The Rural Touring Dance Initiative (RTDI) was a national project that supported 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.
Between 2015 - 2026 the scheme worked with 55 companies to bring 421 shows to 20 000 audience members in rural venues across the UK.
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 supported eight new associate venues to programme dance in rural areas and market towns, many of them in Levelling Up for Culture places. It enabled 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 between autumn 2023 and summer 2026.
It also included 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 were excited to support these 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.
Alongside exciting performances across the region, we welcomed artists for workshops and residencies to develop audiences, dance networks and participation in dance and creativity through movement.
The South-West region Rural Touring Schemes included:
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 were:
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
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.
