting 140 shows to just under 13,000 audience members in rural venues across the UK.
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In July 2022 the RTDI partners (Take Art, the National Rural Touring Forum (NRTF), Highlights Rural Touring, Sonia Sabri Company, and lead partner The Place) were awarded funding of £400,000 from Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and £450,000 from Arts Council England. These two funding awards ensured RTDI can continue its important work until June 2026, building on its success by working with and supporting more rural touring schemes, venues and dance artists across England, Wales and Scotland.
The funding supports eight new associate venues to programme dance in rural areas and market towns, many of them in Levelling Up for Culture places. It enables RTDI to support up to eight dance artists & companies per year to tour their work to rural areas, with over 200 performances and 90 workshops expected between autumn 2023 and summer 2026.
It also includes a small budget for volunteer Dance Ambassadors in each region to work with the RTDI team to develop their dance audiences in their area.
RTDI partners announced national open calls in July 2022, 2023 and 2024 for dance makers with tour ready shows. Artists who wanted to tour their work to rural areas applied, and the shows on these menus were selected by a panel which, for the first time, included an artist and a promoter.
We are excited to support the latest incredible productions to develop tours and meaningful relationships into rural communities in 2025/26 following hot on the heels of two successful years of touring with the artists featured in the 2023/24 & 2024/25 menus.
“Establishing a network of Rural Touring Scheme Dance Ambassadors is a key development for the next phase as is greater involvement of children and young people. We are excited to be part of this ground breaking audience development initiative and are determined to make it a great success”
Alison Lord, Director of Dance, Take Art
In Phase 3, RTDI now has a network of regional Co-ordinators. Based at Take Art Beccy is the RTDI Co-ordinator for the South-West region. She is working with rural touring schemes and Associate Venues in the area to produce six tours between Autumn 2023 and Spring 2026.
Alongside exciting performances across the region, we are welcoming artists for workshops, residencies and much more to develop audiences, dance networks and participation in dance and creativity through movement.
The South-West region Rural Touring Schemes include:
Artsreach (Dorset), Carn to Cove (Cornwall), Villages in Action (Devon), Beaford (North Devon), Super Culture (North Somerset), Air in G (Gloucestershire), Pound Arts (Wiltshire and South Gloucestershire), Take Art (Somerset).
The South-West region Associate Venues are:
AMATA (Falmouth), Weston College (Weston-Super-Mare), Strike A Light (Gloucester)
Take Art and Villages in Action are developing audiences in collaboration with volunteer Dance Ambassadors in the Shepton Mallet area and the Teignbridge District respectively.
Please visit the The Place's website where you will find a wealth of project information including news, archives, resources, previous menus, and programmes, and full UK listings.
Contacts:
Alison Lord, Director of Dance
Email: alison@takeart.org
Beccy Lloyd, RTDI Coordinator
Email: beccy@takeart.org
Watch our two original feature films below, which show what we successfully achieved within the first (2015-2017) and second stage (2018-2021) of the project.
Watch our two original feature films below, which show what we successfully achieved within the first (2015-2017) and second stage (2018-2021) of the project.
