Offspring
On londondance.com Emma Gladstone, Director of OffSpring and Young People's Programme @ the Place, talks to Melanie Nix about the challenges of programming dance for children when so little professional work is being made specifically for them.


Despite the numbers of children skipping along to dance classes on a Saturday morning, performances pitched at young people are still battling to be taken seriously.

Born out of frustration at the lack of professional work to which Emma wanted to take her own child, Offspring, the programme for younger people at The Place, which first ran in Spring 2000, was never intended to stand out as an isolated season. "I didn’t want it to be anything other than high quality work that ran through the other programming" she explains, so the first conscious inclusion of dance pitched at the younger person was spread out over four months.

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